Bed rest sounds nice, doesn't it? Who wouldn't want to be put on bed rest? You picture yourself lounging about in a feathered nightie or flannel footie jammies, watching your favorite movies and eating grapes straight out of the servants' hands. Perhaps there's a oversize glass of wine at your bedside, or, if you're Dyckerson, a plastic jug of urine. Either way, it sounds like a great opportunity to relax and rejuvenate.

The little-known reality is that bed rest blows. In my non-bed rest life, I'm a person who is always on the go, unwilling to sit still for very long. Plus, I teach group exercise classes, as well as working out on my own at the gym 6 mornings a week for an hour and half to two hours a day. This gives me the energy I need to leap fences and dash through alleyways when the Feds are chasing me, or beat the crap out of anyone who looks at me sideways at the grocery store.

In short, I like to keep very busy.

But because God has cursed women with the twisted joke that is a nine-month pregnancy, complete with cumbersome weight gain and many other unpleasant bodily changes, and because I'm perhaps being punished for being such a terrible person all my life, I have recently been ordered to serve out the remaining 4 months of my pregnancy on bed rest. Well, to be fair, I'm not sure yet that the bed rest order will continue that long--I'll find out next week at my doctor's appointment if I can at least go back to my slovenly desk job a few hours a week--but it's not looking good. And I'm certain there will be no more working out or teaching group exercise for a long time to come. So if you thought I was crabby and disagreeable before--look out, brother.

Far from the peaceful feathered nightie and footie-jammies scenario mentioned above, bed rest is a horrible, ugly existence. Television, formerly a vehicle only used once a week to gaze upon the faces of the hot guys in the Lost cast, now becomes the central focus of existence. Along with the endless hours of Court TV, Discovery Channel and History Channel, there is also such brain-killing fare as Frasier re-runs, Judge Judy, and the occasional soap opera. This is bad news for those of you who come here faithfully seeking my well-thought out, deeply intelligent monologues that instruct you in the ways of the world and stimulate your minds, since after a few months of this dumbifying television intake, my blog may start to read like--well, it's too horrible to say it. But you know what I'm thinking of.

For the first time ever, I envy you. Not your lice-covered scalp or filthy, feces-covered apartment, and certainly not your lengthy prison record or astonishingly low IQ. No, I envy your ability to get up and walk around the house, even leave the house when the mood strikes. Presumably, despite your hundreds of noticeable faults, you're at least not laying on your couch hour upon hour until your skin starts to fuse with the upholstery, nor gaining five pounds per month while inadvertently committing to memory every line from Frasier's 1995 season.

Jealousy is an ugly thing. In fact, it's so ugly that maybe the only thing uglier is what a woman looks like after 4 months of pregnancy bed rest. Hear that sound? That's me, hitting the wall. Soon I'll become one of those people who only posts a photo of herself from the chin up, always blurry and darkened, with a cloud of hair swirling in front so that a person viewing it isn't entirely sure if it's a photo of a woman or an aerial shot of Kenya.

So say goodbye to the old Karla. My bed rest sentence has only been in effect for a few days, but I fully expect that by the end of it, you will see a newer, angrier, more horrible Karla than before, one that you'll like even less than the old one. And actually, pissing you off may be the only satisfaction I get in all this. It might even make it worthwhile.

Labels: The Karlababble Household