Soothsayer

You've all heard of reading tea leaves, gazing into crystal balls, and calculating astronomical alignments to tell the future. We'll ignore the fact that the only reason you know these things is Harry Potter. What you probably didn't know is that the most popular movement in fortune telling is the pee-stick reading.

It's an entire culture. These thousands of women buy a variety of pee-reading supplies, usually in the form of plastic sticks with absorbent tips, and occasionally in bulk as flexible absorbent sticks. With the use of these sticks in combination with a woman's own urine, many are able to foretell the coming of a child.

The world tends to look at this underground culture as a group of hormonal women over-analyzing one of the simplest medical test you can use in your home. They wouldn't be wrong. But within the culture, there are strong controversies about the most sensitive brands, the correct time in the month to test, or the difference between first morning urine and second morning urine. There are millions of web entries where women share their results, post pictures of pee sticks, and obsess over barely visible/totally invisible lines.

It's often more of an obsession than a hobby. Within the art of pee stick reading, there are the sub-arts of nipple tenderness assessment, real and imagined nausea and other GI symptoms, and the ephemeral study of psychological alteration.

I've become more than a novice in the art of pee stick soothsaying. I use the good equipment, am a staunch FMUer, and can't pass up a good opportunity to POAS. This obsession almost equals my involvement with WOW and related terminology. Thus I derive a complex question: POAS 10dpo or DPS naxx25 with DH?