Is the "My Turn" column in Newsweek. In the little world ruled by own imagination, I am writing "My Turn" columns and the magazine is publishing them every week. I would get to state my opinions on all kinds of fascinating or mundane things, and they would be mine, and other people would read them, and form their own opinions. Ah, the joy.Consequently, I find myself asking this week: Is this guy kidding, or what? What kind of fantasy world is he living in? Oh right, it's the one where his children are so young that they're only just now starting to slip out of his 24/7 surveillence/domination, and he can't handle it.
The summary of the column is this: this guy, a conscientious suburban dad, has two kids, ages 5 and 7, and he and his wife are encouraging healthy eating habits and they are appalled that everyone else in the world is consipiring to destroy their children's future by giving them !gasp! candy. Halloween and Easter, of course, are the biggest offenders, but he's down on lollipops from the bank teller, too. Control of his children's diet should be in his hands, dammit! He's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore!
Never before have I seen such a perfect example of a fool's paradise. If he thinks he's got any control over everything his children do, he is seriously impaired. He's in for a nasty stretch of teenage years, I'm thinking.
"Dear, now, don't eat that candy; it's bad for you; have a nice carrot instead."
"Fuck you, dad."
Events at Bizarro World High School this week have conspired to remind me that teenagers tend to be somewhat outside the range of parental control, which is not to say that one doesn't hope they will have developed their own internal controls, but you know, some do, some don't. The entire girls' softball team got sent home yesterday for wearing *ahem* inappropriate shirts that they'd gone out and had made for themselves without the coach's knowledge. Not that they weren't clever, but you can take a double entendre too far, and these were pretty much walking billboards advertising the girls' willingness to participate in sex, as long as it was "safe." Now there's an oddly mixed message for you.
Speaking of odd things kids at school have done recently, yesterday we were trying to help a kid pick a term paper topic for history; he had to choose from the general assignment "Pick anything that ever happened in history ever," which from any other teacher would have been idiotic, but this guy pulls it off. So the SCM suggests to the kid "How about the invention of the printing press?" and the kid rolls his eyes and harumphs and shrugs his shoulders and says "Right, like what did that do?"
Okay.
I did take a very nice walk today, and I took pictures but they're still in the camera, so I'll work on them and post them tomorrow. I saw a very neat thing close up that I'd only ever seen before from the road and covered with brush, so I hope the pictures came out okay. Now I am going to crunch some more.
