OK, this scares me.

It seems that the UK wants to follow the American path to Nazism. This war on an emotion is turning into a great tool for the authoritarian instinct. When will Canada follow suit? When will Canada join the USA in suspending civil rights and join the UK as one of the most surveilled countries in the world? I suspect it will be sooner than anybody thinks, cynic that I am, but this is one of those rare cases where I'd be really super-happy to be wrong.

I think it's instructive, for those in Canada who think "it can't happen here", to compare a couple of things. Specifically I want to compare police presence in Canada (and, quickly, the USA) to police presence in China. Of the two countries, China is the one referred to as a police state (and despite the tone of this message, I actually agree with that designation). Yet here's the funny thing: while living in Canada -- Ottawa, to be specific -- I had more official interaction with police officers (as opposed to social interaction or just happening to see them in passing) in an average month than I've had in China in nearly six years.

Yet China is a police state, but Canada is not. How sure are you of this? Think carefully before answering, because the price of a wrong answer is the freedom that is supposedly the cornerstone of our society.

Let me kick it up a notch. A long time ago I went to Houston for a job interview. (I was even offered a job, but idiot border regulations torpedoed my chances there. "Free Trade" has as much relation to freedom of trade as the "Democratic Korean People's Republic" has to democracy or the people.) The experience was an eye-opener in many ways. In one concentrated dose I got some of my stereotypes of Texas obliterated (Houston is an astonishingly diverse and cosmopolitan city!) and horrifyingly confirmed (the gun culture is at the level of insanity -- one of the people who interviewed me brought out a handgun to show off after I admired a "sculpture" that turned out to be a hard disk after being shot several times). I also had something nasty confirmed about the "Land of the Free". In my grand total of ... say 36 hours ... in Houston, I had more interaction with police officers or other gun-wielding officials of the state than I would get in a typical month in Ottawa or in six years of living in a police state!

And this was years before 9/11.

So if you really don't think a police state is possible in Canada (or Britain or the USA or wherever), keep this in mind: you're already half-way there. The USA has essentially suspended habeas corpus -- it's just going about it the smart "salami tactics" way. It also has a long history of taking laws intended for one purpose and applying them generally (War on Plant Products, anyone?) as time passes. The UK has more official surveillance cameras, both in terms of population and in terms of raw numbers (if memory serves), than any other nation. (The USA has fewer official cameras, of course, but for that can subpoena any camera logs they like should they feel they need it, so the effect is largely similar.)

And Canada? Well, I'm out of touch with Canada right now. I've been away for an absurd length of time and internal Canadian news doesn't often reach the international press. Given Canada's history, however, it's only a matter of time before we import Yet Another Bad Idea from the USA. The time span for that ranges from 5 to 20 years with the pattern being the dumber the idea the quicker we tend to take to it. So I really am afraid that Canada is following the USA's lead into Nazism.

Which leaves me in the awkward position of wondering if living in this police state isn't a better choice right now, especially given that I've got an expanding family to consider.

I don't know how to nap.

It sounds ridiculous, but I'm serious. I don't have the knack. People around me -- especially here in China -- can take naps. I can't.

If I plan for a one-hour nap and don't have something external (a person, an alarm clock, etc.) to wake me up, I'll wake up hours and hours later. There's no upper bound on this. I've taken a nap a 1PM and woken up at 3AM before. What's worse, though, is that when this happens, my sleep cycle is so thoroughly screwed I have insomnia for the next few days straight just as if I've been jet-lagged.

"So," you suggest, "why not use an alarm?" Well, I've tried that. If I use something (or someone) to wake me up after an hour, say, I wake up more tired and more muddle-headed than I was when I decided I needed the nap. The whole point of the nap is lost that way.

I'm really jealous of the people around me who can nap. It looks so ... restful.

It's Official. My life is disturbing.

So, yesterday was the Big Day, news-wise. By the time it all settled down, though, I was too drained to have the energy to write. So today is the day I try to settle down and organise my thoughts to transmit not only the news, but a taste of my life over the past year and a bit.

Of course all of this starts in March 18th, 2006. A lot of things -- basically the meaningful bits of my whole life -- started then. Of course Joan, being Chinese, and me, being a bit of a traditionalist at times, thought the whole point of marriage was to have children. For a variety of reasons, however, we didn't seriously start working on this until July of 2006. Well, OK. October.

Still, by the end of January we started to get a little suspicious. People around us who got married at about the time we did (or, in many cases, long after we did!) were in a family way, but our oven had no bun. February through March heightened all suspicion to the point that in April we decided enough was enough. It was time to bring in medical opinion. (And, of course, by "we" I mean "Joan". I would find it hard to consider anything less appealing to me than going to a doctor for this kind of thing. Even in Canada, where notions like "privacy" aren't just known but actively enforced I'd be antsy. Here in China? Where people discuss their most intimate personal details openly in public with a thousand others around? And where people are endlessly fascinated with even the most minute detail of foreigners' lives? "Antsy" isn't strong enough a word. Remind me to tell you of Joan's first experience with how foreigners are treated here in China sometime.)

A lot of dates are getting branded on my brain around this time of year. March 18th. April 30. May 14. May 19. April 25.

April 30 was our first trip to a hospital specialising in reproductive medicine. It was an abortive attempt (no pun intended) but it really heightened just how uncomfortable I was going to the hospital in China for problems like this. The doctor sat at a desk in an office and people just clustered around competing for her attention. When they got it, they blurted out their problems openly. And, of course, when Joan started talking, everybody was staring at me and listening intently. The result of it, however, was that the doctor suggested that another hospital would be better for this particular problem -- specifically the big one here: Tongji.

We decided to take that doctor's advice and arranged for a trip to Tongji hospital, finally getting there on May 14. There I had my panic attack as the number of people involved was truly incredible to behold. There was just no way in Hell I was going to have this potential problem discussed out in the open with literally hundreds of people in earshot. The visit was cancelled.

Well, almost cancelled.

Joan tried one last time to get actual information from the "Information Desk" and this time actually got it. There was a speciality clinic in a completely different part of the hospital than we had been sent to, you see. And when Joan went to check it out, she found it to be actually civilised. Private consultations, for example, with the top professor. Private. Closed door, even. I jumped at it like a shot.

(Well, actually I didn't. I still wasn't happy with the whole situation, but this I was willing to face at least.)

An hour later, after a strange man had fondled my genitalia and pronounced them structurally sound, I found myself in the lab building in a private room ... How can I put this delicately? Extracting seeds. Yeah. That's the way to word it. I found myself in a private room (or as private as the Chinese can imagine a private room to be -- the glass was frosted) extracting seeds. Into a small plastic cup. Surrounded by classic paintings featuring nudes (since actual pornography is technically illegal here). The cup was handed over to a technician and we waited for the results.

The results, after interpretation by the professor, were not good. Basically a low motile sperm count with a larger-than-average proportion of malformed cells. What we had suspected turned into a true nightmare. This was the low point of the week.

Slowly over the week we recovered from the shock and started investigating things which could be done. The news wasn't exactly encouraging, but neither was it hopeless. I wasn't sterile. I just had reduced fertility. I did a lot of research, as did Joan and we started to plan sort of a reverse of the Catholic "rhythm" method of birth control. Joan was a real trooper as we investigated and planned, proving once again that I had made a very good choice in marriage. (Her choice? We're still debating her taste in that....)

That Friday, however, I noticed a few things that had me curious. First, Joan was late with her period. Way late. As in, by that point, six days late. This is not the first time that's happened, though. In fact it was the third. The record was almost two weeks late, in fact. So missing the period wasn't a strong sign. There were, however, other things that weren't adding up for me. Small subtle changes in Joan that I hadn't seen before. Things that added up to me, on Friday, asking Joan what she thought and us agreeing that on that Sunday we'd go get a home pregnancy test to see what the scoop was.

I'll segue a bit here and describe a minor incident that happened Friday morning. I was shifting some clothing around from storage to use and stumbled across a small plastic bag with what looked like a small box of pills. That evening, before we started to talk about the possibility of Joan being pregnant, I asked Joan -- as a kind of afterthought while doing something else -- what they were, pulling them out and glancing over them quickly. Joan gave some vague thing about "women's stuff" and I dropped them back where they belonged. No alarm bells rang. Later, as we went to bed, I noticed that Joan had left that drawer slightly open, but again no alarms rang.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. That would be the 19th. A day before we agreed to go out and get a pregnancy kit. At 5:30AM I get woken up by a voice saying "Michael? Michael? Wake up." As I clawed my way toward consciousness, that same voice added "You're going to be a father." As I struggled to make sense of my suddenly upside-down world, I realised what had happened. That "box of pills"? Was a home pregnancy check. Joan was already suspicious a couple of days before I started to get suspicious and had picked up the kit. She wanted to test without me knowing in case it would raise false hopes. But the hopes weren't false. The kit showed "pregnant".

So consider the timing. On Monday I was told I was low fertility. That it would be a lot of work and effort (and possibly even require in vitro) to make a child. Quite possibly the lowest point in my life. Then on Saturday of the same week I'm told that I'm about to be a father. Quite possibly the highest point in my life, second only, maybe, to March 18, 2006. The timing of all of this is very disturbing.

Later calculation has us figuring that conception occurred on April 25th, incidentally. Which means that Joan was pregnant already before we visited even the first doctor, not to mention the one who fondled my genitals and pronounced me infertile.

Of course I'm still a cynical bastard, so, although I told a few people about this already, I didn't blog it until today because home pregnancy kits aren't 100% certain. But yesterday Joan and her mother went to that first hospital and had a proper lab check done and it's now official. Joan is pregnant and I'm going to be a father.