Random thoughts

I've had a lot of weird thoughts popping into my head lately. Here are a few of them:

1) I've been having lots of dreams that I'm pregnant. Several times I was pregnant with twins. Since I grew up with a Southern granny who insisted that dreams of pregnancy/birth were a sign of an impending death, I'm just waiting to see who croaks. Okay, sure, I'm obsessed with getting knocked up which is why I'm dreaming about it; but still, I can't just overcome years of dream-meaning training in one go.

2) Guilty secret: Ever since I was a kid, I've loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, the "Little House" series. Even though I'm in my 30's, I still pull them out and read them at least once every year or two.

For some reason this morning, an incident popped into my head from one of the later books, where Laura and Almanzo have gotten married and had a child, their daughter Rose. An older couple, family friends (the Boasts), actually offered to buy baby Rose, as they had never been able to have children. Mr. Boast tried to make the deal, saying that they were so young that they'd have more children, but that he and his wife desperately wanted a child and could never have one. All the while, Mrs. Boast sat outside in the wagon, waiting to find out what happened.

As a youngster, I just thought it was kinda sad and very weird that someone would offer to buy a baby. Now, as an adult who knows how heartbreaking infertility can be, I can truly feel for the Boasts.

3) I think it's funny, yet sad, that IFs will try just about anything if there's a chance it could help them conceive. For all that we're supposed so much more advanced than our forefathers, I can't help but think that we're not so much more advanced after all. I mean, what's the difference between Pliny's advice to barren women to eat a hyena's eye with food, licorice and dill to ensure conception, and the current fertility-fad to swallow mouthfuls of "Chinese fertility herbs" from a guy named Biff who claims to have been trained in eastern medicine? I'm tempted to start a rumour that eating three chocolate bars a day will improve your uterine lining, just to see how many women start doing it. They might not get pregnant, but their thighs will spread, and at least then I won't be alone in my gigantic thigh-ness.

4) I hate some of the cutesy abbreviations in the IF world. "Preggo" or "prego" for pregnant women is probably the one I hate the most. If I am lucky/blessed/etc. enough to get pregnant, I will bitch-slap the first person who refers to me as a jar of spaghetti sauce. I don't mind good old-fashioned, and somewhat derogatory, terms like "knocked up"; I'm weird enough to find that somewhat charming. But I am not chunky, garlic & mushroom, or traditionally flavored, thank you.

5) Sometimes I have far too much free time at work. Did you know that a lot of networks have full episodes of TV shows & TV movies online? For free? And of course there's Yo*T*be, with all kinds of video silliness. This week, I've watched Heroes (which I originally mistyped as Herpes), The Partridge Family, Richard Pryor stand-up, and Scrubs. I really shouldn't be left alone in the office so much.