The (now) longer nails on my left hand.

I’ve been hesitant to mention it here, in large part because of the significance. I bit my fingernails for my entire life. I’m pretty sure I stopped sucking on my digits as a toddler and started to bite my nails off the next day. It was an activity as normal as breathing for as long as I can remember.

What’s puzzling to me about it is the unceremonious manner in which this habit ended. I simply stopped without thinking about it. Seven days later I had to find a nail file and shape my newly-grown orange peelers. (Luckily, I inherited an antique “Diamond Deb” nail file from my grandma. It’s actually coated in diamond dust, making it an amazing file.) My new habit is filing my nails once a week.

Maybe we don’t always need to face our bad habits head-on. Maybe it’s possible to do an end-run around them. Or maybe we should focus on our good habits and they’ll crowd out the bad ones? Maybe there is a lesson here related to identifying my goals. I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite happy to have shed this habit.

Yesterday, my unit moved to our new office on Delaware Ave. My portion of the new office is rather spacious, and I’m happy about that. I also have plenty of natural light now, which rocks. Aside from random office noise, it’s easy to focus and get things done, which is a luxury I’m very grateful for.

It’s funny how being uprooted opens your eyes to your surroundings. Tonight, after my trip to the gym, I stopped by the old office just to see what it looked like without us in it. The carpet was dingy (always was), and it smelled like rats and dirt. The hallway was always cramped in that office and I could hear every single phone conversation on my hallway via the ducts of the asymmetric heating system. There was a quant charm and character in the old office that there will never be in our new office. I will miss those “old building” oddities about the Carriage House. It will always have a soft spot in my heart. But if you stay too long in one place, it’s easy to stagnate. With the UC budget situation the way it is, I think we moved out of the old office at the right moment; a moment when fresh ideas need to be born to deal with unprecedented difficulties.

In the spirit of that transparency, I’m going to tell you about the difficult news I got a couple of weeks ago with the hope that sharing helps me move on and move forward. I’ve come to believe in the power of sharing my life with everyone. There’s nothing I’m going through that someone, somewhere isn’t also suffering. Open suffering == open healing.

After 3 tests on my blood and 2 tests on…cough…other bodily fluid, on August 6th, I learned that I am sterile. I will never father a child. That reality is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written on this blog and it weighs incredibly on my heart, my soul and my being. My body does not produce sperm. This is my new reality. Welcome to it.

My condition is called non-obstructive azoospermia, which means I have no sperm because my body does not produce it rather than because of an obstruction in my reproductive tract (sperm is produced, but can’t get out of the testes).

When I first found out, I was crushed. Had I learned this 10 years ago, before I ever thought about marriage, let alone having children, I would have had 10 years to consider the implications. As it is, Kalin and I have been trying for the last year and each of us was starting to wonder if we were “broken.” At the moment when we wanted it most, we have been told, we likely never had a chance. And that, in a nutshell, is the most humbling event of my life. I have always taken immense pride in my health and at this point, my health has–for lack of a better phrase–given me a swift kick in the balls.

After letting the news soak in a bit, my very first thought was, “There must be some miracle of modern science that will allow me to overcome sterility.” We live in a world dominated by male-centric medical cures for seemingly unimportant maladies, of course someone one must have figured out a way for sterile men to father children?

As it turns out, there is. Using a combination of testicular biopsy (yes, boys, you read that right), petri dish sperm culturing, hormone therapy (on Kalin) and in-vitro fertilization, there is a 30-40% chance we could have a baby that is related by DNA to me. It took me about an hour to consider and dismiss that approach. Why? because that is a tremendous emotional burden just to save my ego and my pride. Kalin and I would go through an elaborate process of modern medical experimentation–with only a 30-40% success rate–simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of my children not being blood-related to me. I applaud the researchers who can make this happen, but this is not how I envisioned being a father. Being a real “man” means sometimes you have to say no to your ego, and not let your pride make your life decisions for you. I can still be a father and intend to do so. My son or daughter will not share my biological DNA, but there is more to share in life than our biological threads.

At the moment, Kalin and I have a lot to consider. Thankfully, there are several options for us to have children. Faced with the prospect of not having children at all would be many times worse than facing this hurdle. I’m infinitely grateful to have a warm and supportive family around me. That makes the more difficult moments easier to bear. With this news out in the open, I’m hoping I can move beyond it.

Addendum.

This post has taken longer to write than any other post I’ve ever written. I’ve deleted and rewritten large parts of it. And I’ve stripped a considerable amount of “garnish” from the text. The truth is, I really don’t know if posting this is wise. But I have a gut feeling that getting it off my chest might help me get over it. Additionally, if someone else happens to be in my situation and comes across this, maybe it helps them feel better knowing they aren’t alone (I felt better after reading the blog post linked above).

I know this: this situation has helped me to understand that I am fundamentally a different person today than I was just a few years ago. I know this because I can’t stand to be morose about this news. Yes, it makes me sad. And I know someday, when we do have children, I’ll have to deal with the occasional upwelling of doubts that will come from knowing that I am not the biological father of my kid(s). But the reality is, this is reality. I can’t change it, so damn it, I’m going to find a way to laugh about it. Surprisingly, that didn’t take long after I heard the news.

One of my first thoughts was this: when I was 19, a disgruntled ex-girlfriend insisted I had gotten her pregnant. Now I know she was lying. Then I thought: all those years wearing a “protective” cup, wasted. Those things are NOT comfy. Last thought: I NEVER have to wear another damn condom as long as I live.

R.

Through bleary eyes and lack of sleep, I just spent a great day at CopyCamp, a barcamp-style event hosted at the Mercury News building in San Jose. There were about 40 participants, including several Mercury News reporters and editors. We had a couple of group discussions and 4 breakout sessions. The discussions centered around the Mercury News’ style, tone, and technique in its coverage of race, immigration policy, the work of non-profit organizations and activism groups, technology, and business. The discussions were passionate and eloquent. I was moved by the obvious impact the Mercury News has in all of the diverse communities of the Bay Area

I am very grateful to the Mercury News reporters and editors who participated. As representatives of the paper, they were asked pointed questions. I thought they did a great job of listening to critiques of the paper’s performance and explaining the philosophies and realities that govern their jobs. At this moment in time, it is impossible to discuss print news without getting into the topics of staffing cuts, the move from printed paper to the web, and the pressures of being in a for-profit, corporate environment. In my previous discussions of those topics, I had rarely considered the people in the newsroom, instead thinking of the Mercury News as a single entity. Sitting down with the journalists from the Merc and members of the public, it brought home to me the reality that the Mercury News is employing people. Real people who are trying to bring important information to my attention. I may disagree with the content or the tone of the Mercury News sometimes, but I have never been more certain of its importance in the Bay Area, here in Santa Cruz, and all over the world.

The beauty of CopyCamp’s open format (and BarCamp in general), it encouraged discussion among participants. I’m always inspired by what people are doing and it is often quite striking what is going on in your community that you don’t know about.

I learned a great deal about the Merc’s online setup from Randy Keith, the Merc’s online editor. I briefly talked to Goro, who helps Japanese start-ups relocate to the Bay Area and blogs about Bay Area news in Japanese so recent Japanese immigrants can read about local news in their native language. I also chatted with Jorge Zavala of TechBA, who works with start-ups in Mexico and Canada to help them relocate to the Bay Area.

I had some excellent post-camp discussions with CopyCamp’s organizers, Chris O’Brien of the Merc and (Digi)Dave Cohn, a recent Knight News Challenge grant winner (along with Margaret and Quiddities), who’s creating a non-profit for local investigative journalism called Spot.Us, Chris Amico, a freelance journalist (and UCSC alum) recently back from China and Rex Pechler (also a UCSC alum), a future Google-ite who’s working on a citizen journalism start-up. Here’s a video of Rex, Dave and I recorded by Chris Amico as we left CopyCamp:

Update 6/30, 10am PDT: Chris’ video goes along with his blog post about CopyCamp. I recommend the post and the video, so I’ve removed the video so you can see his post and the video together.

Note: I think I came off kind of harsh in my description of my “ownership of the newspaper.” In my rambling, I was attempting to address the newspaper industry in general, where I feel coverage tends toward the broad, sensational story and not get to the details and underlying “meat and potatoes” of a community involved with the story. I think that directive comes indirectly (via staffing cuts and profit-motive) from the higher levels of the media industry as a whole and not from a conscious effort on the part of the newsroom staff. So, you could say I pretty much blew it on that question.

I want to thank Chris O’Brien and Dave Cohn for organizing CopyCamp, the Mercury News for hosting and everyone who came on a Saturday to participate in the discussion. I had a great time and I will carry many of the ideas and concerns I heard today with me into the discussions I have here in Santa Cruz about newspapers and citizen journalism.

Update 6/30, 10:03am PDT: Dave Cohn has written about Saturday’s CopyCamp.

If you’d to participate in the ongoing discussion we started today at CopyCamp, go to MajorityofNone.com.