Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Working the odds

There's a gas station just up the street from us, where one of the clerks is a Jamaican guy who bugs Heather about how she needs to smile more and another clerk is a homely blond lady who flirts with Heather, too.  I just hear the homely lady talk about spanking her young son, and when I see the Jamaican guy I'm pretty smiley anyhow.


Lately, I've noticed a sign above the check-out saying that Shell Station #whatever had had a $30,000 lottery winner.  It's ridiculous how encouraging that is.  Against all logic, I'm convinced that, should I enter the lottery, I would immediately win and only have to worry about people coming to me to capitalize their internet start-ups.  (That is stupider than thinking I would win.  Nobody we know has a start-up.  They would just want us to pay for their kids to go to college, and I will tell you now: $140,000 is not happening if your kids don't get less annoying.)  I only entered the lottery once, though, and was very much discouraged by the condescension and negativity of the blond gas station clerk.  She's a bitch.

I have the same conviction about conception.  Heather and I start talking about timing, wondering if it's too much of a problem for her to have a baby during the store's busy season, or whether it sucks too much for a kid to have his birthday at Christmas time.  And it would be awful to be pregnant in the South during the summer, too; I'm not sure Heather could climb into our dinky above-ground pool.

I wonder, though, if conceiving a baby with frozen sperm, on the first try, is as unreasonable an expectation as winning the Powerball.  We can never have total control-- this movie from National Geographic will make you realize how fucked-up our reproductive systems are.  I guess it's like the sperm bank itself-- determined to weed out the crummy candidates-- but the sperm bank's pickiness is costing us $700 a pop, and the female body's pickiness likely is going to cost us even more.  I can dose Heather up with teas and get her eating leafy greens every six hours, but if her uterus isn't impressed with that pricey sperm, we're gonna be buying a lot of 5'10"-plus lottery tickets.  Where is the guarantee?  Why am I pretending that we should wait till after December to inseminate so the birth comes after busy season, when we probably won't be pregnant till after December even if we start inseminating in September?

By the way, Heather wants everyone to know she just kissed my "sweet cheek," and I'm not feeling so sorry for myself now.

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