Stereotypes and Kilroy

A coworker asked me, with a downright gleam in her eye, whether I was "finally" getting tired.

"No," I said. I have been having some trouble sleeping but I'm not going to divulge these personal details just to satisfy that hungry gleam. In any event, all in all I feel just as perky as I always have, restless even, now that I've been grounded from certain activities such as racquetball or soccer. The gleam disappeared and the woman actually said, "dang."

This hunger of my fellow female acquaintances to share in what they feel should be my discomfort is disconcerting. A woman who works downstairs and fancies herself in charge of parking took it upon herself to insist to the new HR person that one parking space is "always" reserved for people who are pregnant. "The last girl who was pregnant," she told the straight faced HR woman, "was so huge she could barely get out of her car." The HR person couldn't help smiling as she offered me the space; she knew I would turn it down. If I didn't play the Disability Card when I was one leg short of a working pair after ACL surgery while still in college, hobbling around like a madwoman from class to class across a 135-acre campus, there's no way I am going to play it when I have two perfectly good legs and a sudden aching desire to play tackle football. Talk about weird cravings.

I did however have the common experience recently of dreaming that we had the kid. Stanley was fine, although pretty old to be a newborn, and the main thrust of the dream was that I had completely blanked out the whole process of giving birth, which, on the one hand, was just fine with me, but on the other hand was disturbing, because apparently I had been awake and aware during the process and Stanley somehow ended up with the name Kilroy. "Kilroy?" I kept asking my husband, "Why Kilroy?" "I don't know," he replied in the dream, "You kept insisting that it had to be Kilroy, so that's what I did."

Stanley Kilroy Hilarius. At least the name is anything but stereotypical.