And The Father Is...

Meters Swum Today: 1700
Playing on the iPod: "Castles in Spain" by the Armoury Show (a classic!)

I had a dream last night that I was pregnant (!) I was working for some weird company that didn't allow pregnant women into one of its divisions because of some chemicals or something that might endanger the baby humans (the women were, I guess, disposable). They tested all the women every six weeks to make sure none of us were pregnant. It was kind of a joke because we were all gay, so I was chatting up the cute queeny guy who ran the blood tests when the machine suddenly went "Bing!" He said, "Congratulations, Mommy, here's your transfer to Division Six." (Presumably at the same rate of pay; UAW, et al. v. JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC. U.S.C.No. 89-1215 and all that.) I said, "Wait a minute. I can't be pregnant." (This is some of the old semi-lucidity again; there's always some tiny corner of my brain, in a dream or hallucination, that knows Something's Not Quite Right Here.) The guy said, "See that light? Means you're pregnant." I said, "Then it's a false positive." "Oh, no. We sometimes get false negatives, but never false positives." (More semi-lucidity. This is true of most over the counter tests.) He hands me a packet. "See you in nine months, Mommy."

So I go to see my doctor, the Anti-House. In real life she's like this, too. She doesn't like to run tests or play "What's My Diagnosis"; if you get better, that's just grand, and she doesn't much care what made you sick. She agrees with him that I'm pregnant and runs a sonogram. "See that?" she says, indicating a fuzzy blip magnified x100. "You're eight to ten weeks pregnant." "That's impossible," I tell her, which it is in real life unless I've been pregnant since the Summer Olympics in 1996, the vaulting finals. "Well, it may be impossible, but there it is. Who's the father?" "That's the million dollar question," I tell her, and go home to tell Joan about this.

Joan, predictably, hits the roof. Joan does not want kids. Joan has never wanted kids. By now I'm getting pretty upset myself. How could I possibly be pregnant? But it seems that I am. My pants are tight. I'm kind of roundy in the tummy. Later Joan comes in and says she's sorry, she didn't mean to yell at me, we can even keep the kid if I want to. I tell her I'm thinking of giving it up for adoption and we have this Big Discussion. "Who's the father?" she asks, and again, I'm kind of stuck for an answer. Isn't there a TV show like this? "Who's My Baby's Daddy" or something like that?

Anyway, I woke up not-pregnant this morning (whew) and I'm pondering What This Could All Mean. One of my friend's daughters just had a baby so I guess it could be something to do with that. Maybe all women who are pushing forty and haven't had kids and never will start having dreams like this. Sort of a biological wake-up call: "QUICK!!! Get knocked up or forever lose your place in the gene pool!!" Er, no thanks. Every time I've ever had the urge to give birth I've gone to SuperTarget during a big anniversary sale and that took care of it for quite a while.

It's probably about the book. Isn't everything? Wild Child sent me a "thanks but no thanks" on No Accounting for Reality (made it up to the chief editor, though, whoo hoo!) but said they'd take a look at anything else I might have. I never know if they say that sort of thing just to be polite or if they really mean it. Well, I decided to take them serial and I do have something else; Mindbender, to be precise. Genre-wise it's about as far from No Accounting as a book can possibly get (Light-Hearted Fantasy/Comedy, meet Darkly Serious Thriller, Darkly Serious Thriller, meet--etc) So I wrote them back and told them about it and they want to see it and part of what they want to see is Ye Olde Synopsis. Oh great. I wrote a synopsis for it once. It sucked rocks. I wouldn't send this thing to the Library of Congress. I'll have to write a new one. So that's my mission for today; write a synopsis that doesn't suck rocks. On my lunch hour. Yeah, that's kind of like giving birth, come to think of it. Hey, if anybody wants to be the baby's daddy, get in here and help me. I'm serious.