Manfriend and I have been idly discussing the eventual possibility of children. Every few years, we have this conversation, and every few years it evolves to a slightly more fucked up place.

“I just want one,” he tells me, like that somehow is more persuasive than saying “I want eighty.”

Parenthood is not defined by how many children you have, so much as the fact that you have children. One or fifteen, it doesn’t matter. You’re already a broken shell of a person. After one kid, what does it matter how many more you have?

“What if we have twins?” I asked, as I squeezed toothpaste onto my toothbrush.
“We’ll throw one of them off a cliff,” he replied sarcastically from the bedroom.
“Oh, I get it. You want to ensure that we always hold the majority votes.”

Inexplicably, he found that hilarious.

“So if we have a kid, you realize that one day this conversation will come up, right?” I studied him gravely. “You had a twin, but daddy only wanted one child.”

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. It’s been a hectic mix of neurotic ideas, swirling around my subconscious until they burst forth, unbidden, and under appreciated. In retrospect, they’re quite funny, though at the time they made me shake uncontrollably in apprehension.

So I had an eye doctor appointment today. I have terrible eyes – poor vision, and I am high risk for severe vision problems. Consequently, it is critical that I see a doctor annually to ensure tragic things do not happen. Inexplicably, I developed a cold sense of dread around this particular appointment. Logically, it would make more sense to fear not seeing a doctor, as the risk of the unknown was inherently more threatening. Fear doesn’t respond well to logic, it just gets more absurd.

My malevolent subconscious had me convinced that not only was my (new) eye doctor trafficking in black market body parts and organs, but that he has designs on my eyes, despite never having met me. I was convinced that he was working in collusion with my other eye doctor (who had referred me), and that they were going to cut out my eyes and sell them for a mint on the black market.

I would either, invariably, end up with soulless empty eye sockets, destined to poverty and self pity, or my mutilated corpse would be discovered slowly, in unidentifiable pieces around the city. I then went on to think that if I had a small dog, that would somehow protect me from this fate, because the tiny, tiny dog, would somehow be clever enough to foil these villainous doctors.

Now, because you’re not completely insane, you’ve already identified the largest logical failure in a sea full of them. Yes, given your knowledge of my horrendously awful vision, what would these nefarious characters possibly hope to gain from stealing my eyes?

In actuality, not only was my doctor awesome, he told me to relay a message to manfriend:

“Stop being a dick. Don’t make fun of your girlfriend when she sneezes in sunlight.” It’s not an allergy. It’s a real condition called Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome (ACHOO), or Photic Sneeze Reflex. Suck it, baby.

“Why don’t you want pets?” I asked, while lying on the floor and staring up at my long suffering and tolerant manfriend.
“I didn’t say I don’t want pets,” he said, sitting down next to me.
“But… okay, so what type of pet would you want?” I shifted around and began idly playing with the sleeve of a sweater that was draped over one of our dining chairs. “What are the parameters of your hate?”
“The para…” he started laughing. It never bodes well when he starts laughing. “If we’re still together, I mean, if we have a house and we’re still together and we can have pets in the house, and we’re still together,”
“You keep saying that, you keep saying ‘if we’re still together,’”
“If we’re still together I mean, if we haven’t broken up.”
“That’s not making it better, you realize that,”
“I just mean if we’re still together, we’ll be together for ages, and fuck it. We might as well get a dog.”

Apparently five-seven years is his criteria for our relationship to stand the test of time and permit dog ownership. It’s like a prison sentence in many ways.

Life is crazy. I have to come up with aliases for the people in my life so that I can refer to them in this blog without putting anyone on the spot, or incriminating the guilty. Okay, so first person I need to create an alias for is one of my friends who lives in the same building as Manfriend and myself. She’s an awesome person, and I don’t want to get into too much detail about her, because this is an public blog, but it would be nice to be able to reference her and say, “So this weekend, Manfriend, Blank and myself went to a birthday party,” and obviously I can’t refer to her as Blank. keep reading »

Happy three, baby.