So I'm All

Ok so like I was going into one of my classes today and it was like a totally important day and everything because it was the deadline for this totally important paper that I'd assigned and stuff? And I'd full-on totally explained how I don't EVEN accept late work because I'm like hardcore about everything? And most students can hang with it even if they look at me like Whatever when I explain the class rules, but so this morning when I get to my first class of the day this one girl who's totally a student in my class is waiting for me outside our room and like you KNOW something's up because she's looking like she's about to throw down with a freaking like mental episode or whatever because something is totally obviously up with her? And so I don't EVEN want to like say Hi to her because I can tell she's like on the verge of some sort of like emotional episode and crap and Dude I'm already like thinking to myself how like I don't even want to deal, right?

And so I get to the door of the class and she sees me and I see her, and like she's all Um, like, Hey Professor? and I'm all Hey, and she just stands there for a second and like I think maybe everything's fully copacetic right? Then I remember that the only reason a student would like call me Professor is if they royally screwed themselves one way or another and need to, like, let the ass kissing commence, and like that's like my clue?

So then she's all Like, do you think I can talk to you privately before class starts, and my brain is totally like Aw Fuck Man Not Even, and so I say What's the what Kylie, and then, ok and THEN, she's all:

Um like I know that before in class you said you totally don't accept late papers and everything? And also how you like don't accept excuses except for Loss of Limb or whatever? And like I TOTALLY respect that totally, and so I'm not going to try and make up some lame excuse because I fully agree with you about that sort of thing?

And so I'm about to say like, cool, I'm really glad that you totally like get it Kylie so that means you have a paper to hand in today right? And Dude THEN she says, but I have um extenuating circumstances and stuff?

And I'm thinking like Holy Crap she's totally gonna start crying and stuff and I completely can't deal with that and so I just say, like, how extenuating? And then Dude she full on falls apart like Defcon 90210-style and freaking goes OFF: Like I'm soooooooooo sorry but what happened was, like, I was trying to finish my final draft over the weekend early like how you told us to, my boyfriend Josh came over and we had this big thing and well I don't want to burden you with my own problems but we had a knock down drag out fight because three weeks ago he totally hooked up with a friend of mine who was my best friend last year and then he totally denied it like a dog but later I saw him scratching his crotch a lot like he caught crabs and so finally after I kept asking him, you know, Did you get crabs from Ashley, he finally admitted it and I said I knew it and then I called him a lying asshole and that's when he broke up with me and it all went down right when I was trying to finish this essay for your class because I really wanted to make a change this year and focus on myself and my grades instead of other stuff like partying and Josh.

And so I'm all, Ok Kylie, like, I really don't know what to do with all that information, and Dude she like KEEPS GOING and she's all, So, um, long story longer, I don't like actually have my paper to hand in today because when Josh left he like took his laptop with him and my paper was on it.

And then she like asked me for an extension on the paper and I was like Sorry Kylie that wouldn't be cool to everyone else in the class who got it done and she got totally pissed at me and walked away. And then after she bailed I was like standing there feeling sort of bad for a minute, but then I remembered that this is, like, college and stuff? And college students are supposed to be, like, adults and whatnot? So then I didn't feel so bad anymore.

Septembers

September is a weird month for me. It's not just because our family engine restarts, revs up and picks up its pace after a summer of beach, pool, library, and miscellaneous daddy-daughter hang time that usually involves a few rounds of Daddy-play-with-me-I'm-BORED vs. Sweetheart- I-can't-right-now-because-I-have-to-get-at-least-a-little-work-done-today. In some ways, September's rush feels good, like rejoining the rest of the world after a hiatus. (World: Hey, Captain Didactic, where ya been for three months? Me: I been here the whole time, Homeslice. Just... out of the loop.)

No -- I feel weird in September because this time of year makes me want to both celebrate and hide under the bed at the same time. That's how this month has trained me.

Here's how it happened.

September, 2001:

Like everyone else in the country, 9/11 hits me like a brick in the face just as I'm waking up that morning. Thus begins a new era -- Americans spend several days walking around like zombies, trying to to make sense of how the world has immediately and permanently changed. I don't have much time to think about it, though, because two weeks later, my own world is reshuffled again when my daughter is born.

It's an odd experience sitting up late at night holding a cherubic, sleepy baby in your arms while watching replayed news footage of exploding planes, crumbling buildings, and people jumping out of 30-story windows because it's the safest bet for survival.

And of course, global events aside, I spend the rest of the month (and several afterwards) waiting for the Parenting Police to knock our door down to arrest me, charging me with Falsely Impersonating a Father.

September, 2003:

We've moved from one rental house to another just around the corner. Quieter, a little bigger, but still not our own Home. We've kept the Mini-Pirate alive for a couple years. I'm feeling more confident as a father, although I remain convinced that any proficiency I've developed is surely temporary. Still, I've learned the basics. Keep toddler away from hot things, high things, and electrical things. So no playing with power lines on the roof in a tub of boiling water. Check.

It's an unusually hot Fall, even for Southern California. We won't learn the cause until much later, but one Sunday near the end of the month, we wake up and learn that wildfires have sparked up across the county, and seem to be devouring everything. It's bad. By noon, the sky across San Diego is a dark orange, and it stays like that for several days. on TV, we see footage of houses blackened and crumbling, of families standing dumbfounded behind police tape, parents holding little kids holding stuffed animals, all of them bewildered to see their homes disappear so quickly.

We ourselves are safe from the fires, but there's a layer of ash covering all the parked cars outside, and it smells like the entire city is inside a burning ember. We stuff wet towels under our front door to keep pollutants out, just like the people on the news tell us. We worry about our 2-year-old's lungs. We spend four days inside, playing games with the oblivious Mini-P, pretending the sky outside doesn't look Martian. San Diego ultimately takes over a year to recover from the disaster.

September 2006:

Three years later. We're living in a new house, one we actually bought ourselves the previous year, which means, which means we're still on a House Honeymoon. The Mini-Pirate is in kindergarten. She's flourishing. While I was worrying that Kindergarten World would be a little too big for my tiny kid, she of course has proven me wrong by jumping right in, making friends, networking with teachers and classmates like she's running for office.

We wake up one morning to learn that there are fires again. This time isn't quite as bad as the ones two years before, but tell that to the San Diegans who have to watch their houses burn to gray dust. Again. All classes at SDSU are cancelled due to Apocalypse, and I later learn that several of my own students lost their homes. Some close friends of ours are forced to vacate their homes in Tierrasanta, taking only their clothes, photo albums, and cats.

Again, my family is safe. But it's so dry and flammable everywhere that the trees in our backyard rustle like dried newspaper, and I start hearing phrases like Protective Open Space. I consider staying up all night with a garden hose to wet down our roof, just in case the scarlet part of the night sky starts to get a little too close to our neighborhood.

More Septembers come and go: new classrooms, new backpacks. New notches in our kitchen doorway to document our daughter's new height. It's been a few years since the last disaster. Now it's September again, and I can't help holding my breath when I watch the news, waiting for it. More fires. An earthquake. Terrorism. A giant meteor.

And yet, on the other side of it all: my daughter turns 8 today. Each September I get to look at my kid through new eyes. She is something different every year. This year, she's more gangly than she used to be. She still has a grin as wide and friendly as a front porch. She still likes to regale my wife and I with crazy jokes, but now, she follows up each one by saying, "Buh DUM Bum." Heh. She loves superheroes. She wears out her shoes faster.

I love this freshly minted 8-year-old girl so much today I almost forget to keep an eye on the skies.

Then.

Now.

How I Got My Daughter to Hate Reading

And now this from the latest issue of Bad Parenting Monthly: The story of how we persuaded our daughter to hate reading! Excellent!

Mini-Pirate has always loved to read. Even before she could understand the written word, she loved books. She got books. As a toddler, she looked beyond the seemingly harmless tactile whimsy of Pat the Bunny to discover the complex life lessons beneath the surface. She saw right through the simplistic surface plot of Goodnight Moon, to the secret, darker Sylvia Plathy subtext. The first time we sat together and read The Monster at the End of this Book, she looked up after the shocking denouement and said, "This reminds me so much of Gravity's Rainbow."

Ok. Maybe not.

Still, uppity literary pretense aside -- the girl has always had the big love for books. Last Spring she devoured the first two Harry Potters without any prodding from us. Several Oz books. Mary Poppins. The original Alice, pre-Disneyfication. That entire Magic Treehouse series that apparently consists of 5,387 volumes. A series of fun/spooky mysteries about spunky kids in haunted houses who find treasure, that I totally want to read myself. With each new bookventure, SaucyWench and I have felt both proud and relieved to have a kid who's obviously going to be A Reader.

So.

Our new third-grade teacher introduced one of her class requirements last week: each kid is to read thirty minutes a day at home. Real reading. Chapter book reading. No problem, SaucyWench and I said to each other. Mini-P's teacher last year had the same policy, and it was a no-brainer for the kid. (I'm not saying it was a competition, but... kid freakin' smoked her classmates. Frankly, I was a little miffed that there was no trophy presented at the end of the year.)

But since our afternoons have proven to be a little busier than they were last year, we haven't had as much reading time available. So, we told Mini-P a few days ago, let's go ahead and read chapter books together during our pre-goodnight bedtime cuddling. Two birds, one stone: we fulfill a class requirement, and we all get to read together for fun, which we love to do anyway.

Stupid us. We forgot the rule: if we try to make this girl do something, regardless of whether or not it's something she loves, it suddenly becomes THE MOST TORTUROUS, OPPRESSIVE, DIABOLICALLY UNFAIR PUNISHMENT IN THE WORLD.

She said no to reading chapter books at night. She wanted to do other things: play paper dolls with her mom, play make-believe superhero games with dad, or anything else -- other than reading. We insisted. Her no became Hell no (minus the swearing). We stayed calm and reminded her she loves to read. She got upset. We got confused. She cried. We remained calm, keeping our bewilderment inside, working hard to remain unprovoked in the face of her melodrama, a tragic play about a young orphan girl whose evil step-parents lock her in a dark, rat-infested dungeon with no food, no water, no shoes, just stacks of books, hundreds of thousands of books that she has to -- gasp -- read before she's set free.

Every night for a week we went through this.

Last night, I was working in my office and listening to my wife dealing with the same big-time drama yet again, and I heard things coming to a boil in Mini-P's room.

"I don't want to read a chapter book!" she cried.

"We've explained the new plan, Sweetheart," my wife said, her voice calm and level as a lake, sticking to our long-standing parenting motto: don't cave. "There's really no reason to get upset. You can choose any book you want. It just has to be a chapter book."

"But I don't want to read a chapter book!" Mini-P's voice was approaching a near-wail.

"Well, we could just say goodnight right now, if you want," Saucy said, "and you can do something else on your own, until you get tired."

And then my daughter said:

"I hate books. And I hate reading!"

Ow. Ok. OW.

Nothing she could say at this age could drive a shard of glass into our hearts quite like that. A kid saying she hates to read -- whether she means it or not -- is a special kind of heartbreak. Especially if you're us.

We're not sure what to do at this point. Our fear is that we're doing permanent damage here, beating her former love of reading out of her forever, by requiring her to do it. (Forget about the fact that she's been a budding bibliophile since she was a zygote.)

Either we stick with our rule and keep trying to convince Mini-P (and ourselves) that this isn't worth getting upset about, there's no problem here. Or we give in and tell her, Fine, you never ever ever ever have to read again.

And then sit back and hope she remembers on her own how much she loved it when Harry played his first Quidditch match. When Alice chased after that rabbit. When those kids found the treasure.

Best. Summer. Ever?

"So kiddo, you've wrapped up the first week of school. Guess that means summer is officially over."

"Yea."

"What do you think -- did we have a good summer this year?"

"It was ok. Actually, it was pretty boring."

"WTF??? I mean -- What? Boring?"

"Well, yea. It was pretty boring the whole summer."

"But... but... How can you say that?? We were superheroes!



"We were rock stars!


"We were cowboys!


"We were even pirates!


"You're telling me all that was boring?"

"Oh yea, I forgot. That was pretty fun. Oh, Daddy, you know what was really fun this summer?"

"What's that?"

"Remember the time when we went to the store and you tripped and knocked down all those boxes of crackers and everybody stopped and looked? That was SO FUN!"

The Secret Agenda -- Found!!!

I don't get political very often, mainly because I usually feel a little too dumb to take part in any sort of real debate that's not about whose turn it is to take out the trash. I rarely contribute to party conversations that involve public policy, laws, or elections, because I always assume that the people I'm talking to know a lot more than me about stuff. I'm afraid that in the middle of a spirited, intellectual conversation about healthcare reform, I'll accidentally say something like, "Well, history shows that tuna melts made with Starkist hardly stand the test of time."

So I keep it shut and wait for the dialogue to meander over to a topic I'm more comfortable with, like who's recently come back from the dead on Lost. Or which recent cast of The Real World is the sluttiest.

But tomorrow is my daughter's first day of third grade, and apparently, there's a hubbub taking place in school districts across the land about this speech the president plans to present to America's students.

I can't afford to alienate any readers of this blog. I'm too desperate for attention and emotionally needy to risk losing anyone by stepping onto a soapbox, phone book, or stack of playing cards, and making any kind of claim.

But. I read the speech several times. I looked for a secret Socialist agenda. I searched for an encoded message telling children that drugs are for super cool kids only. I read the speech backwards to see if it might tell me that Paul is dead. I looked hard.

And... I found something.

Turns out there are several reasons why parents should be concerned. Below, I've quoted some of the more controversial statements Obama plans to make in his speech to our children, and I've analyzed the subtext. I think you'll be surprised.

1) Opening statement: "Hello everyone -- how is everybody doing today?"

First of all, this smacks of condescension and hypocrisy. How is everybody doing? It's obvious that when Obama greets "everybody," he doesn't mean all children. He's clearly only saying hello to the kids he likes the best -- the ones who voted Democrat in the last election. Such exclusionary thinking only polarizes our nation.

2) "Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is."

Hold the phone, Mr. President. Don't go telling my kid what she's "responsible" for. You think I want the White House telling my kid she has "something to offer"? That might be fine for those Communist parents who think all kids are equally special, and lead them on by encouraging their piano lessons, gymnastics, soccer, martial arts, or oil painting, and unload all that ridiculous praise all over them. But I reserve the right to teach my child that mediocrity is its own reward. No president has the right to undermine my right to keep my kid's achievement bar low.

3) "No matter what you want to do with your life -- I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it."

Ahem. I believe there are several exotic dancers at our country's strip clubs who would beg to differ. Apparently, the president wants children to be "doctors," or "scientists," or "people who like to read" when they grow up. Rampant elitism if I've ever seen it.

4) "At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- that's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying."

Whoa. Uh, HELLO????? Visit Socialist RUSSIA much, Mr. Prez? I don't know where you live, but we live in the good ol' U S of A, where FREEDOM OF SPEECH is part of our Declaration of Constitutionality!!! That includes the right to call a teacher a douchebag if he assigns some of that "homework" that's so popular with the hippy Liberals, blow off school to go drag racing while stoned, and drop out to start the world's best death metal revival band.

5) "Today, I'm calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education -- and to do everything you can to meet them."

Islamic Extremism. Right there. Why not just tell kids to major in Terrorism in college???

6) "What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future."

Whoa. Just whoa. Let me guess, Mr. President -- could the challenges you want my daughter to solve include how to get her own grandmother into one of your healthcare reform senior citizen ritual DEATH CAMPS?

7) "The truth is, being successful is hard."

Apparently, you've never heard of a couple of American success stories called Spencer and Heidi Pratt. Zing! You're done.

8) "Even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you -- don't ever give up on yourself."

It's exactly that kind of thinking that cost us so many lives in Vietnam.

I could go on and on. Once you know what to look for, the White House's secret plan to brainwash our children through false affirmation and encouragement is SO obvious.

Although, I suppose everyone could go here and read the speech for themselves.

Nah. This is America.

How To Be Funny

I may have a new parenting issue to deal with, but I'm not quite sure. I think it has something to do with Respect.

Mini-Pirate and I were wandering around our local Old Navy today, enjoying their frosty a/c and perky 'tweenerific music piped in through the speakers. We were killing time on the last official day of summer; school starts for her on Tuesday. Not a microsecond too soon, by the way. It's been a long three months. Mini-P and I are both pretty sick of each other by now. Maybe that's a partial explanation for what happened.

So I'm flipping through some shirts, looking for a couple that might be wearable in my classes. I pull one on over my T-shirt, then take it off and try another, a plain white button-down. Nothing interesting or weird about it. Plain. Mini-P is watching me blankly, impatient to leave because men's clothes are boring.

I stand in front of her, wearing the white shirt, and say, "Well? What do you think?"

And my seven-year-old says flatly: "Well, that other shirt made you look like a surfer. This shirt just makes you look like a moron."

(Beat.)
(Um.)
(WHAT?)

I'm struck slack-jawed for a second, not quite sure what to do. My kid just called me a moron. (Sure, technically, she didn't actually call me a moron, as much as tell me that I bore a striking resemblance to a moron. Semantics? Not helping.)

Some Dads are all about respect. How to talk to adults, what you're allowed to say/not say, where the line is. When I was young, my dad and I joked around a lot, but still -- the only time I'd even consider calling him a moron to his face would've been if he was trapped under a refrigerator and I had a running head start.

So what does it say about a father whose kid is so comfortable calling him a moron? Surrounded by back-to-school Old Navy shoppers, no less?

Maybe some other (smarter) dad would've yanked that kid up by her collar and dragged her outside for a good old-fashioned talking-to. Maybe on some other day, I might've done that. But today:

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I freaking cracked up. Big time, in the ROTFLMAO way. Couldn't help it. Tears-down-my-face laughing.

Because I'm sorry, but respect issues aside, it was FUNNY. When she delivered that line, she did so with perfect timing, and right-on-target deadpan delivery. It was like a comedy bullseye. At that moment, she might as well have been on stage with a mic in her hand and a fake brick wall behind her while waitresses out in the audience served up a 2-drink minimum.

As offensive words go, "moron" is nothing. It's not profane, it's not crass -- in fact, as an insult, it's sort of sweet. I don't even know from whence the kid got it -- my wife and I tease each other at home, but we don't call each other names. Clearly Mini-P's been pulling slang from new and exciting sources I don't know about.

Laughing may have given her the wrong message about what's appropriate when you talk with adults, I get that. I should probably worry about what she's going to say to her teachers this year at school ("Hello, Mr. Taylor? We need you to come and get your daughter. She just called her math teacher a Royal Douchebag.").

But right or wrong -- in my family, we reward Funny more than Respect. I'm just happy she didn't call me an asshole in the checkout line for her encore. Buh-DUM-bum.