this is the post where i explore my psyche

It's been a few days since an update and despite having only two readers I am determined to keep this blog alive into the New Millennium. Did I spell that right I think I did

okay

For some time now I've wanted, more than anything else, a daughter. I can't explain quite why a daughter specifically, or why I've been wanting a kid at all, but I do. I've had a strange ache in my chest when I think about it, and this has been going on since about late last summer, around August or September. I think this is somehow related to one of my characters having a daughter, but I don't remember if it was the thought of him having one that made me think it would be cool to have one, or whether me thinking it would be cool to have one inspiring me to create one for him. I'm pretty sure it's the latter. I've been feeling this way for a while know.

Actually, come to think of it, I think it might have had something to do with me being forced to watch "Possession," a surprisingly good chick flick about a poet and some hot lesbians, although one of them goes straight at some point (sorry for spoilers, if you've not seen it), which is simultaneously hot and totally lame at the same time. In fact, I'm just going to assume you've seen it even if you haven't. If you have seen it or don't care, read on.

At the end of the movie, Asch finds out he has a daughter, right? It about made me cry when I watched it, and I never cry over movies, ever. I think it probably had something to do with the fact that it was completely gay that the guy could never know his daughter and that sadded me. :(

Fucking Firefox keeps highlighting all of my completely purposeful misspellings

This also probably has some connection to my strange fascination with the first Silent Hill game, where Harry Mason is looking for his daughter. I really don't know why this father-daughter shit gets to me. Father-son stories just don't have the same impact, nor do mother-son or mother-daughter, for that matter. I think this is because I grew up in a house with a 3:1 male-to-female ratio, and all of my friends were guys for a long time (except now they're almost exclusively girls.)

Speaking of Silent Hill, I got a weird feeling when I watched the commentary on the movie version's DVD and the director said that "In looking at Harry's character, we determined that Harry, as a character, is a woman. That's why we cast a woman in his role." (I'm paraphrasing.) I understand what he was saying; the general audience that would see the movie would probably find it somehow unbelievable or less dramatic if it was a "man sent to do a woman's job." But at the same time it made me feel stupid, I guess, that it does seem so unbelievable that it would be the father and not the mother who would dread the dangers of Silent Hill to find their child. But that was one of the things I loved about the game is that it did break that stereotype. That's almost certainly why it's my favorite of the four Silent Hills (in spite of being an awesome game in its own right.)

FUCK, that last paragraph doesn't lead into what I was going to say next very well

oh well, neither does that

Going even further back than that, I've always been profoundly offended by LiveJournal's infamous "ChildFree" community.

Don't get me wrong, here; I've got nothing against childfree as a lifestyle. In fact, I endorse it if you're making an honest decision to abstain for a good reason, and even if you're doing it for a bad reason, it's still perfectly within your rights to do so. Childfree, as a lifestyle, is perfectly tenable.

It's the people in the community I hate. The community has its intelligent, well-meaning, nice people, but for every one of those, there's a spiteful loon to go with them. Their entire front page is consistently littered with words like "sprog" and "crotchmuffin/dropping" as euphemisms for children, and "moo" and "breeder" for the adults who have them. No matter how generalized, prejudice is prejudice, and there's really no difference morally between hating children because they're children, or hating black people because they're black. You're hating them for the same reason: Something fundamental about themselves that cannot be changed, and moreover, has no bearing on their worth as a person. It also seems incredibly strange to me that these people are so readily willing to criticise others for their decision to have kids, while simultaneously becoming extraordinarily sensitive when people criticise their decision not to. From thence comes the incessant spouting of the dreaded "T" word. Dicks.

Oh, wait, this post was supposed to be about me, right? sh*t I'm getting off topic.

Coming back to the present.

It almost hurts when I think about having a kid. Mostly it's the thought of possibly having a kid who's born with a mental or physical disability, or worse, if Heather were to go through what her mother did. That thought horrifies me and I don't know what to do about it. There's the option of adopting, but somehow I don't feel comfortable with that. Am I a dick for wanting a kid who's genetically mine? I think I mostly want to avoid the awkward stage where the kid inevitably asks about their real parents, not to mention that if the real parents ever come a-knockin', they can legally take the kid back if they can prove themselves to be fit parents. There are still a lot of uncertainties in this area.

Moreover, I can never tell quite how Heather feels about the matter. In private she seems to agree that she does want a kid, and says she's willing to do it, but around other people her tone changes and she adds a lot of caveats to her speech: "If I were to ever somehow, accidentally have a kid..." It makes my chest hurt when she says things like that. I'm going to continue writing this as if she's not reading it, because addressing her directly would be hard.

All of this isn't to say that I want a kid right now. I couldn't support the kid if I wanted to. But sometime in the future, preferably in the next few years. I hate the idea of being substantially older than my kid. This is how my parents were with me; my mom was in her late 20's by the time she had me, and my dad was even older. This created a rather large generation gap that I don't think was ever properly filled. They were too absorbed with their professional lives by that point and in the following years this lead to my brother and I enduring the hell that is day care. It seems like I very rarely saw my parents and that never sat right with me. I'd hate for my kid to have to go through the same thing.