Thinking outside the uterus

The regular reader(s) of this column might have noticed that, lately, I’m having a difficult time writing about anything that isn’t directly related to local news.  Specifically, news that is local to my wife’s uterus.

The fact that a baby could very well come flying out of there at any moment makes it difficult for me to think about too much else, but I should probably spend some time recognizing that there’s a big world outside of my wife’s uterus, which is why this column will be devoted to various other topics that I’ve been neglecting, such as the Republican primaries, and perhaps my wife’s fallopian tubes.

I’ve been watching those primaries closely this year, mostly because they make me feel young.  Back in the year 2000, when bald spots were still things that happened to other people, I started driving my first car that had a CD player installed.

“Well, I’ve made my last mix tape,” I thought.  “And also, I’ve had my last thought about Newt Gingrich.”

Not that I spent that much time thinking about him anyway, but it just seemed like that space in my brain could be emptied out to house more important matters, like the phone numbers to the houses that my childhood friends no longer lived in.  But now that Newt is back in the headlines as a frontrunner among the nearly seven billion people who will never be president, I’m transported back to the days when my cranium was sunburn-proof.

Incidentally, for anyone who is concerned about the state of their bald spot but is too afraid to look, you can judge the severity of the situation by the altitude of the barber’s mirror at the conclusion of your haircut.  As the bald spot widens, the handheld mirror will drop lower and lower.

“It’s good?” the barber will ask, holding the mirror an inch from your clippings on the floor.

“Yes, the back of the chair looks fantastic,” you’ll say, content to imagine that the top of your head still looks the same as the last time you saw it, when you were twelve.

This is the kind of hard-hitting political coverage that the reader(s) of this column have come to expect, and it’s honestly a nice change of pace from the wall-to-uterine-wall writing that I’ve been doing lately.

Never mind that Kara’s doctor estimated that we have a 50/50 chance of having the baby in the next two weeks, and that he gave us this prediction last week, which means that I might very well not be able to type the rest of this sentence without having to fling the laptop across the room and run every red light between here and the hospital.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I did take a break to eat a Double Stuf Oreo, the existence of which still baffles me.  The superiority of the Double Stuf is self-evident to anyone who has ever compared it to the original Oreo.  In a just world, Double Stuf would be the default, and anyone who wanted the inferior original could pick up a package of Half Stuf.

Insights like this wouldn’t be possible if I allowed myself to be consumed by the thought that very soon, we’re going to be sharing our house with a toddler and an infant, which means that the folks going through Navy SEAL training will be getting a better night’s sleep than us.

We may not have many sleepable moments on the immediate horizon, but at least we know what we’re getting into this time.  Actually, that kind of makes things worse.

Regardless, we’re very much looking forward to welcoming the newest member of our family.  As it turns out, he’s much more fun to think about than Newt Gingrich.

You can request more election coverage at mikectodd@gmail.com.