Funny things come to mind when you are 39 weeks pregnant and evacuated from your office building because of a mercury spill.

Immediately, you begin calculating the numbers. If the mercury spill occurred at the clinic on the second floor of our building at 9 a.m. and traveled through the air vents at 1 cubic inch per second until we were evacuated two hours later, what class level of X-Men will my unborn child be? As the to-be-parent of an X-ceptionally gifted child, it's important that I understand the full possible range of her abilities.

Seeing as her powers will have come from exposure to mercury, perhaps she will rise to the level of Magneto, with an ability to bend and control metals. Or perhaps her powers will manifest in making a natural coat of armor, Wolverine-style claws or X-ray vision.

When we were first notified about the men in hazmat suits coming into our building, I initially pictured my daughter being born with gills and fins. This is particularly appropriate because in one of her ultrasound photos, my spawn, as she is affectionately called, bears a striking resemblance to a blobfish. We've since nicknamed my daughter Bloberta. And now that she is going to be born with gills, it makes the whole experience come together nicely. I was never one to believe in destiny before, but this mercury spill is having me reconsider.

I'm not the only person whose mind overflowed with odd thoughts this morning. (Perhaps an active imagination is a side effect of mercury poisoning?) Passing men in hazmat suits as you walk into a building brings a few very specific images to mind. For both my co-workers and me, one of the images most immediately conjured was of E.T.

Perhaps it is because "E.T." was the first movie I saw in a theater that the wrinkly little dude with a face that resembles the love child between binoculars and a foot has a special place in my heart. Or perhaps it's simply because the movie is a classic. But my affection for the extraterrestrial is strong. I love the way his finger lights up. I love the way he says "ouch." I love when he gets drunk. And I cry like a baby at the end of the movie, even after 5 million viewings. My affection is not matched by my co-workers.

Whereas I remember the magic of the dead flowers being brought back to life and making the bicycles fly, my co-workers think only of the scenes in which the men in hazmat suits take over the Southern California home, putting up plastic sheets, defibrillating the binoculared foot and scaring a poor young Drew Barrymore — not to mention scaring my poor young co-workers. And my co-workers continue to be scared by this movie 30 years later.

We were kept in our building for some time while the men in hazmat suits worked just out of sight. There was much speculation as to what could be happening in the clinic beyond our walls. Ebola? Anthrax? An actual E.T.? How long would our work be willing to risk all of our lives when clearly the virus behind a pending zombie apocalypse was next door? It didn't seem very efficient to lose the entire staff. Isn't that just poor time management?

Eventually, after two hours, we were evacuated from the building. My boss told me and my to-be-X-Men-daughter, Bloberta, to go home. The rest of the staff went into another building across the way, ordered a pizza and watched "Child's Play." Yes, "Child's Play," the movie about a demented doll, named Chucky, that comes to life and begins killing everyone. What makes Chucky come to life? I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with a mercury spill.

As for me, I'm going to order some specialty parenting books. Here's hoping Amazon carries information on raising a superhero. Or a monster. I may have to go to a pet store to get a solid book on raising a fish. And I will definitely need to pick up a book on astrology. I'm not really positive what people mean when they say that "Mercury is in retrograde," but if werewolves have taught me anything, it's that this is the time I should place my daughter in a tank and wait for the gills to come out.

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