Hurricanes are Not An Aphrodisiac

Note: For absolutely no reason in particular, this is the second pregnancy post in a row. Author’s apologies all around.

I want to share with you a little phenomenon I’ve recently stumbled across, and that is the unbelievably large amount of very pregnant women I have seen about town for the past few weeks. And not just “Oh-that’s-sweet-she’s-expecting-a-baby” pregnant, but an “Oh-my-God-that-woman-is-about-to-pop-and-I-don’t-care-how-magical-babies-are-I-am-taking-a-giant-step-backwards-because-her-water-is-clearly-going-to-break-and-these-are-my-favorite-shoes” pregnant. PREGNANT, folks.

Like the sheltered uptown cocker spaniel in Lady & The Tramp, I was simply baffled by all this baby business (but without a wizened bloodhound named Trusty to explain it to me.) I was recently at a wedding shower having a nice little innocent chat with two of my friend’s moms, one of whom is a nurse. God only knows how the topic came up, but she announced to us that Houston was expecting a 25% increase in births in June and July, because of Hurricane Ike. And suddenly it clicked. Thanks to MTV’s Sixteen & Pregnant (previous post – holla!), I now know where babies come from, and using my powers of deduction and some simple context clues, I quickly realized what was going on with this influx of fruitful ladies that me and my shoes had been carefully side-stepping during my daily errands. These broads had been doing the mattress mambo (yes, I’m twelve, and I make no apologies for it) DURING HURRICANE IKE. Think about it – June/July, minus nine months, takes us right back to September ’08. Knowledge really is power.

At this point in the conversation, one of the mothers giggled and admitted that her second-eldest child was a hurricane baby in the 80’s, because, and I quote – “the power was out and there was nothing else to do!” (Author’s note: Before I spin off into my rant, let it be known that my friend’s mom is totally excused from the verbal persecution as she falls under the Known And Liked By Wendy clause. Definition: Just because I hold society to impossibly high standards, you don’t have to live up to them, mainly because you picked me up from high school lacrosse practice or you make really good brownies or something.) I get a big kick out of my friends’ moms and have known most of them since I was a wee tot, so I prefer to mentally block any existence of their sex lives, just as I’m sure they prefer to do the same for our group of friends. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – that sort of thing. For all I know, their “hurricane baby” floated down their flooded street in a basket made of reeds, a la Moses… just like how we threw up in high school after Senior Girls’ from “dancing too much after eating a big dinner” and those lipgloss-smudged cigarette butts behind the garage “must have been left over from the workmen.”

Thus we arrive at my issue: Sex during a hurricane??? Are you serious with this? You know who I got busy with during Hurricane Ike? A fleet of orphaned baby squirrels at the SPCA – but alas, that is a story for another day, another blog entry, and at least several cocktails. If any of you lived in Houston in September of 2008 and had the gall/stupidity (I can say that because I was here the entire time) to stick around during Hurricane Ike, you know exactly what I’m talking about. No power, no clean water - days ticked by and without a steady stream of Freon pumping throughout our houses, the September humidity began to permeate everything indoors, including my soul. A faint smell of mold introduced itself and everyone’s sheets were damp, and not in the “I had too much fun at Vintage” urine-soaked way. And oh dear God don’t even get me started on the generators. Frankly I would have preferred someone set up a week-long NASCAR race directly in front of my house, because at least then I could have had some great fanny-pack-wearing-people-watching to accompany the 24-hour cacophony of big-rig engines and the overpowering reek of gasoline. Your day basically went as such: Wake up in the morning drenched in a thin layer of sweat. Take a freezing cold shower in the dark. Dry off with a towel that is starting to smell like mildew. Have a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. Break out the chainsaw/rake/garbage bags and attempt to make your lawn/gutters/street look somewhat passable so that hopefully the revered CenterPoint Energy workers will show up and restore your power supply. Go inside and take another freezing cold shower in the dark. Play solitaire. Have a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. Listen to various National Guard and Red Cross reports of death and destruction on your wind-up radio (I’m not even kidding, my parents and I sat huddled around ours for days like eastern-European refugees during World War 2). Play solitaire. Find out one of your friends never lost electricity at their apartment. Bum-rush said apartment with a 6-pack of lukewarm beer and find 50 other assholes who had the same idea as you. Consume beer (which is unfortunately starting to taste like water by this point) and head home for another ice-cold shower. Contemplate another peanut butter sandwich but get too depressed staring at the king-size jar of JIFF. Read until it gets dark (7:30 PM). Lay in bed until you drift off into a fitful and sweat-laden sleep.

This went on for 10 days at my house. As one may imagine, leading a lifestyle such as the aforementioned wasn’t exactly doing wonders for anyone’s appearance. I’m a relatively low-maintenance kind of gal (“of an English mentality”, I prefer to call it), but by the third day of this crap even I was starting to shudder a little every time I glanced in the mirror. Not to mention the raging guilt I felt on the inside for realizing this is how people in third world countries live and the only real hardship my cushy little life can claim is being forced to listen to the guitar-guy in the wine section at Kroger on West Gray.

So as you can see, Homely Appearances and Overwhelming Depression reigned supreme in September. How was it possible people were feeling the need to get busy? I understand there are some folks out there who are into, for lack of a better term, some freaky shit, and to you I say Mazel Tov. But sex during Ike’s aftermath goes beyond anything even the most devout sado-masochist could conjure up. Sandals is for lovers; the Gulf Coast after a hurricane is not. Everyone was miserable because they were hot and muggy – why would you do anything that would further the hot mugginess? It’s like going for a jog in the Sahara and refreshing yourself with a nice cup of hot creamy soup afterwards – no one does these things! It isn’t cool, it isn’t funny, and there’s certainly nothing arousing about it. Let me the list the things I would rather do than have sex after Hurricane Ike:

• Sit on a cactus
• Have hot bamboo spears shoved underneath my fingernails
• Live on a steady diet of candied goat anus
• Have an abnormal amount of children with Jon Gosselin
• NOT have an abnormal amount of children with Robert Pattinson (See what I did there?)

In conclusion, God forbid we get hit with another whopper storm like Ike again in the near future, but if we do, I only ask that you people think long and hard (that’s what she said) about the activities you engage in while sans-power. The Baby-Boomers that resulted from the end of WW2 are one thing – putting a strain on the healthcare and social security system because you couldn’t think of anything else to do after Ike is quite another altogether. If you feel the urge, maybe try to distract yourself with something else. Come over to my house – we’ll listen to the wind-up radio and make peanut butter sandwiches. Because if your child is born with leaves in his hair and wearing a CenterPoint energy uniform, you really only have yourself to blame.