Carbe diem orbos

So the downside of the F-word being gainfully employed is that he can't come to India with me in December. Shit. It would have been so much funner with him. Oh well, I guess theoretically it will be a work trip anyways, and I should concentrate on working, confining my fun and shopping and exploring to the weekend.

I have a sense, though, of urgently having to carpe diem, and go to these weird new places now before we have babies, when we won't have the energy, money, or nerves to haul kiddies around the world too much, or at least not to places we haven't been to before and don't know the ropes of.  My experience of Asia remains confined to Shanghai and Singapore; I have a feeling that's like trying to get a sense of Europe through Newcastle and London (ergo est just not on).

How long do I have, I wonder. We just thought through the schedual for next year's magazine - there are four downtime weeks. I chose one in June so I could go to Europe to see the grandmother, if she's still alive. I didn't say I sort of hope I'm already in my third tremester by then. I didn't say it in part because I don't know if I am sure I sort of hope that. Life is so lovely right now without any kids in it. I wish our fucking birth control methods would just spontaneously fuck up and take the decision out of my hands. I don't have the mental equipment for it.

And I don't even nearly have the confidence to make it - to say, okay, now I'm going to start trying to do this to some poor, unsuspecting unborn spirit floating around in the ether waiting for its next crack at karma and the eventual escape from the cycle of existence. I don't want to be looking at my kid in ten, twenty, thirty years and be thinking, sorry, kid, you didn't deserve me; you should have been born to someone who wasn't a monumentally selfish lightfoot with a pottymouth and zero housekeeping skills. You deserved someone less opinionated, less mentally unstable, less misanthropic, less Dread Pirate Jessica, in short.

By the same token, in ten, twenty, thirty years, I'm even more petrified at the prospect of all of the things my children could have been but weren't because I didn't have them, and maybe they were born to some fat suburban reality-television watching cockwanks who didn't even read to them or take them anywhere nice for their holidays instead, and they're fucking miserable and spending all of their unconscious energy wishing they'd had a family like us. 

I'm also petrified of dying while they're still in their formative years. Sometimes inconveniently, I actually am religious in a recognizably Christian sense, and the idea of still having some sort of recognizably conscious existence and having to impotently watch the world fuck my child up after I'm dead just makes me want to vomit all over my computer. Holy fuck.

What a fucking world, man.