Soon, I Will Jit in a Cup

And, later that day, I will blog about it.

Because that's the kind of society in which we live, and that's the kind of guy I am. And, fortunately, that's the kind of wife I have-- who will tolerate my exposing explicit and painful components of our lives to you, all-too-perfect strangers-- and not divorce me and/or pelt me in the junk with a tennis ball.

Such an act of junkular violence, obviously, would rather run counter to our procreation mission.

When we miscarried in the autumn of 2009, I innocently thought that we could wait the prescribed three months and just, you know, make it happen again. Turns out that, unlike ordering the "Rooty-Tooty Fresh & Fruity Breakfast," is easier said than done.

On Friday, Mrs. Apron went to a fertility clinic. They have prescribed her hormone medication. They're going to inject dye into her girl parts and take a look to see what shape everything's in. They're going to test her blood.

And, of course, they're going to test my spunk.

I'm not thrilled about this prospect, but I'm trying to be positive and mature about it. As you might imagine, neither comes naturally to me.

Heh-heh. "Comes."

See?

The good thing about the semen analysis is that I get to masturbate into a cup in the comfort of my own home on a Wednesday morning, and then drive it over to this clinic on my way to work. I don't have to do it in the exam room like some creepy bastard, and I don't have to let the scrubs-adorned pony-tailed chippy behind the counter know any of my peculiar pornographic proclivities. Which is nice.

What's going to be weird is that, on Wednesday mornings, my wife is at home. Like, how is this going to work-- logisitically speaking? I'll wake up, get dressed, walk the dogs before they explode all over the place, and then, like... what? Will I be here upstairs jackin' away while she's downstairs eating her "Smart Start"?

I mean, weirdsies.

There was a funny thing in the packet that says, "Occasionally, due to religious reasons, the sample may have to be obtained during intercourse. A special condom designed for this purpose will be provided." My wife read it to me and we laughed. Good ol' Catholics: saving the day with a dose of ice-breaking "Every Sperm is Sacred" comedy once again.

There is, of course, nothing funny-- about Catholics or infertility-- going on here, but I don't know what else to do at this point but be an idiot. Really, it's kind of my default. And thank God Mrs. Apron encouraged me, or at least allowed me, to blog about this.

"You realize that, if I do that," I said to her on Friday afternoon after her appointment, "that I'm going to do it my way, right?"

She smiled at me.

"I wouldn't expect anything less."

"Ha!" I laughed, "or more."

"Exactly."

I want a baby-- a son or a daughter, but not both at once, please-- and I will jit in a cup if it means that we'll be one step closer to the life we've wanted together for a very long time. I'm not in a rush or a hurry, but I am getting a little impatient to get started with this next part of our lives. It's not a contest, or a race, or a anything, really. And it's certainly not a joke. But, sometimes, it's really all I've got.

Well, that, and a hell of a lot of love.

Ride That Pony... Every Month

I’m going to blog about something that happens to lots of people on a monthly basis, and, don’t worry: it’s not the cotton pony.

I know I’m a sensitive blogger, but I’m not a woman. Yet.

I don’t know if this is true or not, but there seems to be, recently, an overabundance of products, items, services and just thingy things that we are being charged for on a monthly basis. I, like you, (and I like you—awww!) am being bombarded constantly with advertising, that has not changed—but what has changed, in my mind, is that instead of being sold a bill of goods that we pay for once, we are essentially purchasing tangible objects and paying monthly service fees, or we are not even purchasing the object oftentimes—we are renting it and still paying that monthly fee.

Take this Motorola modem sitting on top of my desk amidst a veritable sea of random papers, business cards, envelopes and… Neosporin tubes?

(Ew.)

I am renting this modem. I do not own it. It belongs to the great, rabid, insidious Comcast overlords, who have fang-penises and permanent lockjaw on my nards. I pay some assholish amount of money for my superdoops high-speed internet yumminess and my cable television which my wife utilizes for almost exclusively for “SpongeBob” and I utilize almost exclusively for “Intervention.” Oh, and I pay a monthly rental fee for the fokakta modem, which I have replaced three times since we moved into this house last February.

Gee, Marmadick—they don’t make ‘em like they used to!

This got me thinking a bit about what services or products my wife and I pay for on a monthly basis. There’s the typical stuff, like the television and the internet. The cellphone (fortunately, we “own” those, I guess) and the water. The newest introduction of monthliness in our lives is the gym. Fortunately, we’re getting the summer “free” and we’re still sponging off my EMT discount even though I haven’t touched a stretcher since 2007 (shhhhh!) but, after August’s end, it will be a monthly service fee, which will remain, whether we work my balls off or whether we stay at home eating apple and raspberry pie.

We don’t do Netflix. We’d probably like it, but we’re also probably scared of it. It’s new, and different, and that scares us. Well, it mostly scares me. There’s no reason, really, why it should, except for the fact that the Netflix overlords, with their greasy, elongated fingernails and their venom-pus-filled pro-Simian foreheads will be able to track our film preferences, habits, and my disturbing proclivity for films where goggle-eyed-but-gorgeous English actress Natascha McElhone is featured in various states of undress.

Same deal with EZ-Pass. I mean, sure, the EZ-Pass overlords, with their gangrenous eyelids and their pock-marked, forked leather-tongues won’t know about my Natascha McElhone fetish, but they’ll be able to track my motoring movements, and that’s maybe kind of skeevier. Fucking skeevadors. EZ-Pass is a monthly thing, isn’t it? What’s with all the monthliness?

Oh, and Pandora keeps trying to get me to give them X number of dollars every month. And they’re really turning up the heat on me—it seems like they’re playing that motherfucking “You know what 2:30 in the afternoon feels like, right?” Right. It feels like holding your mother hostage in a vermin-filled basement shit-closet. I know what it feels like. Trust me.

And then there’s goddamn iTunes. And the goddamn Kindle e-book downloads. And cellphone internet data plans. And for you single peeps, there’s the soul-sucking, motherfucking eHarmony and Match and JDate (worked for me, d’hyeeyuck!) and Christ only knows what other craziness out there that I’m too not-in-the-know to know about.

It just feels like we’re renting our lives away—for only $10.00-a-month! But that shit adds up, and if you’re a technocrat of the highest order, you’ve got to be giving $10.00-a-month of your at least semi-hard-earned cash to a bumload of entities who are sucking you dry and squeezing your tit blue, and not in a quaint, hey-that’s-kinda-nice way, either.

They’ve been charging monthly fees for porn websites for years, but I never partook. After Juliana taught me the ways of Pornhub, well, I’m gettin’ it from the cow for free, and the milk’s, well… um… we’ll just leave that fractured analogy alone.

It’s kind of funny, the rental mentality. That whole paradigm has changed, hasn’t it? I don’t know about you, but my snobby family always looked at people who rented as scumbags—white-trash who paid $7.00-a-week for the TV they couldn’t afford to buy outright.

The Rent-A-Center crowd.

$24.00-a-month for the Barcalounger. $13.00-a-week for the microwave. Pay ya on Friday, Sam.

Now, we’re all doing it. But we call it “subscriptions.” “I have a subscription to thusandsuch website that enables me to access thisandthat content.” “Subscribing” sounds much more palatable than “renting.”

And, after all, it’s all about the marketing.