Daily Drip

home stretch bumpdate, Jayson Tatum, overconsumption 🤝 likability

Hello and happy March. It’s 6:25 AM. I’m sitting in bed drinking coffee with my dog, playing Cigarettes After Sex 2017 self-titled album. Corniest band name but I sincerely think this album is a perfect listening experience. Lent begins today.

Let’s start the obligatory pregnancy update with a cool fact. The fundal height is the distance, in centimeters, from the top of the uterus to the pubic bone. Around 20 weeks, it begins to correspond with the number of weeks you are pregnant. Sacred geometry much?

I had an OB appointment yesterday. She asked me how I was doing and I shrieked, “WHY AM I SO BIG????” We laughed. She took my fundal height. I measured 33 on the dot and I’ll be 34 weeks tomorrow. She put her hands against my sides and said, “Your torso is the length of my hands. You have nowhere to grow but outward. You are fine.” This is to say you can feel like a planet when really, all is going according to plan.

Plans. I remember those. Nibbles of control over the timing of your life. Last week I had a panic attack at the office because I thought I was going into labor. Over the weekend, I woke up gasping for air, choking on vomit from acid reflux. No two days are the same. “Be like water,” my husband tells me. But I am sludge. My water could break any fucking minute and I am sludge, the thick flow of my existence halted by every obstacle, filling the cracks of spaces I’m not meant to occupy with all my new needs. The drama.

Winnie the Pooh ass

Anyway, here’s what I’m up to and into right now:

• Cobb salads. I made them for lunch all weekend and they just hit. They make me feel like one of those carnivore freaks who call bacon, eggs, and cheese “superfoods” and slather themselves in beef tallow under red light bulbs. Peter Thiel, cut the check!

• I need to get something off my chest… I am a Jayson Tatum fan. :-/ Jayson Tatum is objectively boring. Inoffensive to the point of swaglessness, Taylor Swift-like in that way. But you know what? Jayson Tatum just loves playing basketball and toting around his goofy little son and I RESPECT that. I’m a person of extremes, so I love a quiet titan as much as a belligerent diva. (Speaking of quiet titans, I’m dying to read this Jokic biography.)
  

• My current fragrance obsession is Blanche Bête by Liquides Imaginaires. Maybe twice a year, I’ll fork out $20 for some fragrance samples just to feel something. I kept hearing people talk about Blanche Bête with this mystical awe, like they’d reached the land of milk and honey and this was the milk and the honey and heady tuberose and mmm, is that a coconut note? Yes, she’s curious. Miss Havisham in lingerie, lounging about Lady Arwen’s secret Rivendell boudoir. I’d like a full bottle to land on my doorstep, thanks.

  

  via Liquides Imaginaires. Even the bottle is art.

• I just finished Haruki Murakami’s running memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If you’re new here and only know me as glued to my couch, know that before pregnancy, I was training for my third full marathon where I’d hoped to qualify for Boston. After watching months of training go down the drain and reckoning with my body’s growing list of limitations, Murakami warmed me. He reminded me just how symbiotic running and writing are as lifestyles. When you regard your physical practice as a spiritual non-negotiable, you see the way it shapes a simpler, more profound existence, and that opens the mind for art. The deeper you get in both, structuring your days around miles and pages, making hard sacrifices to succeed, the closer you get to God. Anyway, I’m going nuts and cannot wait to run again. My Strava game has been depressing. Time is a flat circle.
  

• Pregnancy has been my era of creature comforts. $50 body lotion. Crisp cotton poplin pajamas. MY LE CREUSET OMELETTE PAN. Samples of Blanche Bête, Diptyque Eau Rose, and that Chloë Sevigny one from Régime des Fleurs. I come to you unashamed. In fact, I’m savoring the temporary freedom from interrogating my own consumption which, in any other phase of life, keeps me in check (read: eats me alive). I’m writing more about this in longer form but let me get to my point here. Having taken the pressure off myself a bit, I’m paying closer attention to how other people navigate consumption. I’ve come to find a certain likability politics at play, i.e., if someone can beautifully articulate their love of a thing, if their values align with ours (socially, politically, aesthetically, etc.), their displays of overconsumption are interesting, comforting to watch, a hobby, a passion, even charming. But everyone else? Mindless trendoids brainwashed by TikTok. The kinds of people (always women!) who inspire lofty takedowns. Sure, there are nuances, like buying secondhand vs new. Shopping small. I’m still inclined to ask: are people with good taste and big vocabularies and explicit morals the only ones allowed to publicly enjoy their stupid trinkets? Idk, I guess I like my sanctimony even-handed. Let’s *all* buy less and love more except me I can buy whatever I want until I give birth ok
  

• From the group chat. Never romanticizing my neuroses. Simply accepting that which I cannot change. Reminder: marriage does not erase crazy.

• I feel personally victimized by Big Sugar. Over the weekend, I decided to “check one off the list” and try Crumbl cookies for the first time. I got the three-pack of minis: chocolate chip, Biscoff lava, and strawberry cupcake. Now, whether they were delicious is besides the point. (They were.) The disgusting anxious frenzy vibrating through my body within two bites was worth promising NEVER AGAIN. I knew I was in trouble when I skipped a legitimate breakfast Sunday morning to finish the Crumbl with my coffee. Whole day chalked. I was on Mars. As much as I love a treat, I believe these places are demonic psy-ops designed to keep us tense and unfocused. DOWN WITH CRUMBL!
  

• The song I have on loop is “The Largest” by BigXthaPlug. Thank you to that Jalen Green Wingstop commercial. Texas rap brings the people (my husband and I) together.