Fun Fact:

A Seattle style hotdog is actually a polish sausage with cream cheese and grilled onions. It's really quite tasty!

Here is a terrible video of me narrating my apartment.

Every time I've tried to write a blog post recently, it's come out like an email to my mom: "Seattle is fine. The weather sucks. I like my job..." etc. etc. Meanwhile, my friend Sam back in Chicago is managing to post pretty consistently despite having brain cancer. Anyway, Seattle is fine, the weather sucks, and I like my job.

I have a lot going on right now

I've been posting about once a month now, and it seems appropriate to continue that even though so much has happened since my last post. For instance, I got fired about four hours later. At first I thought I got fired for being a bitch, which I will cop to, but now I think maybe I got fired for being racist? I'm not sure. Whatever the official reason, the actual reason is that my boss hated me and I hated her right back.

Originally I wasn't going to move to Seattle until mid to late summer, but why sit around being unemployed for three months? So I'm on a plane right now, one month later, on my way. The cats are in the baggage compartment, which is sort of nerve-racking. I figure, as long as neither of them suffered a heart attack during take off, they should be fine. All my stuff went on a moving truck yesterday, and will arrive on the west coast a little closer to May. I have a job at a private clinic waiting for me on Monday, and I'm in the process of getting approved for an apartment. This has been a hell of a month for me.

I figure I'm gonna pick up the pace on here now that all my Chicago people no longer have easy access to me. I'm still not planning on getting pregnant until December, but I should be good to go at that point.

I keep having mini panic attacks, though. Holy shit, I'm moving!

ETA: Landed safely, cats are fine, ensconced with The Gentlemen, starting my new life tomorrow!

My Mom Is Freaking Out

Last August, my mom and I took a really stressful road trip vacation. We were talking about the baby, and she said something along the lines of "This would be a lot easier for me if you just moved to Seattle. What am I supposed to tell my friends? What if [name redacted] wants to throw you a baby shower?" I had not, up until that point, considered moving to Seattle. The original plan was to just have it here and mail it to the west coast or something. I had no intentions of leaving Chicago, and I was also pretty sure my moms friends knew what surrogacy was, so I still wasn't considering moving.

Things changed, life changed, Seattle ended up seeming like the best plan. Now my mom is absolutely flipping out about this. She doesn't want me to leave. She doesn't me to talk about the baby. She definately doesn't want me to keep this blog. When [name redacted]'s daughter saw the link to this blog on my Facebook page and mentioned it to my mom in passing, the world pretty much fell apart. How could I possibly talk about this in public? Now everyone knows!

My mom is going through a rough time right now. A lot of things are changing very quickly in her life, and this is just one more thing. Still. It'd be nice to get some support for once, instead of endless horror stories about miscarriages and cleft palates. I know pregnancy can be a freakshow, but let's hope for the best. I'll worry about problems as they come up, but I'm not going to just give up in despair right now.

No matter how much my mom tries.

Apartment Torture

I've been checking out apartment sites for Seattle since about Christmas. This is an exercise in futility, since of course none of these apartments are going to be available when I actually want to move. However, it's helping me get the feel for the neighborhoods, and also how apartments in Seattle work.

One of the apartments I found recently looks adorable, so much so that I was going to ask to be put on their waiting list if they have any units open up this summer.

Look at that loft! It's super cute! Ignore the previous tenant's stuff, it's a totally cute apartment, and the loft really saves space over all. Also, I would have to climb a ladder to get into bed, which is not a problem today...

Crap.

That ain't gonna happen when I'm 8 months pregnant.

Plenty of time to keep looking.

What is the Seattle Baby Project?

This year, 2011, I will be moving from Chicago to Seattle. I'm going to be a surrogate mother for very good friends (assuming I can actually get pregnant in a timely manner). This plan is complicated by several factors:

1. I've had emotional problems ever since I can remember. I was officially diagnosed with major depression when I was thirteen, and it's never completely gone away. Pregnancy hormones on top of the stress of moving to a new city are going to be so much fun!

2. I work at Planned Parenthood and participate in abortions on a daily basis. This is actually not complicated for me, but apparently it is for other people. This is planned. This is one of the most overly planned pregnancies in the history of parenthood.

3. I'm getting too old for this shit. I'm going to be almost 33 when I start trying to conceive, and if conception takes a while, I could be 34 by the time I deliver. That's not exactly high risk for a first delivery, but it's probably going to be a little more complicated than it would be if I were ten years younger.

4. I've never really lived anywhere outside Chicago. I lived in England for 51 weeks once, and it was terrible. I'm scared that I'm going to hate Seattle and be stuck there for two years. From what I've seen, I don't think I will, but the hills and the weather are my greatest geographical concerns.

5. My cats are total assholes. If I didn't have them, or they got along with other animals even a little bit, I could try to get a roommate situation, but most places either already have animals or don't have them for a good reason. I have a possible roommate from Chicago in the form of L, but she's applying to grad school in a couple of different places and there's no guarantee she'll move to Seattle with me for the fall. Being able to afford a place on a new entry level income is going to be tough, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.

I'm sure there are more complications I could thing of if I gave it a few minutes, but let me move on to my faq.

What if you want to keep the baby?
Even if I really really want to keep the baby when its born, I'm not going to do it. I'm barely able to take care of my cats, let alone a totally helpless human infant. Also, I volunteered my services in October 2008. If all goes according to plan, I'll be delivering on fall of 2012. I will have spent four years emotionally distancing myself from the baby. Yes, I'm probably going to be sad when I turn the baby over, but I'm also going to be happy, because that will be the fruition of years of planning and work. Also, I'm going to be in this baby's life. Just because I'm not personally living with it or raising it doesn't mean it isn't going to know who I am.

What's wrong with the real mom that she can't have kids? (yes, I've been asked that)
There is no real mom, but there are two dads. I'm super good friends with one of them, and moderately good friends with the other one, which I figure averages out to "very good".

Whose eggs are you going to use, then?
I'm using my own eggs. I find this to be a really weird question, like they've got five grand to spend on a stranger's eggs when I've got perfectly good eggs right here that I'm not even doing anything with.

So are you going to have sex with both of them and just not know who the biological father is?
First of all, I'm not having sex with either of them. I work at Planned Parenthood, remember? Sex does not equal babies, and babies do not equal sex. Second of all, we know exactly who the biological father is going to be. We're really not going into this whole pregnancy thing half assed. We've actually thought about it.

Are they going to pay you for carrying their baby?
Nope. Aside from being illegal in Washington state, also the dads are not loaded. They're doing well enough that I'm not worried about them raising a kid, but they also don't have the kind of cash this kind of venture usually involves. They shouldn't be denied the opportunity to have kids just because they don't have the right reproductive organs or tons of money. They will, however, pay all legal fees and medical expenses. Were not going to go crazy with fertility treatments, but being pregnant is not cheap.

What if they turn out to be bad parents?

What if you turn out to be a bad parent? No one knows how they're going to do as a parent in advance, but that doesn't stop straight people from having kids all the time. I trust them to make a good faith effort at being good parents, and only time will tell how well they succeeded, same as everybody. Also, if this is the polite way of asking, "What if all gay men are actually pedophiles?" then clearly you have the wrong blog.

This is my story. I will tell it as it happens. If I can get Discovery Channel to do a reality series and pay me a bunch of money about it, so much the better.