It's pretty insulting to tell someone they were an accident—a pullout method gone wrong; a drunken hook-up followed by a failure to procure Plan B. But can we acknowledge a statistic I came across? Forty percent of childbirths in America were the result of accidents. Forty percent! Look it up. That's true. That's a huge number of us who simply weren't ever intended to exist.

In fact, dear reader, if we consider our respective conceptions, there's a pretty good chance—a 64% chance—that among two people picked at random, at least one was an utter mistake, an altogether unwanted human being.

But given what my parents tell me about their lengthy, deliberate family planning process, I feel confident that the accident here...

...was you.