As Yet Untitled

The Beginning I may not have mentioned it here yet, but in case you didn't know, I am pregnant. Let's get the preliminaries out of the way: I am about six months along, I am having a girl, and her name will be Evie. I plan on having a vaginal birth with as many pain-reducing drugs as they can possibly pump into my body. I have yet to do anything to the nursery. So, with that out of the way, let's get to the real point of this post. I wasn't sure that I ever wanted to have kids. I mean, I always thought I would someday, kind of the way you always assume you will die. It was just an inevitability. But I had no intention of having children a year after getting married. That is, until I was looking into my husband's grayish-blue eyes one day and imagined them nestled under a mop of curly, dark brown hair and complimenting little pink cheeks. Then I immediately thought, I should have a baby right now . Then I quickly told myself I was crazy. I have a full time job....

I don't like to think that I like technology. I often opine about the glory days gone by where people had landlines and answering machines, and VHS tapes were the only way to watch a movie. I could go on and on about how much I miss the 90s, but that is not what this is really about. For the last two weeks I have found myself confined to the couch and yet awash in a sea of technology, not unlike the Apple freaks on Portlandia . As I look around me I see the Olympics on the flat screen,  the laptop I am typing on, my smartphone, my Kindle, and my newest acquisition, the Google Nexus 7 tablet . (Also, wonder of wonders, an actual book! Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.) An extreme surplus of gadgets, I am sure you will agree, for a woman who professes to dislike technology. I am finding that as much as I miss the good old days, I can't deny my pleasure in having these venues of media available to me in so many different ways, and the Nexus 7 is just the cherry on top o...

Let's cut to the chase. Everyone, male and female, needs to read this book. In How to Be a Woman , Caitlin Moran takes an incredibly (seemingly) complicated issue (feminism and female identity) and makes it almost unbearably simple. She sums it up in two short questions: "Do you have a vagina? Do you want to be in charge of it?" It can, apparently, be that simple.  Through an  honest, emotional, and hilarious recounting of her own life, compared with strong, well-researched analyses of the female plight, Moran creates the image of a world in which women can just be women--and still be successful. Where it isn't a "man's world" or a "woman's world" but just "the world". She refers to humanity as a whole as "The Guys"; a group that everyone should be a part of, equally,without putting gender specifications on behavior, looks, and social niches. "...the purpose of feminism isn't to make a partic...