OPB

Other People's Babies:
I just don't care.

And I don't expect other people to care about mine. Why should they? Aside from family and very close friends, I mean, it's just a baby to everyone else. People make them all the time. I see them everywhere. Most of the time I think "I could do better than that."

Take today. I met a colleague for lunch. She was in the process of holding the three month old baby of a friend of hers. My thought upon seeing the baby was "Look, a baby. I'm going to have one of those soon. Wow." I did not want to hold it or touch it or anything like that. Why would I? It's wholly unconnected to me. I mean, congratulations and all, Mr. Stranger Man, but no thanks. I'll hold my own when it gets here. We are not presently living in some sort of sci-fi world of infertility, and it's not like the species is in danger of dying out because of under-reproduction, so I don't have a sort of kinship-with-the-human-race thing going on, either.

I can only imagine that I will have to be dragged out to "show off" the baby when it gets here. Am I supposed to bring it into work when I am still on leave so people can see it? Probably. That seems a little gross. I know that people do it all the time, and it's probably expected, but do people keep doing stuff like that just because it's expected, or are they so exhausted and saturated in abnormal hormone levels that they have become entirely deluded, truly believing their experience to be central to everyone else's life as well?

As I did the required cooing and polite listening, I kept thinking "Why am I doing this? I don't care." I don't have to tell people that I don't care, but do I have to lapse into Cute-ery and primordial nonsense because you squeezed out a smaller version of you? It's like I can't help myself. I am compelled to sink into the expected societal responses. How often we are subconsciously dragged along with those tides, even when we intellectually reject them?

More often when we care to think. Sneezing for instance. I hate it when people acknowledge my sneezes. It doesn't matter if it's a "Bless you" or a "Gesundheit," can't I just sneeze in peace? A little part of me dies every time I knee-jerk out a "Gesundheit" for someone else's sneeze. Why am I perpetuating this nonsense? Do people do it because everyone does it? Do people actually like it and expect it? Frankly, a cough is a more alarming symptom than a sneeze, and no one gets a blessing for that. So here I am in my little ol' cubicle, trying to surreptitiously sneeze so no one will hear it, and no one will bless me.

If I sneeze in the forest, and no one is around to bless me, will I be more subject to disease?

If my baby is born, and I don't parade it around like a whippet at Westminster, does it exist?