Let's not talk about pregnancy

I’ve been going on about pregnancy so much lately that I’ve started to bore myself. So let’s change the subject, shall we? Instead of listening to me whinge about my poor aching back and squished organs, let’s all make fun of my pre-adolescent self.

Did I ever tell you about The Movie? Why, I don’t believe I did. Back in the day, my sister, my two cousins and I decided to write a movie. At the time, I was ten, my cousins were eleven and twelve, and my sister was thirteen. The four of us used to play together all the time, but were at the start of a somewhat awkward era wherein I still wanted to play pretend games but my sister had moved on to more teenager-y things like an obsession with The Outsiders. Our cousins were of two minds. So as a compromise, we decided to write a movie. How was this a compromise you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: Because our particular style of “writing” was to act out the scenes (or, as some might say, “make pretend”) and then write down what we said. It was much more efficient that way, even if we sometimes forgot to do the writing down part.

While we fully intended to actually produce this movie, we were realistic. We knew that we were young and it would probably take us a few years to get a final draft, so we planned to ask our school’s eighth grade teacher to edit it for us when I was in the eighth grade, in four years. (My sister was in the eighth grade at the plan’s inception.)

So once we decided to write this thing, we got right down to business and developed the cast list. The four main characters would naturally be played by us, but here’s a sampling of the rest of the cast:
Matt Dillon
Patrick Swayze
C. Thomas Howell
Ralph Macchio
Rob Lowe
Most of the rest of the cast of The Outsiders
Johnny Depp
Holly Robinson
That other guy who was on 21 Jump Street
Etc.

(Why yes, we were writing this in the late eighties, why do you ask?)

The next step was to come up with a plot, and it was a good one. The theme would be drunk driving. (We were against it.) The four main characters were named Carolyn (me), Vicki (my cousin), Kim (my cousin), and Kasey (my sister). The premise was that Carolyn, whose nickname is “Crayon”, Vicki and Kim are juniors in a high school and also members of a band called “The Dreamers” whose singer just quit. (Also, for what it’s worth, a band whose set list is suspiciously identical to the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat.) Kasey transfers to the school, makes friends, and – what a coincidence – is a singer!

And with this cliffhanger – Will Kasey join the band? Will Kasey start dating Carolyn’s brother, played by C. Thomas Howell? Will we learn the origin of Carolyn’s SUPER COOL nickname? – I will leave the story for now. It’s been a long long day. But never fear, I will be back to answer all your burning questions.

Oh, and last week I took a belly shot of me at 28 weeks.


Mr. Pickles in the house!

The Chicken Game: The Flickr Group

OK! I’ve officially set up the Flickr Group. It’s called “The Chicken Game.” Now, I don’t entirely understand how Flickr Groups work, so I don’t know if you can just search for that group and join it, or if I have to invite you, but this is the URL for it. I think.

www.flickr.com/groups/1040141@N23/

I think I set it up so that anyone can join, but let me know if you have any issues.

The Chicken Game: "The rules"

Well! Somehow, I just knew that Swistle’s audience would be the right audience to get this INTERNET PHENOMENON rolling. I am beyond thrilled at the sheer number of excited participants who left comments. I am hoping that there is a subgroup of lurkers who are planning to play, but did not comment, based on my stats for the day:



(Each of those peaks represents a day that Swistle linked to me, with the debut of TCG at the end.)

But a few people had some questions, left in both the comments on my blog and on Swistle’s, and I want to address them here rather than within the comment section because I never trust that people are going back to read updates in the comments. I usually don’t.

Question 1: Ack! I want to play, but I don’t understand the rules! Do I have to buy an infinite number of chickens and hide them on everyone I know, never to see them again? I mean, they’re cheap, but an infinite number of anything begins to add up.

Answer: Relax. You do not have to buy chickens for the rest of your life. All players in TCG hide the chickens on each other; whoever finds the chicken picks the next place to hide it. So you can play with everyone in your household or workplace or wherever using a single chicken that simply makes the rounds. Of course you are welcome to leave the chickens at other people’s homes, mail them out, or include them in gifts as well, but you have to be prepared not to see those particular chickens again. Those chickens will go to join a new household, this insuring the spread of the INTERNET PHENOMENON.

Question 2: How do people who didn’t read this post know what to do with the chicken when they find it?

Answer: The original chicken game evolved organically, but I think you’ll probably have to tell them. You can leave a note with the chicken the first time, or you could hide the chicken and then oh-so-casually tell them about the INTERNET PHENOMENON sweeping the nation before they have a chance to find it. Either way. But if you don’t tell them, you might end up in a situation like Stimey’s where the chicken just stays put. Forever.

Question 3: How long does the chicken game last?

Answer: My extensive chicken game research suggests that with a fresh group of TCG participants, there is a flurry of excited and frequent chicken-hiding which peters out after a few weeks as people start to run out of novel hiding places. But you can play it forever; you will probably just wait longer and longer to re-hide the chicken. For example, I had not hidden the chicken on Andrew for months, but I squirreled a few of them away in his luggage last month when he went on a business trip. One in his shaving kit, one in his suit coat pocket, and one amidst his underwear.

Question 4: Will you mail me a chicken?

Answer: Absolutely! INTERNET PHENOMENONS don’t just happen, people. Email me your snail mail address at docmaureen at yahoo dot com. Or you can leave it in the comments if you like, but you probably don’t like.

Question 5: I am Shelly Overlook, and I won your PIF. Will there be a chicken in it?

Answer: Shelly, part of the reason the PIF package has not yet been sent is because I had to wait until I wrote about TCG so that you would know what to do with the chicken(s). (The other part of the reason is because I am not what you might call “prompt”.)

***
In other news, I am 24 weeks as of today. Ack indeed.





(Note: I took these today, after receiving my ashes for Ash Wednesday. So that's what is going on on my forehead up there.)

I have entered what I believe to be the “cute belly” stage where you can finally tell I’m pregnant even when I’m wearing maternity tops (that shirt is not one), but I’m not yet at the stage where people are surreptitiously following me around the store to make sure I don’t pop out a baby right there.

Speaking of people assuming women are ready to pop, can I tell you of my theory? I have come to the conclusion that the general population thinks that women who are seven to eight months pregnant are “ready to pop” because everyone forgets what a nine-month pregnant woman actually looks like. They forget for two reasons: First, women who are 40-weeks pregnant don’t really get out much, so the general population does not see very many women who are actually “ready to pop.” The 40-week pregnant women are all at home, nursing their sore backs. They are certainly not driving; they can’t, because they can’t turn around to look behind them when they want to reverse. Second, it should not be possible for a person to look like this:



Since it only lasts a week or two, you tend to block it out.

My true life's work

I have written about The Chicken Game before, back on the old blog. I have to admit, that after I hit “post” on that entry, I entertained a secret desire that I would get hundreds of comments from people begging me to mail them a Mr. Pickles immediately. Inexplicably, this did not happen.

But for those of you who either did not read about TCG back in the day or read about it but have forgotten it (I realize this is essentially everyone), I will summarize it for you here.

This is Mr. Pickles.



He is a small yellow chicken. He was known simply as “the chicken” until The Doktah, a class and lab-mate of mine from grad school, christened him. And just so you know, the little one is called “Mr. Pickles brother, Mr. Pickles.”



So to play TCG, what you do is, you take Mr. Pickles and you hide him somewhere. The hiding place should be such that Mr. Pickles is not immediately visible to the chicken recipient, but should be a place the chicken recipient comes across often. In college, popular hiding places among me and my housemates were boxes of cereal



the sugar bowl



the fridge



and the medicine chest.



When I played TCG with The Doktah, we hid Mr. Pickles in other sorts of places like bags of centrifuge tubes, centrifuge tube racks, and the actual centrifuge. The best lab hiding place of all time was The Doktah’s; she put Mr. Pickles into a centrifuge tube and then properly labeled it as “Mr. Pickles, Feb 5, 2002.” (Centrifuges and centrifuge tubes play an enormous role in the modern biological laboratory in case you didn’t guess.)

I have been known to secrete a Mr. Pickles in people’s coat pockets, purses, and shoes. I often tuck a Mr. Pickles inside the wedding gifts of my fellow Chicken Game players. I leave them behind at people’s homes when I visit. I have also used my friends’ cameras to take surreptitious photos of Mr. Pickles, and I convinced my friend L’s wedding photographer to take a picture of Mr. Pickles at the DJ station. That photo made L’s day when she saw the proofs, weeks later.

Once you start playing The Chicken Game, you will find it difficult to keep quiet while you wait for the chicken recipient to find the chicken, but – and I can’t stress this enough – it is absolutely critical that you do so. You may not, under any circumstances, ask leading questions like, “So, have you had cereal lately? Maybe you should have some now!” The element of surprise is the secret to a successful Chicken Game.

I know what you are all thinking. You are all thinking, “What do you mean, ‘Once you start playing The Chicken Game’? Why would I want to start playing The Chicken Game? It sounds phenomenally stupid.” But here’s the thing: The Chicken Game is awesome. Really! You have no idea how much fun it is to unexpectedly find this little guy



in your cereal bowl. So don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

Why am I bringing this all up now? Well, months ago, Swistle blogged about a book called Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same, and I got all excited. See, my former housemates gave that book to me because when they obviously had to buy it for me when they saw it in the bookstore. And as a sponsor of pay-it-forward contests, Swistle already has a history of getting strangers from the internet to mail things to each other, and Swistle has a vastly larger readership than I do. Thus, I thought to myself, “What if I got Swistle to blog about The Chicken Game, and her readers started to play it, and it became an INTERNET PHENOMENON?” I emailed Swistle immediately. I was a bit overexcited about the whole INTERNET PHENOMENON possibility, and the email therefore included a few more exclamation points than was perhaps wise, so I had to follow up with an email explaining that I am not, in fact, a crazy person. Fortunately, Swistle has been known to get overexcited herself and did not hold my many exclamation points or all caps – did I mention the plethora of all caps? – against me.

So Swistle thought it was a great idea, and together we concocted a plan. I would mail her some chickens. She would play The Chicken Game at home, document it with photos, and then, at a predetermined date, she would write about it and also link to my post about The Chicken Game. And then people all over the world would start playing The Chicken Game in their own homes and it will become an INTERNET PHENOMENON.

Swistle and I discussed how best to exploit the INTERNET PHENOMENON-ability of The Chicken Game, and have decided that the photos of Mr. Pickles are the key. So I will start a Flickr Group for TCG photos once I figure out how that works. But bloggers could also choose to include a photo of Mr. Pickles in their blog posts, or just include Mr. Pickles in a photo of something else, without comment, much like the snail’s daily appearances in Blue’s Clues. (Item: I did not know about the Blue’s Clues snail until Swistle suggested this Chicken Game tactic.)

I should probably mention that the chickens are readily available by the dozen at craft stores in the weeks leading up to Easter. I get mine at Michael’s. And, while the chickens do come in other colors, any color but yellow is unnatural and wrong.

I’d also like to mention here that when Swistle and I were first emailing about this, she asked if we should wait until closer to Easter to post about it so that people would be able to acquire their own Mr. Pickleses, and I said we could not possibly wait that long. And yet, here we are. Lent starts on Wednesday. Procrastinators, unite! We’ll work out the organizational details later.

If all goes well, at some point in the future someone will email me to tell me about the awesome new game they learned about on the internet. And then my life’s work will be complete.