To My Unborn, Unconceived (Probably) Child

I haven’t got my period yet this cycle. I am not stressed out about this. Not yet. I have had some cramps, am unnecessarily cranky and am ravenous for chocolate, so it’s just a waiting game with my ovaries at this point. But it got me thinking: someday I could make another human!

So what would I want that human to know if I were in some horrible accident post its birth and it never knew me? What would it have to go off of? These blog posts? Dear God. The stored files on my computer? Holy Horus. The things people tell it? (Don’t think I’m callous because I’m calling it an “it.” One of English’s flaws is that we do not have a third person, singular, genderless pronoun. “Them” is plural and so grammatically incorrect. “It” is the best I can do without using that horrible him/her concoction.) I’m sure people would say nice stuff about me, but normally people say nice stuff about dead people which is probably more often than we realize (or want to recognize) just inflated garbage because when someone’s dead we suddenly have to be nice to them. That doesn’t really make any sense. What is that person gonna do about it, really?

That person is dead.

Even though I believe in ghosts and am pretty sure that if someone called me a dick once I died that I would find a way to haunt them, and not like Patrick Swayze in Ghost haunt them, but just generally make them miserable haunt them, doesn’t mean that most other people believe in ghosts or would be capable, once they die, of pulling off a successful haunt. I imagine you need to really plan out your haunting ahead of time and hone your apparition skills (source: Beetlejuice) and just because you suddenly have an infinite amount of time on your newly transparent hands doesn’t mean the still-living cocksuckers defaming your memory are going to be around forever, waiting for you to paranormally get back at them. And the desire to haunt them will wear off if you take too long after they’ve forgotten about how shitty you were when you were alive, so you have to get to this haunting thing right away after death. Which is why I’ll be sweet at it because I’m thinking about it now and planning it, and no, you can't know about my haunting plans because then, if I die and want to haunt you but you know about what I want to do, then when creepy shit starts happening to you, you'll just be all “Oh, Ashley, stop that!” or “Hey, you broke my vase! You owe me! What’s Michael Jackson up to?” But I won’t be able to tell you what Michael Jackson’s up to because he’s not dead, just hanging out in Dubai, but you won’t believe me because no one believes me when I tell them that–and you’d think being dead would make people find my argument a little more compelling, but you’d probably just think I was being lazy when in actuality I wouldn’t be--I'd be the opposite of lazy because, after you’d be all “I know Jacko’s not dead!” then I’d be like, “Fine…” and I’d have to go to Dubai and haunt him a little, find out, and report back to you like he’s dead. And that’s just unsuccessful haunting all together. Not that it will matter because most people aren’t horrible like me and think it’s okay to talk shit about the deceased, so they won’t say crap about me which is actually pretty nice.

But really, you should be much nicer to people when they’re alive, especially if they’re an asshole (ew, see, that “they” is just wrong) because people who are assholes are more likely to punch you in the face if you talk shit about them and even ghosts can’t punch. At least not at first. And I don’t believe it’s out of respect for the still living because, if that dead person was a jerk and you say so the other people should be like, “Yeah, Jim was kind of a douche” because chances are that Jim was a douche to the people who are saddened by his death too. Douchiness is douchiness. I mean, if you were a douche and then you fall out of a hot air balloon it’s not really like people have an obligation to suddenly recognize your good qualities, if any, or pretend like you were sweet.

So what I’m saying is, if my child is my child then it will probably think about this (because nature over nurture, apparently) and not really trust everything everyone says because the people who know me well enough to tell my it about me will say nice things. Granted, those things (except for the me hating on dead people stuff) will be utterly true because I am pretty fucking sweet, but my it deserves some empirical evidence of my true existence and not the fluff that will come about because I can’t stick up for my own damn self because I’m dead and haven't gotten a hang on haunting yet.

Actually, now that I think about it, that’s pretty valiant of you, still-living people. To push aside your own qualms and think of my it who never got a chance to know me. That’s really, really nice. See, now that’s a true thing I would say about you if you were dead first, “Dude, Sally would have been so sweet to my kid and told it how awesome I was if I’d have died first! She was a saint!” Of course, I couldn’t genuinely know that, but since you’d be dead, I would probably give you the benefit of the doubt. Oh, gosh, becoming the thing I hate already.

Well, since you still-living people seem to have it covered, I guess I can forgo this whole thing. Except that this entry will still exist and then cause the whole “Are these people lying to me about my mum?” question to be in my it’s head. (Yeah, it is going to call me “mum.” Deal with it.)

Unborn, (probably) unconceived baby, Mum was awesome.

Done.

P.S. I just got my period, so I could take out those parenthetical probablies and that whole first paragraph, but I’m not going to. Instead, you can just relax with this little bit extra knowledge here at the end.