The ticking of the biological clock

Most of my friends don't want to have kids, at least not any time soon, if at all. Most of my friends aren't running at that elusive goal of "marriage"; they might be in relationships or wish they were in relationships, but it's about the person they're with, not the act of getting married. I personally have never wanted kids, and have no real interest in getting married (which is probably a good thing, considering my appallingly blank dating history). In fact, although I have a few married friends, I've never even been at a wedding of someone my generation (who's not a relative). And no-one that I've been close with has had a baby (at least not since high school, which is a completely different situation).

Considering that I'm nearly 30, this seems somewhat remarkable. Really, given the averages, everyone around me should be getting married and having babies (or should have done that ages ago).

However, my point here (because I really did have one) is that I have one friend who had two of her closest friends from university get married on the same weekend in September. Now she just found out that they're both pregnant. And she's devastated. More than anything she wants to have a family, and she always assumed that she would be married and have kids by now (after she got her career off the ground), but she's still single, and isn't ready to think about being a single mom.

And it's really hard to know what to say. "You'll meet someone"? What if she doesn't? And I really can't understand how she's feeling at all, because I've just never had maternal instincts. So I sit and listen to her talk about how depressed she is, and part of me wants to tell her that it's not the end of the world and that she can't judge her self-worth based on whether or not she's married with a family, but I know that's not what she needs to hear, so I stay silent. And feel helpless.

Christmas time is here by golly, disapproval would be folly

You know, I hate shopping when I know what I'm looking for, because I never find it, and I get irritated, because it seems completely obvious to me what stores should sell it, and why isn't it obvious to those stores???

This whine brought to you by the fact that I got all bundled up and braved the cold* at lunchtime today to walk to Chapters et al to find a calendar - just your basic wall calendar with pictures of Canada, only I needed a wee one that would fit into a stocking (what the guy at Book City called a "cubicle calendar"). What I was not looking for was a little calendar with 16 pictures of Britney Spears, yet that seemed to be all the universe was willing to offer me. I see calendars like this everywhere, so why not in any of the 5 places that I tried?

*I swear there was a time in my life when I was not obsessed with the weather. In fact, I'm quite certain that I lived my first 25 years in blissful ignorance of weather, and then I moved out here, where we actually *have* weather, and I became an entirely boring conversationalist. On the other hand, at least I understand all the jokes about Canadian winters now.