Death By Consumption #3: Everyone hates my genes
One day, I swear, I will become regular at sending these. Maybe even weekly! Because I consume so much shit, and I need somewhere to try to make sense of it before it kills me. Anyway, this one's long to make up for the absence, I guess:
CONSUMED:
Far From The Tree by Andrew Solomon
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
"The Myth of Whiteness In Classical Sculpture" by Margaret Talbot for the New Yorker
Earlier this year, my friend and former coworker Emily asked me — via a one-sentence text — to be the sperm donor for her and her wife. We quickly switched to gchat and talked about it a little more, and agreed to "keep the discussion moving." At the time, I had been dating Justin for less than a year, and I knew I was stepping into troubled waters but, well, I love doing things if they're interesting, without giving them much more thought than that. I brought it up to him and he wasn't thrilled, to say the least. They want me to what? How does that even work? And what would my relationship to this child be? And what would his relationship to the child be? It was a thorny nest of issues, and plunged us headlong into conversations about his complicated family, my less-complicated-but-still-occasionally-messy family, and a whole slew of other things that normally don't show up within the first year of a relationship.
After months of discussion and outrageously awkward sit-down conversations with Emily and Jamie, we decided, tentatively, to move forward with it, under the agreement that I would not be a father. The kid would have two moms and then we'd be Uncle Danny and Uncle Justin. Someday we'd probably have to explain how I helped, but I wouldn't be coming over and teaching it how to throw a spiral or anything (no one should want me to teach a kid how to throw a spiral, unless they want their kid to learn humility through getting bullied). So I went to the fertility clinic.
There were two separate entrances, one for "donors" and one for "patients." I went in the donor door and explained who I was. The woman behind the counter informed me that I'm a "directed donor," not an anonymous donor, so I had to go to the patient side of the office. As I went outside and back in through the other door, I got my first lesson in how fucked up our fertility system is: the donor waiting room was covered in magazines about cars, guns, hunting, and boobs, while the patient waiting room only had magazines about makeup, clothes, and cooking. This was either incredibly sexist, or a ham-fisted attempt to make a very uncomfortable process feel "normal," by bludgeoning you over the head with stereotypes someone must have assumed would be comforting to people in this strange environment. "I have to jerk off in this place," I thought, not for the last time.
Emily and Jamie's counselor, a very intense woman with a terrifyingly condescending look behind her eyes, sat me down and walked me through the pages and pages of paperwork I would fill out over the next hour. I told her about any health issues I've had, as well as any issues any of my family members have ever had, including the dead ones I never met. (My mom's side is Irish, so I needed a supplemental page for the "alcoholism and mental illness" section. Fun!) I made a list of every single country I had traveled to over the past 10 years. "Mexico? The Caribbean?" she said, alarm ringing out in the stale conference room. "You know they have Zika there, right?" As if, back in my early-20s, I should have thought about potentially inseminating a woman in my 30s before I planned trips. (Disappointingly, she did not care that I've been to North Korea. She didn't even think it was cool.) She set the tone immediately, and that tone was: your genes are trash and should not be given to a child.
Then, the legal section: sign here to forfeit all legal rights to parentage (YES PLEASE CAN I SIGN TWICE), sign here to state I'm doing this of my own free will (giving me visions of gangs of lesbians abducting gay men and forcing them to jack off into a test tube at gunpoint), and sign here if you want Emily and Jamie to be able to access your frozen sperm even if you die (sure, why not, at least someone should get some use out of it). After that it was time to draw blood.
I dreaded this part, not because I fear needles, but because my veins are TERRIBLE. Really shitty tiny weak idiot veins (again: bad genes). And, as predicted, the tech couldn't find a single vein in my arm to puncture. I'm used to reassuring people who need to draw my blood that it's not their fault, but this experience was especially rough, considering the sheer volume of blood they needed to draw. Way, way too many vials:
BLOODY HELL
"Oh god we owe you so many drinks!!!" Emily texted me, as I updated her on the eighth and ninth unsuccessful arm pokes. The tech jabbed me several times in each arm, but still got nothing. They brought in a random guy from the back, who also couldn't find a spot to poke me. Finally, my elbows battered and bruised, poked with enough holes to make me worried my boss would drug test me, they moved to the back of my hand, where we managed to squeeze out some blood. The fertility counselor was growing incredibly frustrated and anxious, plying me with miniature bottles of water and granola bars. "Should I do jumping jacks?" I asked. We decided to take a break, and she ushered me into another room, where I was handed a phone and told to dial a number. "A genetic counselor will speak to you," is all she said before slamming the door behind me. Great, thanks!
I called the number and spent the following 30 minutes being interviewed and, quite frankly, shamed for my genes. "I love talking to directed donors," the geneticist gushed. "Anonymous donors have to have perfect genes, but directed donors have all this weird stuff in them." 2 hours into this process and my self-confidence was just at an all-time high. We broke down my family history in distressing detail, and she came to the same conclusion every doctor has come to: we very probably have a genetic collagen deficiency (we have a lot of aneurysms and a few of us have had our lungs pop open on a whim, whoopsie!).
After the gene-shaming, more blood was drained, and then, without warning, it was Time To Masturbate. I was handed a plastic bottle — the same kind you pee in at the doctor's — and ushered to a hallway where a line of open doors awaited me. "Once you've deposited your sample, drop it in the blue bin and you're all set!" These instructions were worryingly vague, but I chose a room and closed the door behind me. This is what I found inside:
Heterosexual horror. The magazines, the DVDs, the tacky plastic chair. Instead of getting down to business, I took a series of photos to document the room and texted it to a few people. I then realized I had, essentially, just texted friends, "I'm about to masturbate," and felt even more strange. Actually, I feel strange recapping this to you right now. Do you feel strange? This feels strange. Anyway, I did it. It was not pleasurable. I sealed the bottle, washed my hands, and thought about how many people's lives have begun in this miserable closet, due to some dude having a surreally depressing orgasm in a plastic chair that can never be cleaned often enough.
On my way out, I exited through the "donor" entrance, where I was privileged to catch a glimpse of two members of the elusive Anonymous Donor species. My heart was in my throat; finally, I get a glimpse of people with perfect genes! Both men were studiously avoiding eye contact with each other, and appeared to be in their mid-20s. Both white, both over 6 feet tall. T-shirts stretched over muscles. Backwards baseball caps. If they don't work in finance, I'm sure most of their friends do. Perfect genes, it turns out, look boring as hell.
After this experience, I finally read Far From The Tree, Andrew Solomon's book exploring "horizontal identities" like deafness and Down syndrome, and how families with kids who fell "far from the tree" relate to one another and attempt to find love on uncommon ground. I saw the documentary adaptation earlier this year, but had been hesitant to read the book because I feared it would be too emotional, and also because it's just so big to carry around. But this felt like an apt moment to think about this sort of stuff, and I devoured the enormous thing in no time.
Andrew Solomon's empathy comes across in every sentence, in ways that catch you off guard. He somehow brings out the best in everyone, so even the subjects in his book who lack full language capacities become unbelievably eloquent through him. Nearly every other page, a statement slaps you across the face and makes you start crying on the subway. Like this statement, from an autistic boy he meets:
“When parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.”
Just before I finished the book, Emily informed me they weren't going to use my sperm. The geneticist had freaked them out, more or less, with my probable genetic collagen deficiencies, and the two of them couldn't shake visions of their child dropping dead of an aneurysm on the soccer field. Fair enough! All that was left was to authorize the clinic to throw my sperm in the garbage (the final debasement from that LAB OF SHAME), and to figure out how I felt about this whole experience.
I was surprised to find myself saddened that they weren't taking my sperm, even though it wouldn't be "my" kid, and even though even the hypothetical kid was causing tension in my relationship. Justin could never quite figure out who he would be to the child. There's hardly any precedent for what someone like me would be to a donor child, let alone what the donor's boyfriend of less than two years would be. I always argued that the true relationship wouldn't be defined until the kid was old enough to have opinions and define it themselves — and then, by the nature of time, we'd be much further along and therefore much more secure in our own relationship, so the whole thing, to me, was a non-issue. Justin, however, always saw himself as the person on the outside. The kid would have two mothers, one sperm dad, and then this fourth person. Which is also a fair point, and one I found hard to argue with. This shit is complicated, it turns out! I read countless advice columns and essays from the perspectives of parents, donor parents, and partners of donors, and the only overall rule I could decipher was: you all just make it up as you go, like all parents do.
"It must be easier to lead a life in which you are not constantly inventing all the roles, in which there is a script to follow," Solomon writes near the end of the book, when he's detailing his own struggles with having kids both with his husband, but also as donors to other couples. "We have often felt like Christopher Columbus landing for the first time on the wilder shores of love, and while being a pioneer can be thrilling, sometimes one would prefer a place where the roads have already been built and the access is wireless."
Their struggles and negotiations eerily mirrored our own, but the love that grew from it is beautiful and strange and new: five parents, two marriages, six children, and infinitely different relationships criss-crossed throughout the families. It clarified to me why I felt sad — I wasn't sad about no longer having a biological child, but I was sad at the loss of the chance to create a new, strange family.
Months later, a letter arrived from Emily and Jamie, with a $100 gift card to Mission Chinese Food (it's really delicious and inventive and a lovely restaurant, you should eat there when you're in NYC!!!!!), thanking us for enduring "8 months of fertility hell." They ended the letter, "You're going to make such great uncles to our kid!" And I realized, through months of intense discussions with and about each other's relationships, intimate updates about when I would have to masturbate and how Emily was ovulating, deep-dives into all the problems we wouldn't like to replicate from our respective family histories, and some of the most awkward double dates in human history, the four of us had already started a weird little family.
Emily and I were no longer former coworkers, Jamie was no longer just Emily's wife to me, and Justin was no longer just my boyfriend to them. Even though we weren't having a child with them, I knew there was no chance Justin and I wouldn't feel close to their future kid, just by nature of it almost having been somewhat ours as well. "We have fought hard for the familial relationships into which others stumble," Solomon writes near the end of the book, "and there is a veteran's peace in our mutual devotion." Before it's even conceived, Emily and Jamie's child — our almost-donor kid — has two more people in the world who will love it.
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While visiting Tokyo last month, I read Convenience Store Woman, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. It's a short, quick read, which makes it even more remarkable how easily the main character can stick in your brain forever. It simply tells the story of a woman whose entire purpose — entire personality, even — is being a convenience store worker in Japan. "When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don't have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual," she tells us.
It's one of the funniest books I've read in a while, both funny-haha and funny-strange. I read the entire book in one plane ride, my jaw hanging open for most of it. I was insanely jealous of Sayaka Murata for having a brain this hilarious. It skewers consumerism, corporate culture, modern Japanese society, feminism, and conformity, to name a few of its targets. The main character sees being a convenience store worker — with its focus on order, cleanliness, attention to detail, and 24-hour availability — as one of the highest forms of existence, and she's insulted when someone sees her as merely human, complaining, "it felt like he'd downgraded me from store worker to female of the human species." Murata created one of the most memorable characters I've ever read, and I won't be surprised if Convenience Store Woman turns out to be my favorite book I've read all year. There's nothing else like it.
You may have seen this New Yorker story about how Greek and Roman statues were actually painted doing the rounds online a couple weeks ago and decided you didn't have time to read about some old-ass historian fight. I don't blame you! There's a lot going on these days! But I found it very eye-opening, and not just because I got a degree in ancient history. I already knew it's a myth that ancient statues were shown in polished marble like we see them today, but the article explores why we have been led to believe that, and how it can reveal the problems society has always had and still has with even looking at our racist past.
Rome and Athens, of course, were not "white" cities. Ethnicities intermingled thanks to conquered and absorbed territories across the empires (and due to slavery, although it's important to note that Gauls were enslaved as well as Africans). Prejudices sprung up along different lines — some groups of people were judged for having "thick blood," for example. And beauty was celebrated in darker skin colors; as the article notes, Odysseus was only considered beautiful in the Odyssey when Athena made him "black-skinned again."
I thought about the article last Monday, when I had the day off from work for Veteran's Day. I took myself to the Met for the first time in years, and spent hours in the Greek and Roman sections. I pressed my face as close to the statues as I could (I may have been a bit high), trying to find even a fleck of colored paint left behind. I never found any. The closest I got was stumbling upon this Centaur torso. The dark skin tone stood out from the gleaming white statues surrounding it. It had been carved from a type of marble that is naturally a dark red, which meant the skin color could never be washed away. I wished, as I always do, that I could see the statues as they originally were, standing over a bustling street corner under a fresh coat of paint.
DEATH:
For the past six months, I've mainlined every season of "Vanderpump Rules" since the beginning. It feels like reading the Elena Ferrante novels and Infinite Jest at the same time. It's a fucking journey, and before I knew it I had become one of those psychopaths who will talk your ear off in a desperate need to explain why it's actually a show for geniuses. (Don't believe me, believe Martin Scorsese and Rihanna!) Six months ago, I had a vague awareness of human-monster hybrids named Jax and Stassi, but if you had said the words "Lala Kent" or "DJ James Kennedy," I would have given you a stare as blank as James's dead-eyed mannequin girlfriend Raquel. Now, I would scream at you about my love for them until my heart burst, killing me instantly.
I genuinely believe it's one of the funniest shows to ever air on TV. The cast is a mess, and manage to find their way into truly absurd situations that are hard to even explain. The questions hanging over the show are so insane they're sublime. To take one incredible example, one cast member cheated on his girlfriend with another cast member, and when the affair (lol at such a lofty word ever being used to describe the gross, thoughtless fucking that goes on between cast members) comes to light, it's explained that the woman, Faith, was doing hospice care for a 95-year-old woman when she texted Jax to come over and hook up, thinking he wouldn't dare. He did, and they did it, worrying the whole time that the DYING WOMAN NEXT TO THEM would wake up. The fallout from this revelation takes over an entire season, but, insanely, the focus is exclusively on the two of them having sex, and no one EVER — NOT ONCE — circles back to ask, "Okay, wait, what's this about the 95-year-old hospice patient involved?"
These absurd moments are everywhere in the series, and each one is just as unremarkable to the cast. They live in a surreal world of non-stop cheating, screaming, sobbing, and waking up hungover in crummy apartments, and even the reported millions of dollars some of them have made from the show isn't enough to get them to grow up (even though a couple cast members are pushing 40, which never fails to D E P R E S S me). It's a perfect show and it's ruined my brain forever, which is fine. You should just give in and watch it.
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As always, feel free to reply with hate mail, dick pics, comments, etc. Bye! <3