One of the benefits of no longer working at the Dance Center is that I now have Sundays free to work learning web-development with my friend Alex. (I was going to quit so I could do just that, but they fired me before I had the chance. Well darn.) It’s nice going over there, he and his wife Chrissy are incredibly in love. They’ve just had a baby together, so now I’m an auntie. I’m not sure how convincing I am as an auntie, I think my face almost dropped off when I caught myself stirring a pot in the kitchen while holding a baby. Thank mercy I had socks on.
(If you look closely, you can see the panic in my eyes in the picture to the right.)
Honestly, though, babies are weird. They can’t talk, don’t understand that they have limbs, and can barely focus their eyes. Their brains are a protoplasmic neuro-mush that hasn’t fully shaped yet, they’ve got a soft spot in their skulls, and they smell funny. Like, well, baby. It’s a cloying, overly sweet smell that tries to rummage in my system for the breeding clock. I can feel it prodding at my DNA, aggressively trying to turn me into a factory assembly-lining the next generation of wacky Holmes kids.
Not that it’s going to succeed in the slightest. As far as I know, my baby clock has only ticked once. Memorable, a thing like that. I’d been missing someone, a usual state of affairs, but it had been a rather chronic feeling that week, I don’t even know why, and to take my mind off it, I went to a see a film with friends. Not a bad idea, except when it came to my choice of movie; a film prominently starring a man who looks like an older brother to my absentee. I couldn’t help but sigh. Then! The actor had an overly sentimental, tender moment of baby holding and suddenly my reproductive urge twitched for the very first time. Panties in a twist indeed. Yecch.
It was very loud and incredibly uncalled for. It felt like a temporal lobe misfire. What was that? It felt unnatural to my person, as if I’d undergone a momentary psychotic break. I thought of Tim Crow and his argument that that schizophrenia may be the evolutionary price we pay for a left brain hemisphere specialization for language, except that it bypassed both the right and the left and just punched me in the base of my spine. Terrible.
That said, Xander is an utterly adorable little squid and you should all ooh and aah at the miracle of his creation, lest we hunt you down with jam:
