July 18, 2011 - Breakfast

I went to the doctor for a checkup and to have my pills renewed and he said that the thing where my nose feels tight and tense is not actually me dying or my heart exploding but instead a deviated septum. I had decided that I was experiencing it when my blood pressure was high and that indicated Sudden Onset Death Syndrome.

Last night I put my wife in charge. She is now the manager of me, as I need management.

Maybe I worked 80 hours last week? 100? Memos and calls and miscellany, plus units of true work. 20 of them just spinning out into nothing though. Two days lost to just figuring out how it felt to tell the world that we'd done IVF. Doctors, travel, shrink on phone, sleep, naps, confusion, anxiety, panic.

No rest on the weekend. Saturday we went to the hospital to see where the children will be born. I took a picture of a wall panel with buttons for no good reason.

They showed us videos. Every video pans down to what looks like a pile of hot roast beef out of which the baby emerges. You wait through all the stories and then you see the roast beef and the way it works is that you shoot out a huge hot bucket of guts and in the guts there is a baby except in our case two, and likely they'll pull them out before we can push them out.

They have faces and hop about inside my wife, like big frogs. They are long, bony, furry creatures now. Like something you'd see on the savannah, tiny apes, just on the good edge of viable. Ontogeny has recapitulated phylogeny. So they are racing towards us over several billion years, running as fast as they can, about to leap out of my wife's uterus and into our arms on a hot day in August or September and cry, and cry, and cry.

Weight: 330 lbs