Awkwardly Social

We met with the fertility doctor again last week.  This time to do what most teenagers (and come to think of it, many adults) would see as the most embarrassing test they’ve ever had to take, unless they had to do the test with their parents watching - the post coital test.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of dabbling in the fertility arts, this test happens on morning after your peak cycle day (the day your pee strip indicates you’ve ovulated) and after you’ve had sex.  There is much questioning about whether or not you’ve had intercourse the night before, or in my nurses’ lingo “gotten busy.”  Three people asked.  Then the doctor asked again.  I guess they want to make sure they aren’t sucking out your cervical mucous for no reason.

First, they do an ultrasound, and the wand is not playfully smooshed around your belly like it is in the movies.  Nope, it’s up in there.  The doctor pronounced my lining nice and thick (thanks, Jen for your magic tea!) and my ovaries very young for their ancient 34 years with lots of healthy follicles.  I want to say 24 follicles, but that sounds like I might have exaggerated in my head and I don’t want the fertility police to tell me that I’m crazy if I think anyone would believe the human body could naturally have 24 follicles at the age of 34.  So, it was a lot of follicles.  More than he expected, given my age.  They were very nice about how old I’m getting (seriously, I’m only 34, but at 35 they really start to scare you about your chances of having kids if you’ve never been pregnant before) but at one point I was like, “Look at Seth!  He’s the OLD one.”

Then they got out my old friend the speculum.  And sucked out some cervical mucous.  He warned me it was about as painful as a pap smear, and I just laughed, once you’ve had your urethra “stretched” and a uterine biopsy, a pap smear is about as painful as brushing your teeth.

Then they took the mucous to the microscope and looked for sperm.  Which is when the nurse enthusiastically told us about a documentary on the Discovery channel about the journey of the sperm.  She went on and on about the documentary, and when she finally left the room so I could put my pants on, Seth was like, “They really love their jobs.”

The doctor directed me to look in the microscope.  I have never been able to see what people are seeing in a microscope.  I always sort of fake my way through it.  And this time was no different.

Then we had a meeting in his office.  He told us that our next step would be IUI (I made a joke about being a cow) and that what he saw didn’t mean anything was wrong with me or with Seth, just that my mucous was possibly a hostile environment and not being very helpful.  (Aww… my mucous is just like me!)

So that’s what’s happening over here.  I might get pregnant this month, but from what the doctor saw, he thinks it’s pretty unlikely.  And next month we go to the next step.

I want to say hi to all the readers coming from Kristin, my dear friend, someone who has always inspired me to be more honest and say what I’m really feeling.  I am fortunate to have met someone like her, no matter how hard I tried to sabotage our meeting each other.  I used to be really scared to meet new people.  Now, I’m just older, and don’t really worry as much about what people think of me, also, I take xanax.  It’s amazing what modern pharmaceuticals and a couple of years of black out drinking can do for a person.  So, welcome!   

This weekend I spent Saturday in bed, when I told my friend that he said, “Oh!” as only an openly gay man can, and I shook my head and said, “No, not that way.”  And he said, “Oh….”  And we laughed.  I’m trying to get pregnant, but not like all day long.  Mostly this weekend I was trying to fight the plague that a certain group of story producers leaked into our shared bullpen. (Their show rhymes with rodrect prungay, they are the sickest! I think because they work harder than we do, their show is 3 times longer than ours, and they have 3 times the staff…)  Still no baby, but a full fledged cold has been incubated.  Yay, me?

I just read an excellent post by Cecily about personal blogging and how we oversharers, people who talk about their addictions, their fuck ups, their lady parts, are rare in the current “blog market.”  New bloggers fiercely protect their identity and their brand because they want large corporations to pay them cash money to write about a small segment of their lives.  Cool.  Just, not for me.

I’ve never been a brand.  I’ve never advertised on this page.  The only money I’ve made on this blog is on this post about how much I love my insurance company.  I wrote the post, it showed up in my poor insurance company’s new media guy’s google alert 5 years later, and they offered to pay me to include a link to their page.  That’s about how much effort I’m willing to put into making money on my blog.  I admire writers who are able to turn their blogs into money making ventures, but that’s just not ever what this place was for.  I was inspired by Pamie, and then I found a small group of people who were in the same place in their lives writing about their experiences and I connected with them and laughed and tried to make them laugh.

The best part about writing here is that I’ve been writing about my life for six years.  Not the weird rambling repetitive shit I write in my paper journal about my idiotic obsession with success, how I wish certain people were dead because I hate their guts, and why I am so ever loving sad and nervous all of the time. The stuff I write here, while it might not appear so to the casual reader, is edited, refined and written for a reason other than to complain.  I can sift through my own archives and figure out where I was 5 years ago.  (Oh god, I just did that, wow, it’s been a long 5 years… different boyfriend, different house, different Tamara.)

Now, six years later, I write for a living.  I work in reality tv partly because I know there are smart people out there who will see the ridiculous moments we’re putting in there for their pleasure.  I think I also work in reality because of this page, writing here has helped me see how the reality of a situation can be made funnier.  How the reality of a situation can be improved with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

This Robitussin isn’t going to take itself, so I best get on that.  I hope it doesn’t kill the yet to be conceived baby…

In addition to freelancing this weekend (I will be so happy when people stop dying and/or the Obvious Big Awards Show deadline for death is reached), Seth and I continued our quixotic search for a new place to live.

The requirements are, we thought, not that big a deal, especially since I just recently decided that I don’t care if I live in Silverlake anymore.  I’m not completely sick of it, but I’m pretty close.  A friend of a friend suggested we look downtown, and this friend of a friend got on the phone with me and talked me into it.  She was very persuasive.  I’m glad she wasn’t trying to sell me Amway, I totally would sold my soul.

So I did some Craigslist hunting, got drunk at a downtown diner, and we went open house-ing.

The first place we saw was Penthouse 10.  I immediately fell in love.   It was three stories, open floor plan, had a private rooftop deck that was two stories, it was way below what we are spending now, and it was quite possibly the closest thing I’ve seen in real life to where I imagined fancy rich people who lived in cities would live.  It was that good.  We also looked at Penthouse 8.  Identical to Penthouse 10, except it was 80 square feet smaller and $285 cheaper.  I don’t understand downtown.  I mean, they’re basically giving these places away.

We were discouraged by the lack of parking in the building, so we went down the street to another open house and I almost threw up we were up so high.  I took a picture of the roof of my dream house from the roof of the vomit tower.

Then I slowly backed away from the edge and wiped the sweat off my palms.

We spent two hours in Penthouse 8 and Penthouse 10.  I was sold.  We were approved.  Then we went home and started talking about living downtown and how walking Lula alone at night might be sketchy and how we loved the space but it might not actually be big enough to contain all the shit we’ve both accumulated in our lives.  It was sad.   I might have cried.

Then this morning I told Seth I didn’t care, I wanted to live there and if they would agree to let us move in on the 15th for half month’s rent that month, I wanted to do it.  So, we put in our offer.  And we were shot down.

So, here I am, thinking about that rooftop deck and all the parties I won’t have there.  Whatever.  *sniff*

At least we had sex in there, so we know what that’s like.

When my sister and I were kids and we’d get the stomach flu, my mom would pull out the spaghetti pot, the biggest pot in her culinary repertoire, for us to barf in.  We would get better and the pot would get washed out and eventually put back on the stove filled with water for spaghetti nights and we’d all collectively forget that one of us had been using it as a bile bucket.

I made a big mistake the other night, only partly my own fault.  As you’ve probably read I’ve been having some issues with my pee hole.  I’ve peed in lots of cups.  I’ve been declared bacteria and STD free and yet, still the horrible sensation of having a UTI.  It comes and goes, and this is what puzzles the doctors.  Yet, they still give me antibiotics just in case.  My gyno, who I love, gave me a single does of Flagyl to take to try to knock it out once and for all.  I didn’t take it that night because you’re supposed to take it with food, and I stumbled through the weekend waiting for my test results to come back.  They came back on Wednesday but one of the tests she said she would do hadn’t been done, so I thought, fuck it I’ll just take the damned antibiotic.  This was after a meal and two glasses of wine.

Cut to 4 hours later when the vomiting started.  And kept going for 6 hours.  With 15 minute rest breaks in between violent upheaval of broccolini and chicken breast and an Eggo waffle.  And two glasses of my favorite rose.  Seth got so worried that he called my doctor’s office, got the on call doctor to call in a prescription at 4:30am for an anti-nausea drug.  If you’ve never taken one you won’t know that, um, you don’t swallow it.  At least not with your mouth…  Yeah!  Fun for the whole family!  I took it (mmhmm… up the butt) and it had no effect.

By this point I had given up on yakking into the toilet.  My bathroom is always freezing and I was going into flop sweats after every heave, so I moved to the guest room with Seth on the couch near-by to listen to my incredibly loud wretching.  Lula laid next to me, worried.  I hugged a spaghetti pot.  At one point Seth took the pot to empty and wash it out, and returned it smelling of Palmolive.  I handed the pot back to him after a vomit spell and asked him if he minded rinsing out the soap smell, it was making me nauseous.  Which, funny, right?

I finally fell asleep at about 8:30am, woke up and heaved the last tiny bit of bile left in my stomach and fell asleep.

So… apparently what no one told me other than in passing was, if you take Flagyl with any alcohol, you’re going to get violently ill.  It’s um…  stupid to take antibiotics with alcohol anyway, but I didn’t really think about it because I’ve been on antibiotics before without any trouble.  Granted, I usually waited until the course was almost done, and I read somewhere that alcohol really has no effect on their ability to kill bacteria.  Which, might have been written somewhere like the New York Times, or, it might have been written on some non-doctor’s blog.  I don’t know.  Don’t judge me, I’ve got mental problems.  Also, I am retarded.  Yes, I am a total fucking moron, but come on, shouldn’t someone say when they’re giving you this drug, DUDE, YOU WILL WISH YOU WERE DEAD if you take this pill with alcohol.   It mimics the affects of the drug they give to alcoholics to keep them from drinking.  Guess who’s glad she’s not an alcoholic!  Also, guess who hasn’t been drinking!  Yeah, haven’t had a drop since that night.  Not planning on having any drops until this whole thing is resolved.  One thing though, there’s nothing like pain to make a girl want to drink.  Mental or otherwise.

So, short story long, I have an appointment with a urologist.  I’m reasonably sure this is only something old men do, have urology appointments. But whatever, man, I need my sex life back.

Also, I feel no shame about washing out my bile bucket/spaghetti pot, putting it back in the cupboard and serving chicken and dumplings out of it when my boyfriend’s kids come to town.  Because that’s what family is all about, the collective mis-remembering of the alternate uses for a spaghetti pot.

(How awesome would it be to actually have a picture of me being bathed in a spaghetti pot, goddamn my parents for not doing that. So irritating.)

This is a work in progress. But then again, shouldn’t ones sex life should always be a work in progress?

My dad had a gigantic box of classic Playboy magazines in the attic. We shared that awkward discovery one Saturday afternoon while I was looking for some science fiction that didn’t suck amongst the boxes of books he had never unpacked in the 20 years since we had moved to Arizona. Soft focus women with big hips and pink lips stared back at me with bedroom eyes.

I tried not to act interested, but I was dying to see what was underneath the covers. When my dad finally left the garage to go mow the lawn, I flipped through all of them a few. I couldn’t figure out how men got off on these women. Sure, they were pretty, but they were just sort of laying there.

***

I learned about sex at an early age. My mom, a nurse, gave us the talk early and often. I’m not sure if it was her sex-talk free childhood or the hippie young adulthood that compelled her to give us the details about sex, but she did. And since my sister was three years older than me, I remember first hearing about it when we lived in Sedona. I think I was about 4. I remember my mom reading a book to us and me sitting on the green shag carpet wondering why exactly the word penis was so hilarious.

I didn’t go to public school for kindergarten, my parents preferring the local Montessori school for my early education. This is only important to the story because if you go to Montessori for kindergarten you are likely to find yourself in awkward situations when you go to your first day of public school. These situations include but are not limited to - feeling weird that you are required to sit at a desk rather than at a mat in a sunny corner of your choosing, you are asked the last names of your kindergarten teachers and you don’t know them, and most importantly when you tell the girl in the bathroom that she’s completely wrong about sex, it isn’t willies and hoo-has, it’s penises and vaginas. Welcome to first grade, little girl! It’s a good thing Montessori also taught me a thing or two about accepting people for what they are, and while I thought that girl was an idiot who didn’t know the first thing about human reproduction (God, I was annoyingly precocious), I knew that I had to let her come (no pun intended) to the sex table all on her own.

***

I don’t remember how Tricia and I got on the subject, I’m guessing Judy Blume had something to do with it, but one quiet boring day, we were sitting on my girly canopy bed talking about how sometimes we felt funny. Down there. And we liked it. Tricia had some questions, and I felt like we needed visual aides, so I went to the closet outside my bedroom where the baby books were kept and pulled out “Where Did I Come From?”

This book has a drawings of a man and a woman doing it. They have crazy bush. I remember this because I was very disconcerted about the sheer amount of hair. Like, a whole head of hair. I didn’t worry too much about having hair myself, but everytime I saw a woman with curly hair, I figured she, like the curly haired woman in the book had massive bush.

We poured over the book and then, if I recall spent some time quietly thinking thoughts and well, I think I might have accidentally taught Tricia how to masturbate. Her parents divorced and moved away shortly after that. I’m almost positive the two events are not related.

***

My parents gave my sister the Clan of the Cave Bear series one year for Christmas. She read them quietly and didn’t say much about it. Then my mom decided to take a gander at the books and there was kind of a kerfuffle about the whole thing. Which made me really want to read them. They disappeared for a while, and then my sister took pity on me and let me read them in secret.

Jean M. Auel had a dirty mind. She’s kind of my hero.

I got a used copy of Valley of the Horses from Paperbackswap early this year. I was feeling a little nostalgic for my old jack off book and when it came in the mail I flipped right to the pages I remembered so vividly from all those years ago, laying in my bedroom just an innocent 13 year old, hoping someday I would touch some man’s shaft and he would touch my love button.

***

Recently I was talking to Mr. F about how we met, and what he thought of me that first fateful day. I’m like a little kid wanting to hear the same story over and over. He said I was sitting there, looking pretty, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and he thought to himself, “This is a girl I could have some fun with,” and then he sat down next to me while I was in the middle of a heated political discussion about Hillary Clinton and women’s God given right to jack off, and he thought, “I have got to get her number.”

***

I just read three separate posts* (ohmygod, and here!) about sex while I was dicking around the internet procrastinating on my very own sex post.

Procrastinating On My Sex Post, by the way, should be the title for someone’s memoir. It has a certain ring.

So, since I don’t want to flood the internet with too much sex talk (that was irony, I think) I’ll just tell you that if you have a moment this weekend, pop by the site.

I love stumbling upon those little ripples of synchronicity in the human collective. Actually, that’s not true in every case. I get really irritated when I’m writing a script or developing an idea and I do a quick bit of research and a script has just sold or just finished production with similar themes and I feel defeated. Like no one will ever love my script, because that other script was out there first. Being a writer is hard.

It’s nice when it happens on the internet though, and the sex ripple that’s gliding through the internet is probably because it’s fall and people are feeling cozy in their beds. Boys and girls all over are getting closer for warmth and getting a little hard and/or wet in the process.

I like getting laid. But I really like getting laid in the fall.

*That one isn’t really about sex, but has a mention of masturbation, so close enough?