Simple Truth

I've interacted with a lot of people in the last few months about pregnancy and having children. And since my wife is just about 35 weeks pregnant, I've spent just about that much time thinking about it myself. Just about the most important conclusion that I've come to is a very simple one, but that really should be repeated quite often, as it tends to get lost in the hubbub.
The point of pregnancy is not to be pregnant or to tell people you are pregnant. The point of pregnancy, of having a family, of childbirth, of everything, is to raise a human being and make sure he/she is as healthy and ultimately as prepared for adulthood as possible. That is the task. Every single tiny bit of the years-long process is about the child, not about you.
If you are a parent, or are in a relationship with a pregnant person, or are considering having a kid, and your motivation or desire is remotely divergent from that, then stop. You are not prepared do be the best you can for another person.
I've said it a lot (maybe mostly to myself), but you have to get your own life in order before you can even think about sharing a life with someone else. This is many times more important when talking about a child, something truly helpless and clueless.
Are you disciplined enough to stick to a workout of diet regimen? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you responsible enough to save money, even when it's painful or inconvenient? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you a person who is ok to always let the other person in an argument have the last word? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you mentally strong enough to sit and sweat for hours in a hot room because it's preferable for someone else? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you selfless enough to always choose the more difficult path so that someone else doesn't have to? If not, don't have a kid.
Are you ok never ever being the center of attention?
Can you handle the neverending stress of approaching life like Joe DiMaggio* every moment of your life?
Believe me, it's a little intimidating thinking about all of this, and I'm not so deluded to think that I'm some kind of zen master as it comes to every one of these points. But I am aware of them, and I am fully prepared to meet them.


*Always one of my favorite quotes/stories ever: supposedly some writer asked Joltin Joe why he was so professional, why he tried so hard every day, ran out grounders, always kept his uniform pristine, why he never let himself have an off-day, and his response was: "Because somewhere in the crowd might be a little kid who's never seen me play, and I owe it to that kid to show him how great I am."

Baseball Season Projections

I'm back again with some results from the baseball ratings, and although I'm not sure how shockingly informative they will be, at least this time they're in a more accessible format: projected season win totals for every team.
As usual, these are current through right now.

AL East
Yankees -- 102
Rays -- 97
Red Sox -- 88
Blue Jays -- 77
Orioles -- 64
The Yankees continue to be the best team by a fair amount, so even though they currently trail Tampa in the standings, they should pull away at some point later in the year.
Boston is a very interesting case. They've played poorly and are already 6.5 back of Tampa and 5 back of NY. The system still thinks Boston is at least an equal to Tampa, but their early deficit plus slightly more difficult remaining schedule puts them well back. Even on May 13, their playoff chances can't be much higher than 25-30% at best.

AL Central
Twins -- 90
Tigers -- 81
White Sox -- 79
Indians -- 73
Royals -- 69
Minnesota is the best team and should cruise through the summer, because their only competition at the moment, Detroit, is playing over its head. In fact, the second-best team in this division is Chicago, and not by just a little. This shows you how important falling behind by five games is, even this early. Those games never come back.

AL West
Rangers -- 85
Angels -- 80
Athletics -- 77
Mariners -- 74
These results don't differ much from popular perception. Seattle has played terribly so far. They have one of the worst records in the AL and have played one of the easiest schedules. They are no great team, but they're better than 13-20, and my numbers don't even include much Cliff Lee. If they didn't lay an egg the first six weeks of the season, they'd have been a great darkhorse.

NL East
Phillies -- 91
Braves -- 87
Mets -- 80
Marlins -- 79
Nationals -- 75
My ratings don't like the Phillies, but love the Braves. A sharp observer would note than Philly is currently 4.5 games up on Atlanta, but my projection shows just a 4 game final edge. Yes, the system thinks Atlanta is better going forward. The same thing I just said about Seattle applies tenfold to Atlanta. They have been disappointing so far, but Vegas has not given up on them. Elsewhere, no, I'm sorry, Washington is not for real. If only they had more pitching.......

NL Central
Cardinals -- 96
Cubs -- 81
Reds -- 81
Brewers -- 81
Astros -- 68
Pirates -- 66
Here is your runaway best team in the NL, a team that is actually behind Philly in the real standings at the moment, largely because they lost three of four to them head-to-head last week. How can this be? Well, the series last week was in Philadelphia. Philly sent each of their best four starters out, while St Louis was without their ace. In spite of this, St Louis was favored in two games and was a toss-up in another. The only game Philly was clearly favored in featured their Cy Young candidate going against the Cardinals' 4th/5th starter. If the playoffs started tomorrow, I would bet large sums of money on St Louis to beat Philly.

AL West
Giants -- 84.7
Padres -- 83.8
Dodgers -- 83.4
Rockies -- 82.4
Dbacks -- 75
Easily the most exciting division, largely because it contains three solid teams, plus the one team that Vegas missed most badly on during the preseason: San Diego. Their lines from their first 18 games suggest a team that would win 76 games in a season. Their lines from the most recent 15 games suggest an 82 game winner. That is a huge difference for the Vegas folks who don't usually miss by much. The key here is not to get carried away by their 21-12 record and focus on the fact that even after Vegas has corrected their Padre lines, they're still just a .500 team. My ratings have LA and Colorado as the top teams here, with SF a notch below, and SD another notch below. The actual standings have exactly reversed that, which is why the full-season projection feature such a logjam. If I had to bet, I'd trust the numbers and go with the Dodgers.

I'm Going to Name My Baby "Cash Cow"

Or "Manipulated."
As is well-documented, I am a master of sympathy (and empathy, and apathy, and any -pathies really). I care greatly for others. So I feel like my opinion counts extra when I tell you that a lot of pregnancy symptoms are a bunch of shit, none moreso than a man's supposed "sympathy symptoms."
For those unaware, in most pregnancy literature, there are prominent mentions of an effect wherein an expectant father will experience lesser, but similar symptoms as his pregnant wife. Nausea, sluggishness, food cravings, all the fun ones. The idea, I think, is that a man's empathy will actually trigger physical reactions in his body, so that he will share the experience of pregnancy more with his wife.
This is psychological bullshit, of course.(1) Its main intent as far as I can imagine is to help prop up the very lucrative industry that is pregnancy. I fought my way through a wedding preparation last year, dodging the endless financial sinkholes endemic to weddings all along the way, and now I'm wading through the other great unnecessary money-wasting industry in this country.(2)
There are many books and many websites devoted to pregnancy. Maybe 2% of the info contained inside them is of value. If you ever find yourself expecting a child, here is a tip: attend all your doctor visits and ask many questions at them. Make sure to ask the questions in such a way as to convey that you don't know much about the process. Your doctor will tell you everything you need to know.(3) All those books are there to make money, not to inform you of anything. And the really devious thing about the whole industry is that the books/websites/etc are not only meant to make you spend money on them, they are interconnected and meant to make you spend money on all manner of loosely related products.(4) It's like all the pregnancy-type companies are in cahoots. A rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing, and the pregnancy tide is a biggie.
Back to the point. No a man will not have diarrhea at the same time as his wife, not unless they ate dinner at a dicey Indian place the night before. No a man will not have back pain when his wife is carrying around the bowling ball in her stomach. This should be obvious, but since it's related to pregnancy, anybody will believe anything.
To take this a dangerous step further, I'm going to say that lots and lots of the pregnancy symptoms experienced by the actual mother-to-be are bullshit, too. I'm clearly not saying that pregnant women don't have plenty of experiences for which the word symptom doesn't do proper justice, but I am saying that the industry uses the curious and captive audience of pregnant couples as an excuse to claim just about every possible human malady is caused by pregnancy. In virtually every instance, the culprit will be the same: hormones. You can blame anything on hormones. Are you pregnant? Do you sing poorly? Hormones! Do you bite your fingernails? Does your poop smell like poop? Does swiss chard taste funny to you? Hormones! Sometimes, pregnancy hormones really are to blame, and that's all it takes to become a catch-all.
I really should take a second to mention how amazing Sara has been as it relates to all of this, before I say that I've been around other pregnant people who claim to have experienced all the symptoms when that's almost an impossibility. Sara has had her fair share of discomfort and inconvenience, but she's never taken advantage of her situation and she's never made up problems and blamed them on the pregnancy. This is because she is amazing.(5) Other women are not so amazing and other husbands are not so lucky.


1. It's a placebo effect of a placebo effect. A woman suffers from nausea not because she actually has to vomit (yes of course sometimes she will--I'm talking about the many other times when she doesn't really), but because she's been told to expect to have nausea. And then because she thinks she has nausea, the man is also supposed to think he has nausea. Quite a little trick.
2. How many billion dollars are pumped into our nation's economy thanks to weddings and chilbirth? A terrifying amount. If we ever get health-care fixed, this is the next big albatross of waste in the economy.
3. Here is something that no pregnancy book will ever tell you: you don't really need to know much of anything until you're well into the third trimester. There is a somewhat obvious list of foods that you should know not to eat early on. Any medication you take you should do what it says on the package and check with your doctor first. That's it until it's time to take your hospital tour, which is free. You can even get a very informative (and pausable and rewatchable) childbirth class via DVD and $15 is a lot less than $300 to do it live. You don't need to know anything else. Actually you don't need to know the stuff from the childbirth class, either, but it's comfortable to have the knowledge. Seriously, you're insurance company will be paying a ton to send you to 15-20 doctor visits, you might as well take advantage.
4. One example of this is in the aforementioned DVD, which is otherwise devoid of riff-raff. The doctor conducting the class takes a 10 minute break from actually spreading knowledge to talk very enthusiastically about why you should bank your umbilical cord blood. Banking cord blood is an industry unto itself, with competing companies and everything. She even mentions one company by name, and shortly thereafter that company's name and phone number appears on the screen. Thanks for that. Of course what they don't tell you is that there is no certainty that you'll ever be able to use this blood, and that it costs several thousand dollars.
5. I shouldn't bury this in a footnote, but this is one of those things that makes me love her more than ever. When I decided to marry her a little bit less than two years ago, I was completely sure that she was just the right person for me, that although we aren't exactly alike, that her things would fit with my things and it would be wonderful. What I could never have imagined then is that over time, other little things about her would present themselves to me that make her even more perfect for me. Since I try not to believe too much in intuition and mysticism, I can only attribute this to blind luck.

Less than Two Months to Go

As of today, we are just 8 weeks away from Sara's due date. Only 20% of a pregnancy left. Not a lot of time, even though there is better than a 50/50 shot the baby comes late.
Someone asked me today if I was getting nervous. Somehow the question caught me off-guard, but no I'm not nervous, I'm still very excited. To do what I always do and compare something to my experience in athletics, I feel exactly like I used to before a really big race, but one in which my preparation was excellent. I'd start feeling excited and get that sensation in my chest but I'd be welling with confidence at the same time.
So you could say that I am ready, at least unconsciously. Literally, though, I am not ready. Today after work I'm stopping at Lowe's and buying the wood to build the baby dresser/shelf/changing table. Since I'm being nice to my neighbors and restricting myself to sawing on a weekend afternoon, and since I need to apply a couple coats of paint, I don't expect to be finished with it for two or three weeks. That leaves us with more than enough time, but of course Sara is unhappy that it wasn't done last month.
Another thing I have noticed about myself in the last couple weeks is that I've been more naturally industrious. I've been very easily disciplined and systematically getting things done, both at work and home. This wasn't a purposeful change, it just happened.

I can't speak for Sara exactly, but I think our name brainstorming has mostly come to an end. We have two or three names that I would be happy with, and one specifically that I seem to be settling on. I still want to be open to others, and I want to try to come up with some possibilities that aren't names in the traditional sense. Nothing blatantly absurd, but there doesn't need to be some fixed amount of sound and letter combinations that are accepted as "names." Names like Hazel or Willow or Brooke came from words that weren't just names, so why not new ones? Anything can be a name, because a name is the most arbitrary thing in the world.