Conversations overheard during The Great Sperm Search 2005 Part 2

JB: It's hard to say, 'well, we went with the color blind guy who's got colon cancer and Alzheimers in his family because the other guy was short.'
AR: Yeah. I think tiny guy is in the lead.

Here's the weird thing about shopping for 50 percent of the genetic make-up of your future child: it gives you a false feeling of control, as if introducing sperm to egg is ever anything but a crapshoot. You feel this huge responsibility, because you think you're hand-picking the traits your kid will have, and given a choice, you find yourself getting exceedingly picky.

So here's how our little experiment in eugenics is going:

Having narrowed down our search to a handful of smart, athletic, artistic donors who look more or less like me, (if eye color and hair texture have anything to do with it,) AnnaRay and I have paid twelve dollars a pop to peruse their long profiles, which detail their health histories, health histories of their extended families and, oh yeah, SAT scores.

At this point I should note that neither AR nor I would have made the cut. My m.s. would have ruled me out instantly, but even without that, my SAT scores and the fact that my grandfather had Parkinsons would have nixed me. Meanwhile, AnnaRay, as we all know, is going deaf, and her family's health history is riddled with cancer, not to mention divorce.

Maybe we should buy some egss while we're at it.

Anyway, now we're torn, because all of these guys seem to have some evil lurking in their profiles - Alzheimers, schizophrenia, ulcers, corrective lenses, a 600 on both verbal and math - except for one. Tiny guy. He and his whole tiny clan are the picture of good health. So why should we care if he's only 5'5'' and has fair skin? Who cares if our kid is short and translucent if he's smart and talented and healthy? And who's to say he will be any of those things? For that matter, what makes us think we would be sentencing our kid to a lifetime of serious health issues just because we used a donor whose maternal aunt had bunyons and a heart arhythmia?

It's funny too, how we seem to be assuming that Segundo will be a boy, since presumably, the potential lack of height would not be a problem for a girl child. And how awful and superficial is that?

JB: The thing about tiny guy is, he's just like me.
AR: Except I don't have to have sex with him.
Long silence.
JB: I don't think that came out the way you wanted it to sound.