Let's See How Bad This Decision is Now
Thank, Stripe, I hate it
Hi, all!
Looks like my feeble effort to make an informed and morally correct decision about Substack was for naught. If I can figure out how to use something other than Stripe to handle payments on my substack, then I’ll go back to paid content. My Patreon uses PayPal, and now I have more reason to try harder to use it. My ko-fi also uses PayPal, and allows for one-time donations.
In good news, it’s so nice being able to breastfeed a baby with occasional ease. It’s still hard to get the ideal position where she can open both eyes, breathe through both nostrils and have both arms in comfortable positions. The insult added to injury is that once she closes her eyes, if we haven’t been diligent about the little eye-boogers, she might have her eye stuck shut. She doesn’t seem to mind, but it’s embarrassing for us to have a little Popeye child. Also, various family members and bystanders are fully committed to the “point out the most embarrassing thing immediately at every opportunity” school of helpfulness.
My baby has the exact same voice as my niece did as a newborn. She makes the predictable script from “eeeeeeeh” to “aaaaa” to “uuu-laaaa. uu-laaaa. La! La! La!” when hungry. And just like a car alarm, everyone who hears it needs to come over and voice their annoyance that I haven’t turned off the car alarm. It doesn’t help.
This particular time, I was trying and failing to get the child to eat the milk, and her arms were tangled up in some creative way, so I was struggling to redistribute her sleeve. I was super-duper vigilant about my fear of either dislocating her shoulder or harming one of her tiny baby fingers. So I had my big adult hand in her baby sleeve, trying to tuck her little hand into a fist and coax it out of the sleeve, when Grandma walked in and announced.
“She’s hungry. You have to feed her.”
This was, of course, more upsetting than the urgent little cry of the hungry baby. I couldn’t angrily explain that I needed to rearrange the baby’s arms or else I couldn’t plug her into the charger. Also, helpful scolders don’t actually care for those kind of explanations. They drive-by, say the thing that makes me feel bad for the rest of the day, and forget all about it.
What’s great about the baby is that she very rarely cries. She only cries when hungry, and often we’re ready to feed her right away. I wrote an article in a Medium Publication called Breast Stories about how hard it was to learn to breastfeed. It’s more graphic and slightly more detailed than what I usually write. Also more concise because all submissions have to be under six minutes.
Medium still doesn’t pay. The only benefit to writing obsessively is the Pet Sematary effect. That’s a term I made up and think about a lot, but have never properly explained. I will probably write another article next week about how writing is something like lactation. The pain it relieves builds up in the same way, and the output is somewhat impacted by what I eat.
The Pet Sematary effect is something like the need of creative and/or traumatized people to sublimate at least a little bit every day. I guess The Artist’s Way makes the same point a little more successfully with the practice of morning pages. I think the terms are off-putting, though. Specifically, Pet Sematary and whatever I write function as a way to extract unpleasant, obsessive what-if’s from an endless repetition and traps it in external words like a little supernatural monster.
Oh boy, next week I have grad school. I get to wake up, make sure I pump thoroughly, go to school, come back and pump again. This is only four days a week, only one class a day, and I’ve never had any of these professors before, so I don’t know how much homework each class is going to have.
If I find a way to properly organize writing before then, good for me. If not, I won’t feel too bad about it.