Peeking into the rock

I am reading Longbourn, Jo Baker's of what the servants are doing while Pride and Prejudice is going on. It's a wee bit purple in the prose but the people are interesting and the material culture stuff is interesting too.

I'm listening to hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes kind of randomly. There's a reason for this, if I can remember: oh yes, I was listening to all the Frankie Armstrong and after I had done that for two days I wandered off in the direction of Blowzabella, the group she recorded her Tam Lin album with. And the rest is just surfing. And there's a reason I jumped on that juncture: that album was my soundtrack for the last part of my pregnancy with Emma, that and the song "Paul and Silas," because of the verse that goes ":ain't but the one train on this track," which you know when you are pregnant is an accurate description of your condition.

Also "You can't always get what you want," the Rolling Stones song, because I was aiming for a "normal" birth after a cesarian and but the line that tells you that if you try sometimes, you just might find, you might get what you need, was exactly what I needed for consolation in case I ended up under the knife again. I had latched on to a doctor I trusted to make the surgery call exactly if the situation required it and not otherwise, and I knew I had to simultaneously hold on to the vision of this birth I thought was best for us and also let go of it (and all preconceptions), which is hard to do. So the dialectics of that song matched my condition quite well as well.

Of course the reason for Tam Lin was that song, no matter how much it is about romance and faery, is also, deeply, about the magic and terror of pregnancy and birth. I think it was when I was pregnant with Emma and thinking about all these songs and stories where the protagonist must go through intense suffering, degradation, and labors to achieve a lover, that I decided that the lover was a metaphorical device for a child.  It makes a lot of stories more interesting to think about them that way -- The Goose Girl and its variations, for example, or The White Bear. At least it makes it more understandable that a person  would go through all that. (Of course this is not always true in all tellings)

Monday Emma and I did our Bean Hollow Beach trip early because she will be tending to animals tomorrow on the First when we used to do that. Eventually I will get back in the habit of posting pictures. I certainly took enough of them. Afterwards we had lunch at the brew pub that's where the Pescadero gas station used to be.

Other than that, writing, deciding whether I want to drag my carcass to the nice folk dance party tonight. Really quite ready to go under the knife and get a new knee, though I am worried about the cost since nobody seems to think it's important to tell me how much that is.