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My friends have crazy fantasies. I usually get them tipsy and make them tell me what they are. The customary one-drink fantasies include lucky Powerball tickets, something with multiple carats, or clandestine browsing on babeland.com. The wilder three-drink ones involve Ponzi schemes, assuming a false identity and the slashing of tires. My own no-drink-needed fantasy involves a throne. A throne of aubergine velvet and goose down with a megaphone. My fantasy is to be The Decider of Procreation.

It’s fairly obvious to me, but maybe you’ve never considered this before. We make people jump through a couple of hoops to drive cars and own automatic weapons. We make them wait till they are 18 to buy poisonous carcinogens and 21 for fine wines. And yet, we don’t even teach them in school how not to have babies. That’s why I must put my foot down and suggest some guidelines.

Luckily, I sit at a desk most of every day, insulated from lots of undesirables. But when I’m out and about, I can’t help but run into them. I see them on the weekend and at happy hours—they gallivant around town with over-gelled hair and orangey tan streaks. They use apostrophes whenever an S looks lonely and think “sort of” is one word (hell, they think it is a word). They leave their turn signals on for miles and don’t pick up their dog’s shit. They wear two-shouldered bras with one-shouldered tops. They shout things like, “Hey baby, lookin’ good!” from their mother’s sedan. (Or they shout “You lie!” at the Commander-in-Chief.) They use the number 4 as a substitute for “for” in a text message before they are anywhere near the 160-character limit—are your thumbs that tired? Two more keystrokes, is that a lot to ask?

These people, I’d like to make them extinct. Extinct like pterodactyls and unicorns. Bye-bye Texas Tuxedo, bye-bye platform foam flip-flops. Au revoir Roman Polanski, see ya later Chris Brown.

As The Decider, I would sit on my throne and eat Cadbury caramel chocolates and paint my nails. People would make daily appointments for my Decisions and I would be late, like always. I would be busy doing something incredibly important like Perfecting My Topcoat or Having Another Glass Of Champagne. When
they came in, I would give them a test. The test would have questions like, “When did women get the vote?” and “Copyedit this sentence: Jane want’s to know if you hanged up her clothe’s.” I would Google them and see if they’d ever made a misogynistic comment on a Facebook group wall. They would take a short driving assessment during which my mom would sit in the passenger seat and if she rolled her eyes even once at the testee, they would fail the test. If she slapped the person and pulled the keys out of the ignition, they would be banished from the world right then and there.

I would have a gong for when I formally announced whether they had been allowed through my expedited Darwinian process. GONG. “No, do not go off the Ortho, do not pass Go.” GONG. “Fine. One or two at the max.” GONG. “Go for it and give some leftovers to the dude with the mullet who had the 1:30 appointment.”

Our world would quickly be filled with reasonably fashionable, feminist-leaning offspring who could out-spell today’s high school seniors and would also get the hell out of my way on the interstate. Pure bliss! The best of all worlds! Soon we would all live in perfect harmony and spontaneously form kicklines on the sidewalk like in musicals because we wouldn’t have to spend mornings giving the stink-eye to protestors at Planned Parenthood. We’d eat hummus and donuts and sushi and Pixy Stix because who the hell cares what size jeans we’d wear (as long as they weren’t acid washed). We would text each other in full words: “Would you like to come out for dinner before the show?” There would be no “u” or “b4” or even “sho” in existence!

My friendly guidelines would mean that world peace was not just an overused beauty pageant plea and that the Federline genes would pass on to no one else. I would win the Nobel Prize and have my picture on a Wheaties box. What a fantastical, heavenly world it would be with me as The Decider of Procreation.

So from now on, if you’re wondering why I don’t coo at your baby or why I’m holding its head at that frighteningly awkward angle, it’s because I’m wondering if the pain of childbirth was worth it, knowing that your kid might grow up to wear an “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt.

In the meantime, I’m ordering that vibrator for my friend and planning a tire-slashing getaway for another. I hope they’re finding the perfect shade of aubergine velvet for my throne.

Margaret Pilarski is an assistant editor at skirt!. Don’t worry, some of her best friends will still text in code after reading this.