All right that’s it. The right-to-lifers have officially convinced me. I now believe that life begins not at birth but at conception.
So therefore I’m not celebrating my birthday anymore. Instead I’m celebrating my Conception Day and I’m determined to convince everyone else to do the same. Your Conception Day is the day that lucky, one-in-a-million tadpole of sperm sunk its teeth into that egg and refused to let go, like a bulldog with a pork chop. It’s the day your parents did it and it stuck.
As soon as you embrace the idea that life begins at conception, you instantly become nine months older. Because to calculate your Conception Day, you just count back nine months from your birthday, which in my case brings me to September 25, more or less. There’s no way for me to know for sure because my deceased parents were the only ones there at that decisive moment. I assume there are no eyewitness accounts since my parents never struck me as orgy types. And it still kind of creeps me out to even picture my parents being there.
That’s the one drawback with Conception Day. It’s all kind of fuzzy. It’s not as clear cut and irrefutable as your birthday. If you are more fortunate than I and either of your parents is still alive, perhaps they can aid your research. Just ask “Hey mom and (or) dad, what was the date when you did it and it stuck?”
And if we true believers can get Conception Day to catch on, it can provide a real shot in the arm for the economy. Because as any economist will tell you, one of the best ways to create new jobs is to create a new bullshit holiday, like Sweetest Day. This creates jobs for the most chronically unemployed deadbeats of all. Poets. Because Hallmark will release a new line of Happy Conception Day cards and someone will have to come up with the words to express these new sentiments, such as:
Rejoice the day your mother’s egg
Your father fertilized.
And Praise the Lord that in the womb
You were not murder-lized.
These can’t just be dime store poets either because they’ll have a tough job to do. They’ll have to think of a whole bunch of different things that rhyme with zygote. (Thigh bloat? Sly goat? I give up.)
It will take a massive propaganda campaign to enshrine the concept of Conception Day into our culture. (I’m getting a head start by always using upper case when I spell Conception Day.). And nobody can pull off a propaganda campaign better than Hallmark. It’s their entire reason for being. In addition to all the new cards, decorations and party favors, they’ll produce a very special television movie about a brave boy’s quest, against all odds, to determine his Conception Day. It will air after the Super Bowl.
This shift in mentality will lead to better recordkeeping as the children of the future demand to know their Conception Day. Maybe adults will be required by law to keep an official log documenting every time they do it and with whom and register it with the county government in case one of those times sticks.
Then we can call ourselves a civilized society.
Actually, it's even harder than that because conception can happen a day or two after they had sex. I kind of like the Chinese way of just counting ourselves a year old at birth, and not celebrating a birthday but being another year old every new years.
ReplyDeleteMike, just wanted to give kudo's for the recent article in NM magazine. He's a pretty interesting character, and your view made it even better. Hope to see you in there more often. See you at the next Ability Expo!
ReplyDeleteVictor, Brenda and Sara
There is one aspect of this that could make it very exciting. In order to make each logged possible conception activity legal, there should be at least two witnesses.
ReplyDeleteMike Ervin was once a small zygote,
ReplyDeleteThe product of one or more love note.
"Conceptions when life begins,"
He told all of his friends;
Who, set him adrift in a lifeboat.
Sadly I can celebrate my Conception Day without a doubt. My mom knows the exact night she got pregnant with me, while my father occasionally remembers that he was involved in the process.
ReplyDeleteIF you are going for an older age, THEN you could take the age of the unfertilized egg into consideration. All of the eggs that a woman is ever going to have are already inside her when she is born, so in that case my mother was born 24 years before me, so that puts part of me at 73 - whoa! I should try to collect social security before its too late!
ReplyDeleteSorry, bad math skills at 2:30 AM, I would be 57.
ReplyDeleteSorry, bad math skills AND dyslexia at 2:30 AM, I would be 75, not 57. I think I had a headache earlier as well, the same one as I have now.
ReplyDeleteOne small correction. If life does indeed begin at conception, your mother and father were not the only ones there--you were too! I understand if you were too young to remember!
ReplyDeleteYou do realize that you could create a very profitable cottage industry with this idea?
ReplyDeleteScrew Hallmark! *You* design the greeting cards!
(pssst...I need a job if you need help...)
:P
- Sarah
Now, are we talking fertilization or implantation?
ReplyDelete