So… I got a bit of exciting news while we were down at Disney World.  My publisher is going ahead with the creation of an audiobook version of Life from Scratch.  It will be on sale this winter — around December or January.  So if you’ve ever wanted to sit in a car or Metro on your way to work and listen to Rachel and Gael having sex… this is your chance.  And no, I won’t be the one reading it.  They have a professional audiobooker (what is someone called who reads for audiobooks?) working on it.

I am pretty damn excited.  And it’s all the more reason to write this Roundup quickly and get back to finishing up the sequel.

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We’re up to 86 on the Creme de la Creme list as of writing this, and again, the posts are amazing this year.  I know I say that every year, but if every blog is like a menu, you’re going to find dishes you love and dishes that fall flat and dishes that simply aren’t to your liking.  But the Creme de la Creme is like a food fair, where every restaurant has put forth their best dish, so it’s freakin’ delicious.  It’s good writing, emotional moments, and deep ideas all boiled down into a single list where you know that every post is going to grab you somewhat, even if it’s just to marvel at the commonality of our thoughts.

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Speaking of the Creme de la Creme list, here’s your first chance to be moved into a great slot on the list.  I will be choosing one participant from the November IComLeavWe list to be moved into the 6th slot on the list (so you’re close to the top and get more eyes on your post).  I will be using the random number generator when the list closes for the month on the 21st, so there’s nothing more to do on your end except…  IComLeavWe.  It’s a win-win: commit to commenting daily on other people’s blogs for a week (and spread some love around) and possibly win a great spot on the Creme de la Creme list.

The winner will either be moved into that position if they’ve already submitted their post, or that slot will be held for them until they’re ready to choose what they want to submit.

The November IComLeavWe list opens this weekend on Saturday.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Fragmented Observation” (My Lady of the Lantern)
• “If Blogging Were Tweeting” (What the Blog?)
• “I Haven’t Done Anything to Your Bum Bullets” (Just Us and the Cat)
• “Revelation” (Built-In Birth Control)
• “Calling All Infertiles…” (The 2 Week Wait)
• “With All the Love in the World” (Mommy Wants Vodka)
• “When Blogger Friendships Become Real-Life Friends” (Bodega Bliss)
• “Pity Party” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Rashoman: The Ill-Fated Blogger Sleepover” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “The Fat Friend” (BigP and Me)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Too Many Fish to Fry has a post about a moment when she was the mother she needed to be, swatting away the wasps, and it’s a peek into all the times you had no idea your parents were creating a safe space for you without your knowledge.  I love this part: “Because parenting is so subtle and mysterious and confrontational and mind-numbing. Clear-cut victories are rare. And fleeting. I think all parents chase various monsters with rubber swords. The vast majority of us are incredibly fortunate that our monsters are small, relatively (hopefully) easy to slay.”  Isn’t that gorgeous?

Gemini Girl’s post about names got me thinking.  She talks about a study that looks at how our names affect our employment status, and goes on to admit to why she gave her girls slightly unusual names — names that weren’t as unusual as Apple but certainly less common than Jennifer.  She cringes at the end: “I just hope that they grow up and tell me that they do love their names and that they were happy I named them something that was a bit unconventional.  And if they don’t – well…there’s always the Social Security Office.”  Go tell her if you like your name.

Dead Cow Girl has a post about how IVF has changed her body.  It is possibly the only post you will read today that mentions balls in a vice numerous times and she means balls in an actual vice.  I love reading this point-of-view, of how infertility (and treatments) affects her sexual work.  Okay, and I loved this: “While you see the wrinkles and the dimples (the fat kind, not the sexy butt cheek ones) and the pimples and few extra pounds, most men don’t see past the naughty little knickers. You open the door wearing something naughty and all they know is that you have Intentions and that they are lucky enough to be the recipient of those Intentions. They see the perfection that is you.”  It’s hard to feel sexy during treatments; it’s good to take advice from someone who is professionally sexy.

I love Write Mind Open Heart’s follow up to her two posts about discussing adoption with her son.  And while she points out that she isn’t superhuman, I would tend to disagree.  It’s seven points of excellent advice to keep in mind about adoption discussions.

Lastly, the Stork Drop Zone has a post about surrogacy; about becoming a parent and still being infertile, and how she doesn’t know her place on the spectrum yet.  She’s not pregnant, but she’s having a baby.  But she doesn’t necessarily fit in with people still in the trenches since she’s on her way out.  She writes, “I’m not at all embarrassed that we’ve had to go an untraditional route to have our baby, but it can be very difficult emotionally. It’s hard to go register for baby gear when you’re the only mom-to-be there without a baby bump. things like that kind of make me feel like an imposter at times.”  It’s a lovely post about the offshoots of surrogacy.

The roundup to the Roundup: My book (Life from Scratch) is coming out in an audiobook version this winter.  The Creme de la Creme is trucking along (please keep helping to spread the word).  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 21st and October 28th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Thank you for indulging me in my Disney stories.  I am one of those people who love to talk Disney.  We have boiled down our travels there to a science, mostly thanks to my sister who passes along all of her tips as well.  For instance, this is the order of things when you enter the Magic Kingdom (coming, of course, at the start of the day so you can see the opening ceremony): Grab a Peter Pan Fast Pass (currently, it will also spit out a secret Philharmagic Fast Pass at the same time… shhh).  Go on Dumbo first (long lines combined with the fact that the way it snakes makes it difficult for anyone to join you in line later).  Go on It’s a Small World second.  Grab a Fast Pass to Winnie the Pooh before you use your Peter Pan Fast Pass.  Go on Peter Pan.  Go see Philharmagic with your Fast Pass.  Go on Snow White as you walk over to Winnie the Pooh.  Ride the Tea Cups if you still have a moment before Winnie the Pooh.  Bam — you’ve just done 7 rides in about an hour with minimal waiting.

After that, go to Tomorrowland.  Haunted Mansion gets less busy when everyone sits down for the parade.  Taking the non-graveyard right-side route will shave a lot of time off your wait.  When you’re in line for Pirates of the Caribbean and the line divides, take the right side.  It’s slightly shorter (and you’ll get to see the skeletons playing chess!).  If you have a Triple AAA card, you can get special seating for Wishes that is totally worth it (it’s right at the corner of Main Street and the circle, outside the ice cream shop and down a small ramp).

And we can do this for every park (though I’m best at Magic Kingdom and Epcot).  We have it mapped out — when and where to meet characters, the order of rides, where to buy food — so that we have minimal waits and can shove in as many rides as possible.  We’ve done on-property vs. off-property hotel comparisons.  Car vs. no-car comparisons.  I love talking about Disney, rubbing my cheek against other people’s travel itineraries, plotting out when our next return trip will be (poor Josh).

Maybe when I grow up, I will be a Disney vacation planner for other people.

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More fables from the land of Disney in an attempt to make my vacation stories more palatable…

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The ChickieNob didn’t want to see Turtle Talk at Epcot and insisted that it was “too scary” which sounded like bullshit to me since her favourite ride is the Haunted Mansion.  We dragged her in there anyway, and she refused to sit on the carpeted area with the other kids, choosing instead to sit in our laps while her brother took a spot in the front.  Crush came out and did his routine, and when it came time to call on kids with questions, the Wolvog was chosen.

The ChickieNob was considerate enough to begin wailing after I had finished filming her brother talking to Crush (you can hear the ramp up to her grief at the end of the video).  This wailing reached a climax accompanied by a mucousy nose and gaspy breathing once the lights came on.  The ride operator stopped by to see what the hell could upset a child this much considering her ride was a flat screen that showed a talking cartoon reptile.

We were finally able to drag the story out of the ChickieNob.  Apparently, she had been carrying around this deep well of regret since the last trip when we went to see Turtle Talk. Crush had called on her, and she choked up, too scared to ask her question.  He went on to the next child and the ChickieNob had never recovered from it, though she hadn’t shared that fact with us until now.

The ride operator told her that there was a simple solution.  She would go to his tank and talk to Crush and tell him to call on her during this next show.  The ChickieNob explained that she was too scared to sit on the carpet apart from us, so the ride operator told her that a special exception could be made and I could sit with the kids on the floor so that the ChickieNob could release this regret.

Seriously, where else do people give a shit like this about your child?

So we sat down on the floor and watched Turtle Talk again.  When it came time for questions, the ChickieNob meekly raised her hand and Crush called on her.  She asked him if a red-eared slider turtle would make a good pet.  Crush joked around with her for two minutes about turtles as pets and order was restored to the ChickieNob’s world.  She has decided that she does like Finding Nemo once again, and we have been blessed to hear the term “totally sweet” on average twenty times a day since Epcot.

People are often willing to give you what you need if you ask, and no one should live with regrets that are fixable.

[flashvideo file=https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Turtle-Talk.mp4 /]

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We were waiting in line to meet Snow White when a woman walked by with a blue dragon puppet on her shoulder.  It had a small tube leading off of it that allowed her to twist a button and make the dragon’s head move.  The ChickieNob gasped sharply and grabbed my arm: “that woman is holding a real dragon.”

The woman heard and bent down, encouraging the ChickieNob to stroke its blue fur.  She promised that it wasn’t from one of the fire-breathing species, and told her that her friend had found the dragon in the forest without any parents and now was taking care of him.  When the Wolvog returned from his Kimpossible mission (you know, just saving some stolen art work in Norway), he too stroked the dragon and asked the woman a million questions about dragoncare, all the while, the dragon’s head tilting and moving.  The woman explained that the tube was just a leash to keep the dragon from flying away.

And while meeting the real Snow White was exciting and warranted about five minutes of marveling, the ChickieNob and Wolvog couldn’t stop looking at each other at random moments throughout the day and one of them saying, “I can’t believe we met a real dragon.  We are so brave because we touched a real dragon.”

The ChickieNob has given up on wanting a clam or a red-eared slider turtle (Wait! What? We just went through that Crush trauma so she could ask that question!) and now wants to spend all of her time in the woods looking for orphaned dragons.

Let your imagination believe what it wants to believe, and you can discover amazing things.

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The Wolvog’s favourite ride at Epcot has always been Spaceship Earth.  It is his fantasy ride — slow-moving, with relaxing Judy Dench’s voice telling you about the history of inventions.  Plus it has a touchscreen computer in every car.  Needless to say, we went on it probably 10 times while we were there.

He must have been there the first time we went to Disney (because I Googled it on BoingBoing that night), but this trip came right after Steve Jobs’ death, and the Wolvog’s entire seven-year-old body turned towards the animatronic Steve Jobs as we passed through his garage and he reached out his arms as if he was willing the robot to pick him up.

Each time we went on the ride, he released his goodbye a little more.  The first few times, he became silent and reverent as we passed through the garage.  By the final few Spaceship Earth runs, he was calling out his name and telling robot Steve how he too would have a computer company one day.  We couldn’t have created a better goodbye for him, and it came when we weren’t even looking for it.

There is no wrong way to mourn; grab whatever you need to get through a loss.

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The ChickieNob also had some fears about the characters not remembering her since her last visit.  I think it was partially a test of her imagination — were they just people in costumes or were they the real deal, since the real deal should remember someone as unforgettable as the ChickieNob — and it was partially a fear of being forgotten.

She wasn’t just nervous for the ones she had met before; she equally loved and feared the new people she met, such as Alice from Alice in Wonderland who tried to get her to speak by asking her how she was in fourteen different languages. (When I asked the ChickieNob why she didn’t say anything, she looked at me blankly and said, “she never said it in Hebrew.  If she had spoken to me in Hebrew, I would have answered her.”  Seriously, child, but she said it in ENGLISH.)

[flashvideo file=https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Alice-in-Wonderland.mp4 /]

But it’s the ones who we had met before, let’s say, Pluto, were treated to a long line of questioning testing their memory in which they enthusiastically nodded through the whole thing and the ChickieNob looked at them suspiciously, as if their eager agreement of remembering meant they were guilty of forgetting.

She finally relaxed once Snow White informed her that she still remembered me from when I was two, but just hadn’t recognized me since now I was all grown-up.  We had a chat about magical aging — how magical beings don’t age in the same way as humans, therefore, they don’t always recognize us instantly since our faces look so different to them, whereas they look the same to us.

The ChickieNob then answered that she had noticed that many of the characters’ faces HAD changed since our last trip, especially the princesses who looked decidedly different from the photos at home.  Gulp.  Magical aging, dear.  It affects them too.

And that was enough to appease her.

[flashvideo file=https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Snow-White.mp4 /]

Though it didn’t stop her from when I told Mickey Mouse that we loved him and he touched his chest, making his finger trace the shape of a heart in the air, and then pointed to us, to asking, “how do we know that Mickey really really loves us and that he doesn’t just say that to every child?”

No matter our age, we all have a need to be remembered, acknowledged, and cared about.

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It was a hard goodbye.  I did most of my crying in the hotel room the last few nights after the twins went to sleep and maybe lost a few tears at discreet times while waiting in line at the parks (though the crying that came at Dumbo was just because the ChickieNob went on a five minute lecture about how everyone else she knows has a younger sibling and why won’t I just have one more baby and she would help me take care of her sibling unless it cut into her doll time.  And all the while, those stork tags on the ride kept swinging back and forth in the breeze, reminding me of babies babies babies babies babies.)

But the twins did the hard cry as we walked through Cinderella’s castle on our way out of the park for the final time.  The ChickieNob kept pausing to turn around to peek at the castle as we walked towards Main Street, her grief so deep as she screamed out how much she hated school and leaving Disney and did she mention that never ever wanted to go on holiday anywhere else?

And I told her that it was time to let go of the little kid trips and start traveling around the world.  That it was time for her to be dipped into different cultures, sample the food, learn the language.  That we would be back at Disney again, but it was time to travel overseas and that was a sign of how grown-up she was.

Which made her wail, “I do not want to grow up!”

At that moment, she turned around, and lights were twinkling against Cinderella’s castle.  We had always told her those lights were fairies, so I whispered that the Princesses had heard her cry and sent out the fairies to tell her l’hitraot (see you again) one last time.  I personally have always felt much more settled with the Hebrew l’hitraot than the English goodbye.  And the ChickieNob stopped crying and agreed.  “L’hitraot,” she called out (insistent that all the Princesses know Hebrew even if Alice doesn’t).

At that moment, the twinkling lights stopped, and she was able to turn from the castle without crying and walk through the gates.

Sometimes, when you least expect it and without truly wanting things to be over, the end you need arrives.

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Believe it or not, this isn’t the end of the Disney thoughts, videos, and pictures.  I promise I will stop torturing you soon, but I have a few more thoughts to unload.

We recently went to Disney World for 9 days.  9 blissful days where our hardest decisions were whether to wait in a 25 minute line for Pirates of the Caribbean or come back later, or how many times in a row to ride Kali River Rapids.  We barely slept, we ate like crap, and we didn’t do one equation from the math packets we brought along in their backpacks.

Josh was a little hesitant to go back to Disney so soon after the first trip, but I feel like we’re really rounding on the end of their suspension of disbelief.  I know I said that last post, but this time I really really mean it (if you say “really” twice, it means you’re super serious).

It is addictive to see someone fully engaged with their imagination — believing in all possibilities.  That is why we fork over thousands of dollars to Disney, isn’t it?  Because it becomes like a drug watching our children (and frankly, ourselves) believe in fairies and wishes coming true and the idea that we too will visit the moon one day.

I have been in a deep funk since returning.  Funk actually doesn’t really cover it.  I am down.  I feel like I’m going through withdrawal.  I don’t feel motivated to do anything.  I spend most of my time looking at our photos and watching the movies we made.  I am irritable.  I had infinite wells of patience while at the park, but I’m snapping at everyone at home.  I don’t want to talk to anyone.

It is entirely connected to that space because I don’t feel this way when I return from other trips.  I come home from other travels feeling happy that I went but also happy to be back.  And when I return from Disney, I go through many weeks of being down.  I imagine it is similar to how Harry Potter felt when he left Hogwarts for the summer and had to return to the Dursleys, where life was dull in comparison.  It is hard to know that a magical place exists and you’re no longer there.

Because yes, I have bought into Disney hook, line, and sinker.

If nothing else because it’s a place where people believe in things once again.  You can’t help but get caught up in the message that dreams come true; have it sink into your skin.  Every cynical cell in my body disappeared while we were there, and I was overcome with emotion staring at that big white castle and what it represents.  I hugged each character, burying my face in Mickey’s shoulder.  For 9 straight days, I really believed in magic.  And making wishes.  And drank in every last drop of hope.

So you can see why it’s hard to be home.

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I collected a few stories from our trip in Aesop fable fashion, things we learned along the way.  Which seemed like a more palatable way to shove our family stories and pictures down your throat.  I completely understand if you need to stop reading now, but you will miss out on hearing the Wolvog mourn Steve Jobs through an animatronic Steve Jobs or the ChickieNob’s anxiety about the depth of Mickey’s love.  Just sayin’.

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The Wolvog is not the most adventurous child.  We refer to ourselves as the Milds (whereas Josh and the ChickieNob are the Wilds, loving roller coasters, loud noises, and speed).  The last time we went to Disney World, there were more rides he wouldn’t go on than ones that he would.  We spent a lot of time on the People Mover in Tomorrowland while Josh took the ChickieNob on everything else.  On one hand, the boy likes the People Mover and I think he should follow his bliss (I’d also put the People Mover as one of my top ten rides).  On the other hand, it is very frustrating to see him limit himself as well as impede the family from doing things together.

This trip, our friend gave us the brilliant idea to get him sound-blocking headphones since 90% of his fears are tied to sound.  My parents found him a child-size headset, and he wore it around the park.  It gave him the courage to try rides that he had inexplicably bypassed two years earlier.  He ended up loving Snow White, Peter Pan, and the tea cups.  Soarin’ became his new favourite ride.  He got to enjoy the fireworks and even watched every 3-D movie, which are usually his worst fear.

Of course, it also got him noticed.  People stared when he slipped them on (it also didn’t help when he rode Kali River Rapids wearing goggles).  They commented on them, as if headphones were the equivalent of entwining snakes through your hair.  We told him to just ignore the stares; that they didn’t get it.  So he did just that, putting them on whenever he felt he needed them and leaving them in the bag whenever he could.

Sometimes all you need is a security headset to get you over your fears.

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At the same time, I needed to practice what I preached.  I was so busy trying to convince the Wolvog to try things that I missed the fact that I was also limiting myself at the parks.  I knew I didn’t have it in me to try things such as Space Mountain or Expedition Everest.  But milder rides such as Mission Space and Soarin’ were probably totally do-able, though I was too scared to try them.

I told Josh that I needed to get over my fears.  I didn’t sleep the night before we went to Epcot for the first time.  I was literally physically ill as we went to the park, completely overwhelmed with the idea of getting on these rides and equally overwhelmed with how I’d feel about myself if I didn’t try them.

The first one we went on was Mission Space, and yes, I spoke to about twelve employees before we went on the ride (the green, milder version).  I was panicking each time they mentioned that we could still back out of the mission, though the ride operator promised me that it was referring to the orange, wilder version.  That the green version was completely tame and if I got scared, I could close my eyes and be essentially transported off the ride.

WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE A COMPLETE LIE.

The ride was awful.  The twins and I screamed through the whole thing; and we all had our eyes closed through the majority of it.  I hated the sensation of being tilted back and forth inside the simulator.  When I got off, I felt ill from being so tense for four minutes.  And now I really didn’t want to try Soarin’ because it also was a movement simulator.  But the rest of the family kept trying to convince me to stick to the plan and try it.

And, oh my G-d, it was the most amazing experience.

I’ll admit that I squinted my eyes a lot that first time riding it, but we ended up going on it four more times.  It turned into our favourite ride, and I cried the last time we went on knowing it would be years before I got to ride it again.  I can’t believe I almost missed out on it.

Don’t let your fears limit you or you could miss out on an amazing experience.

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On our last night, nearing on 11 pm, the ChickieNob realized that she hadn’t met Tinkerbell yet.  We were about to get on our final ride; we were exhausted, going on our 14th hour in the park (on our 7th day there!) but we asked the ride operator if she thought Tinkerbell might still be hanging out in Adventureland.  She was doubtful, but we grabbed the twins’ hands and ran from “It’s a Small World” all the way to Adventureland in the dark.  When we got there, the pale blue doors to Pixie Hollow were locked.

The ChickieNob, of course, cried.  We stood there for a bit, trying to gather up the energy for the return trip to our final ride.  Behind us, an employee was using the tip of his mop and a bucket of cleaning solution to draw the most amazing free-hand Mickey and Donald on the pavement.  It wasn’t a planned event; just a man paused from his cleaning duties, entertaining us with his talent.  We watched him step around the concrete, his broom a paint brush, bringing Mickey to life until the water evaporated.

Sometimes if you’re only focused on the magic you’re seeking, you miss all the other magic happening around you.

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Okay, this is getting awfully long, so more Aesop-like fables from Disney World coming in a second post.  Please indulge me.  I took 400 photographs, and I have to put these pictures and stories somewhere.

I spent the morning at a pumpkin patch, traveling over the mud-soaked roads on a tractor bed with straw bale seats.  It felt like the quintessential American experience.

I am going to be Bellatrix LeStrange for Halloween.  The twins are going as Harry Potter and Hermione Granger, so my costume doesn’t quite fit with the theme (um… why would Bellatrix be taking the Chosen One trick-or-treating?).  I wanted to be Professor McGonagall, but what was I to do with my mass of brown curls?  The kids are also still on Book Two, so they only know Bellatrix LeStrange as Draco’s aunt, therefore, I have to bite my tongue and not scream out her most famous line lest I ruin Book Three.

What are you going to be for Halloween?  And if you’re not dressing up this year, what was your best costume ever?

* Warning: this post contains a spoiler for Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 book, Never Let Me Go.  I’m not sure what the shelf-life is on spoilers.  I mean, if you haven’t read the book in six years, isn’t it your own damn fault if it’s ruined slightly for you?

Amit Gupta of Photojojo was diagnosed recently with Leukemia.  People immediately started using social media in order to find him a bone marrow match, the difficulty being that bone marrow needs a very close match (unlike donating blood), the best bet coming from either a family member or someone within your community.  Because Gupta is of South Asian descent, a community that has a smaller representation on the National Bone Marrow Registry, it is even more important to get additional people to agree to be swabbed and checked for a match.

In order to entice people to donate, Seth Godin (the Internet guru) offered to give $10,000 to anyone who became a match and donated to Gupta.  Michael Galpert matched that, raising the amount to $20,000.  But financial compensation for organs or tissue is illegal under the National Organ Transplant Act.

With $20,000 at stake, the cause did indeed take on new urgency. Instead of just passing on news that Gupta needed help, people started bragging #IswabbedforAmit on Twitter. The money also made for a sexier news story. The website TechCrunch drove new waves of interest with an article headlined, “#IswabbedforAmit Offers Up 20K To Find A Bone Marrow Donor For Startup Founder Amit Gupta.”

There was only one problem. The offer was illegal.

Under the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, better known as NOTA, it’s a federal crime to give or receive “valuable consideration” for any transplantable organ or tissue, specifically including bone marrow. (Expenses incurred in making a donation, including not only medical costs but also travel and lost wages, are exempt.)

On one hand, you can see why the law was passed: everyone should be on equal footing with receiving tissues and organs.  But you can’t fault Godin’s reasoning because he’s absolutely correct — money moves people:

So he [Seth Godin] wrote a post on his own blog offering to pay $10,000 to anyone who became a match for Gupta and made the stem-cell donation, or to give the money to that person’s favorite charity. The offer, he says, was “a chance to say to my readers, ‘Hey, I care about this. A lot. Money where my mouth is.’”

He picked $10,000 because, he says, it’s “enough money to matter to both the giver and the recipient, without being enough money to sue over, cheat over or corrupt.”

People are working to overturn this law as it applies to bone marrow donation, placing it in the same category as blood or gametes — both of which can be compensated.  And people need to remember that other people will be helped by this along with Gupta.  As more people register to be a bone marrow donor, other people who are searching for a match will have a larger pool from which to find a bone marrow donor.

People get squeamish when we think about donation.  I have to admit that I am guilty of delaying some necessary oral surgery for a year because I couldn’t decide how I felt about using donor tissue (in the end, I opted for donor tissue which has a faster recovery period, and yes, I still crave clementines even though I never ate them prior to the surgery — isn’t that bizarre?).  As much as I would use donor eggs myself, it’s not as easy or quick an answer as to whether I’d be someone else’s egg donor.

There was something beautiful in its awfulness within the situation of Never Let Me Go, where people were being raised to be donors.  The book is about specially-produced children being given this amazing life filled with beauty and art, with the intention of harvesting all their organs in young adulthood.  They are mindful of their purpose, and while a few are scared, most understand it is their lot in life.  While it’s obviously barbaric to create people solely to harvest their organs, what gave me pause was more the idea of knowing when and how you would die, and making people live with that knowledge their entire life.  It wasn’t the organ donation itself.  I couldn’t stop tossing around in my mind what was worse: having a beyond fantastic life up until young adulthood and then dying, or having a terrible life full of struggle all the way through old age but getting to live a long life.  Is it quality or quantity?

And how do we encourage people to become donors if we’re not going to create a Never Let Me Go situation?  Because we need organ donors and tissue donors.  We need blood donors, and this community is very familiar with our need for gamete donors.  Pure altruism doesn’t work; we’ve already seen that we can’t get people motivated to donate just by asking them to donate.

I am pro-financial incentives when it comes to all bodily donation — though I think that the financial compensation should come from specially created philanthropies that fund-raise and provide the compensation rather than individuals in need (or their friends).  Think of these organizations in the same way we look at political organizations that are established to get a person into office.  Instead, these organizations would be established to get people to donate — they would gather the money to compensate donors, raise awareness, hold registry drives.

Donations are, by their very definition, gifts without compensation. I fully agree with anyone who argues that donors who receive compensation are not donors by definition; though I also argue that donor is an antiquated word that no longer holds meaning in our society. Political donors give money with gain both tangible and intangible in mind from access to positions within an administration to simply having your desired party in place when policy is being decided. Philanthropic donors gets a building named after them after they cough up a ten million dollar check. It’s not that there aren’t people out there doing something for nothing, but most people want recognition of their gift, if not financial compensation.

If it helps, we can rename bodily donors “organ/tissue/blood product/gamete suppliers” instead.

The United Kingdom, by the way, recently tripled the amount that egg donors could receive in order to provide incentive for women to donate.  The money is not payment but instead is compensation for the risk and time lost by donating.  Is it all in the way we phrase things?  Can we find things palatable if we just tweak the language?

What about the yuckiness of feeling as if life is being bought or sold? Frankly, there is plenty of yuckiness in the world that we’ll need to discuss in addition to this topic such as the fact that our medical system is a for-profit system, benefiting off the health woes of society. That our pharmaceutical companies do not make drugs out of the goodness of their hearts, but to turn a profit. Our medical system in and of itself is not noble when you start looking at places where people profit off of other people’s misery.

What about the fear that people will be exploited?  That the poor will be driven to donate in order to make money while the rich will never need to part with any of their bodily fluids or organs. I think it demeans the intelligence of people and our ability to make choices. If I need money, there are a multitude of ways I can make money beyond going through rigorous testing, injections, and painful surgical procedures. Bodily donation is certainly not a quick buck. I think that if we looked at who has been moved to sign up to be a bone marrow donor due to Godin’s (and others) financial incentive, we wouldn’t be looking at the most impoverished slice of America.  We’d be seeing, in fact, a lot of people who have access to computers and are invested in the Internet.

Organ donation as well as the bone marrow registry and blood banks suffer greatly from the lack of financial compensation, and I think with the exception of an altruistic few, these programs only exist as well as they do because people are willing to donate when a life is at stake. It may be driven by fear of their own loss or a sense of guilt knowing that they had the ability to save someone.  Is it more ethical to have our donation system driven by fear and desperation than financial incentives?

Gupta’s friends have got around the law by offering now a $30,000 reward simply for a match.  The person doesn’t need to actually go through with the donation — they will receive the money just by being a match.  This money will get hundreds or thousands (or possibly tens of thousands) of extra people to agree to be bone marrow donors.  Other people will be helped because of Gupta’s plight too, finding their own match in this now larger pool of people.  Which begs the question: is this really ethically wrong?  And what is ethically wrong about financial incentives when it comes to donating body parts (as long as the playing field does not become skewed towards the rich having more access to donors, which doesn’t happen in this case).

Would you be more willing to donate an organ, tissue, blood product, or gametes if there was a financial incentive?  Would you be less likely to do so if you knew that you’d be financially compensated simply for giving up non-essential organs, tissue, blood or gametes?