A male student believes the following image depicts a lesbian love affair:

 

The man and the woman are supposedly married but the woman is cheating on the husband with another woman. The owl represents her mistress who is tearing the couple apart and tries to destroy the marriage.

It’s really curious to see how far imagination can get people. I’ve been staring at this image for years, and one word that never visited me in the process was “gay.”

First, I had gestational hypertension.

Then, I had gestational periodontitis.

And now I seem to have gestational diabetes.

For a person who never saw any doctors and felt great before pregnancy, this is getting a little too much.

And check this out: because of gestational hypertension I’m more likely to have an underweight baby. And because of gestational diabetes I’m more likely to have an overweight baby. So I’m thinking maybe it will all even itself out and I will get a normal-weight baby.

Jokes aside, though, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about this and I’m failing. I’ve been doing online searches and all I’m finding is a collection of variations on the Atkins diet. I think the Atkins diet is evil, and just the idea of trying it makes me unhappy. Nobody will convince me that giving up fruit and fresh fruit juices in favor of diet sodas (like the websites I’m finding suggest) is a good idea.

Or look at this sample diet. Reduced-fat milk, granola, low-fat cheese, margarine, peanut butter – this is all disgusting and, I am convinced, extremely unhealthy. I guess the problem is that I don’t understand the guiding principles behind this way of eating. On the one hand, every website suggests I avoid processed foods. On the other, they all recommend fat-free this and reduced-fat that. This makes me think that I don’t understand the meaning of the word “processed.”

And here are some suggestions from a governmental diabetes website:

• Use mustard instead of mayonnaise on a sandwich.

• Use low-fat or fat-free substitutes such as low-fat mayonnaise or light margarine on bread, rolls, or toast.

• Eat cereal with fat-free (skim) or low-fat (1%) milk.

What use are these for me if it would have never occurred to me to put mayonnaise on a sandwich or to eat a sandwich at all? Who on Earth eats sandwiches at my age? (Unless they are a sincere sandwich fanatic). And margarine? How can I take seriously anybody who suggests people eat this nasty poison? When I imagine putting “low-fat mayonnaise or light margarine on bread, rolls, or toast”, I want to vomit. Do people really eat such things? Especially if they are pregnant 37-year-old people? As for cereal, I wouldn’t touch it to save my life, let alone with this tortured kind of milk.

I will eventually get to see a nutrition specialist at the hospital but I don’t believe that specialist will be of any use to me. Nutrition specialists are trained to modify typically US diets in order to make them healthier. I, however, do not eat like an American person.

Discussions about healthy eating always leave me frustrated because I feel like people are speaking a different language.

I just read something very curious:

“Many former government employees make the switch into private contracting, which can serve to drive up the amount they wind up costing the American taxpayer. A 2007 report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the average government employee working as an intelligence analyst cost $126,500, while the same work performed by a contractor would cost the government an average $250,000 including overhead.”

Downsizing government and holding back on decent pay for public employees doesn’t really save taxpayer money. In fact, it costs the taxpayers dearly.

And you’d better believe that the same people who are agitating to “shrink government” and promote free enterprise are working hand-in-hand with those who stand to profit mightily from government outsourcing.

So is this one of those cases where nice-sounding words that everybody likes and responds to on a visceral level are used to dupe us to pay more for the same service? Yesterday, we discussed how pretty verbiage is employed to curtail the rights of academics and destroy higher education. Is this something similar? Do all of these bureaucratic positions simply get outsourced to private companies while we sit here stupidly, believing they have been eliminated for good?

Is this the entire purpose behind the “Smaller government now!” slogans?

This feels like somebody is being had.

I just read a very scary imaginary dialogue:

Imagine trying to tell your teacher (or even your parents) what’s going on. “They keep trying to trip me!” you say. “Oh, come on, I’m sure they didn’t do it on purpose. The hallway is crowded. It must’ve been an accident.”

“They always stop playing kickball right when I try to join the team!” “You’re taking it too personally. I’m sure they just got tired of playing that game.”

“They keep laughing and making snorting noises whenever I have to answer a question!” “It probably has nothing to do with you. They’re just kids having fun.”

“They got so-and-so to pass me a note with a pig drawn on it!” “So they drew you a nice picture. Why do you have to get upset by everything?”

All I can say is that my heart goes out to people who have such horrible, abusive, completely sociopathic parents. It isn’t surprising that a child of such cold, indifferent, cruel people gets bullied. Other kids see that the child has been reared to be a victim and simply react to the role the child’s parents assigned to him or her.