Swimfan
There are people I know who don't have kids who come up to mine all the time and say stuff like "Awww, they're so adorable. You must have so much fun together. They are so precious. I can't wait to have my own. I can't wait."

These people are retarded.

I know it's not politically correct to call non-retarded people retarded, but in this case I think I can make a strong argument for the actual retardation of these people. And I speak from experience because I used to be one of those people. OK, not so much with all the "adorable" talk, but I've always wanted to have kids. Always. I will admit to you that the desire to procreate was (at least in my early teen years) driven by the near statistical certainty that in order to have kids I would need to be having some kind of sex. With a lady.

Tall, short, fat, thin, whatever. Procreation = sex, so I was on board with the idea. Of course it is possible to have sex without procreation, but I'd been trying to get to that for a while and I just wasn't seeing the kind of results I would have liked up to that point.

Plus I figured out that if you told chicks how much you really wanted to have kids in the future, that actually increased your chances of gettin' it on. With the stupid ones, anyway.

The stupid ones came and went and eventually I hooked up with the conveniently-named Mrs. Pops and we got married. Two retarded people, living together in wedded bliss, just busting to have them some kids.

Our first son was born three months and two days short of our second wedding anniversary. That's the thing about retarded people: no sense of time.

The good thing about this sort of retardation is that, unlike actual retardation which is tragic and sad, this one is actually curable. It is cured by the act of having and then having to keep children in your home. And then every once in a while you have a totally voluntary relapse because of the fucked-up inarguable retarded logic of shit like "Oh, this child needs a sibling to play with otherwise it will grow up friendless and tactless and spoiled" and later again "Oh, these two boys we have now are more than our bodies can handle, but let's us try for a girl, just one more time."

So sophisticated, educated intellectuals become mush-brained mouth-breathing thought-challenged imbeciles given to wild flights of vanity and masochism. The long nights, the crying, the diapers, the worrying... frankly it's more than we deserve.

The hardest part about parenting, the thing you can't even imagine when you're young and moronic, is the part where you have to take this innocent, experience-free, mostly defenseless proto-person and make them into self-aware, self-motivated, high-minded, decent, happy, non-moronic human beings. Well, maybe not totally non-moronic since we want grandkids some day, but at least enough to know that cutlery and electrical outlets don't mix.

The problem is balance. You want them to be healthy, self-respecting, courteous, and fair people with so much self-esteem that it comes shooting out of their asses like bright white rays of lilac-scented sunshine.

For instance, you want them to be health-conscious and eat right. But in trying to make them aware of what they put into their bodies, maybe you harp just a little too much and suddenly little Sally is 17, she weighs 68 pounds and--if you hold her up to the sunlight--you can see through her because she hasn't eaten anything except lettuce and melted Jell-O since she hit puberty.

Or you want them to be achieving go-getters who know what they want and know how to get it, but then one day you have to rush them to the hospital to treat another bleeding ulcer/anxiety attack, this one set off because they think they got a B+ on the final of their Ancient Mandarin For Reading Fluency summer elective course.

My big problem is safety. I want to raise people who will be able to assess risk vs. reward when it comes to doing things , especially physical activities, so that when I'm not around when they're 17 and one of their dumb ass friends thinks it will be a good idea to race a train to the railroad crossing, they'll spontaneously know to opt out.

The problem there is that when you take them out to do something that is fun but has some inherent danger--say like swimming--it's just possible that their wound-up, constantly hovering father will carry around with him a 100% All Safety/No Fun Zone, which guarantees that they will never, ever, ever learn how to swim because that involves dad letting them put their faces under water for more than 3 seconds.

The long-term result is that you end up with kids who get made fun of because they can't swim or aren't allowed to play out front or can't ride bikes or skateboards because dad thinks they're too dangerous.

And you know what? Dad's fucking right. I'm having the people come out tomorrow to pad the walls, ceiling and floor of the garage with 12-inch thick foam-rubber panels. If they want to play, they can play in there. And no lights because you could hit one of those things on accident and there'd be broken glass everywhere.

Plus everyone knows that in a room like that, it's almost impossible to drown.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.7

Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:15 PM