Rabbit's foot

Update (May 3): Add two more wins for baby, now 14-1-1 in baseball, 1-0 on the road. Plus it turns out Mom is a hex upon Baylor, as they gave up 31 runs (against this rather baaaaaaad Texas offense) and committed ten (ten!) errors in the two games we were at. That makes Texas 2-0 against Baylor in Waco on my birthday in games attended by me. Warning: Sample size is not statistically significant.

---

The better you know me, the more you know that I am an anthropomorphic pox on the fortunes of my favorite sports teams. I single-handedly count as -3 points in any game I attend, Vegas would be wise to track my movements. There was a streak from the early nineties until I got to Mizzou that my teams did not win a single game I attended (I am convinced this is true).

Oh, there have been some highlights since 1992. I attended the Mizzou-Iowa State basketball game over winter break in 2000-2001, a 3OT thriller when Clarence "I think I'll just jack another three" Gilbert jacked uncountable threes... and actually made some of them. I was at the first Mizzou football win over Nebraska since (literally) before my birth. That was possibly the best game I have ever attended, and was made even better by the fact that I was able to run onto the field with thousands of other students without being one of the baker's dozen who actually got arrested, like my friend Boner did. Plus, the next day we were able to spot Snots in the background of the picture on the front page of the paper by locating the V pattern in his hair caused by his early male-pattern baldness, which was awesome times a million. And the first college baseball game I ever attended was a Texas win over Oklahoma in which Adrian Alaniz threw a no-hitter (only one I've ever seen) and occurred in the same season that UT won their sixth title.

But good god there have been serious stinkers, more than wins. I remember going to a Blues game for one of Zack's friend's birthdays when we got to sit in a box. Problem was they were playing the Devils back in their neutral zone trap days, and the next day the Post-Dispatch referred to the game as the "most boring Blues game in years." So that was awesome. Every Stanley Cup playoff game I ever attended was almost certainly a loss to the Red Wings, although luckily I didn't attend the hockey game that made me sicker to my stomach than any game in any sport I have ever watched (Game 7, Overtime, Yzerman, Blue line, Casey; you know what I'm talking about). And I am trying to forget the Mizzou Homecoming win over Kansas where supposedly the players ran to the goal posts after the game and began tearing them down and the student section begrudgingly joined in. Kansas!

But all of that is changing for Ol' Luke, and there's only one possible explanation: My baby is such good luck that it overtakes my bad luck. Consider this: from 2004 to mid-2008, my teams* in games attended by me were (as best I can recall) 5-8. Altogether, that's not such a bad record compared to my past, but it's 2-2 in football (two Mizzou losses to Texas, Texas wins vs. Rice [oooooh!] and North Texas [aaaahh!]; obviously we weren't springing for football tix before Ariane enrolled) and a bad 4-6 in baseball.

Since last summer? An astounding 25-4-1, which breaks down as 6-1 in football (Mizzou lost to Texas in Austin for the loss), 3-1 in basketball (Mizzou beat Texas in Austin for one of those wins, plus this includes how Texas somehow beat UCLA in December), 1-0 in women's basketball, 3-1 in softball, and (here's the big one) 12-1-1 in baseball so far this season.

Odds are we won't get football tickets this year. It's too hot/loud/busy/terrible all around to bring a baby. Baseball baby can go to. Everybody else brings their babies. I think Disch-Falk Field may contain the highest number of Baby Bjorns per attendee in the world.

That baseball record has me convinced that she'll be a softball player, probably a pitcher, driving her mother crazy with the windmill motion. All I know is that I need to start gambling on the outright scores.

*Oops, forgot to explain that my teams are Texas in everything unless they are playing Mizzou in football or basketball. There are no other teams because there is no one else to watch down here, unless I finally decide to pony up about $20 to go watch the Austin Toros of the D-League just to heckle Quin Snyder.

It's a long way...

View Larger Map

...to the nearest White Castle.

It's so far you have to zoom out, because I can't figure out how to embed it properly.

Will engineer chemically for food

Anyone? Anyone?

Because it is GUTS, people!

Things I have no problem cutting:

Paper
Butter with a warm knife
It out
Class
The cheese

Things I will not under any circumstances cut:

Umbilical cords

Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE SOMEBODY'S GUTS!

Also, they are slimy and tough to get through. How in the world could that be enjoyable? Would you take up the doctors' offer to do whatever it is they do with the placenta? Of course you wouldn't... unless you're all cool and all like McConaughey. All right all right.

Hallmark and the Gregorian calendar once again conspire to help ME

1. Uh huh.
2. Due date.
3. Awesome.


I will have earned a day off of my feet. Eighteen days is a long time to wait to earn something like that.

Of course I was right

When I said this, you knew I was right. I was.

Governor Good-Hair

I love Austin, but good FSM almighty is this state run by a group of retards. Rick Perry is the biggest idiot and loser to ever govern any state. EVER.

Texas: So much potential, so little hope.

Hey, Rick, WHERE WERE YOU THE LAST EIGHT YEARS, ASSHOLE? Stop your grandstanding and eat a bag of dicks, Rick Perry. You are not going to be elected President. What a total moron.

P.S.: I still haven't forgotten your embarrassingly awful 2008 commencement speech at Stephen F. Austin.

Updated 5:32 PM: Right on fucking cue. Rick Perry: Assclown.* These people, aided by Fox "News", will rot your brain out of your head.

*an insult to assclowns, actually.

Bingo

I've just solved the energy problem: insert hydro-turbines in pregnant women's toilets so that every time they pee they generate electricity.

My BOTE calculation figures we could generate over 8.7 Jiggawatts (plus or minus 8.7 Jiggawatts). Guess I'll just kick back and await my Nobel Prize, then I'll just hang with Paul and take part in some hardcore beard-growing contests.

A frightening realization

I was born in May of 1982. I will turn 27 in a couple of weeks.

My daughter will be born in late May/early June of 2009, a handful of weeks after my birthday.

This means that my nominal age will be 27 more than hers all but one month a year (after my birthday, before hers) when it will be 28. See where I am going with this?

The Year: 2022
The Location: New Earth
The Situation: Not only will Old Earth be controlled by the Gay Islamosocialist Terminators,* but right after I am dealing with the mental trauma of being blindsided by 40 in May, less than a month later I will pushed beyond the edge of sanity by having my daughter freshly minted as a teenager at her 13th birthday.

I did this calculation mentally, so there is a 98% chance that it's wrong (I still can't tell you what 7x8 is without thinking REALLY hard about it), but if it's true you can probably get a great advance deal by purchasing my obit already.

*Glenn Beck's latest bit o' truth. Actually, let's give Glenn his own tag.

No intro needed

The most accurate Burger King commercial ever.

Your one word review of childbirth education

Ew.


Your three word review follows:

Ew ew ew.


There's already been more grossness than I have needed, but the first class, despite not actually needing to watch a video, had enough discussion of mucus plugs, pea soup colored amniotic fluid, babies eating their poop in utero, and other horrific details regarding the "miracle of life" for me. But, yay!, three more classes to go. Plus, I made the mistake of watching the last episode of ER, where (SPOILER ALERT!) Rory Gilmore was delivering triplets and the mother's uterus fell OUTSIDE OF HER VAGINA OH JESUS KILL ME.

This is why I could never be that kind of doctor. Although I am happy to offer medical advice. I hear that's legal, but my lawyer is Lionel Hutz.

Other things

I have far too much to write for work right now (another manuscript, cover letters, toying with starting my dissertation five months early) to pay this blogge the attention it deserves. If only there were some other team member who could post things here... perhaps about her own pregnancy... I guess no one like that exists. What was I thinking?

Childbirth classes start Thursday evening. I can't even watch surgery on TV. Do you think I'll be watching the video?

Try to make this grammatical

As much as I hope to raise our daughter in a not-quite-gender-neutral-but-not-dressing-her-in-tiaras-and-fairy-wings-from-birth-on happy medium, I've obviously had to prepare myself to have a daughter. This is, as I have mentioned, a) scary and b) scary. I've progressed enough that now I am utterly terrified of the years 12ish and above ( or however would be old enough to have a crush on the Jonas Brothers or whatever boy band flavor of the month exists in 2021ish*), which is a lot of progress from my initial state of being terrified from birth onwards. Progress!

So as we've made plans for a girl (not that there are really that many "plans" beyond: buy a lot of stuff and learn to change diapers), we mentioned yesterday that if we actually have a boy (which we 100% aren't) it would be problematic. This leads me to the following sentence, which we both attempted to construct properly:

"If she turns out to be a boy, she'll be in big trouble."

I don't think there is any correct/grammatical way to phrase that, pronoun-wise. It's kind of like how "I am sleeping," is somehow considered an acceptable sentence construction. Is there a way to get it right without completely altering the words and/or order? I think not. You can't do it and have the noun match the pronoun gender without throwing the entire idea out of whack.

"If he turns out to be a boy, he'll be in big trouble." What would that ever mean?

Babies. Always screwing up my pronouns.

*starting in 2010, can we all agree to please start saying "twenty-ten" instead of the inane "two thousand nine" or the make-me-claw-my-eyes-out "two thousand and nine"? I've been ready to go with this since twenty oh one, but if people continue to use the "two thousand" phrasing, I will go overboard and try to single-handedly start a backlash against unnecessary date-syllables by using too many, every time adding "Anno Domini" before I say the year, or perhaps the even more loathsome "Of the Common Era" afterward.