Entries Tagged 'being a ridiculous human being' ↓

At what point did video games suddenly become cool? When I was a kid you played video games until (and ONLY until) you or one of your friends got a drivers license, at which point you said, “Screw Mario Brothers, I’ve got better things to do.” Personally I always looked forward to the day when I would be deemed officially too old for video games. I never knew which turtle shell to stomp on to get to the secret level, or which bricks you could smash to get ten bazillion lives. I don’t even know how anyone managed to figure that stuff out in those days before the internet. Actually yes I do know how they figured it out. They were geeks! And they had no life! So I was very much looking forward to sixteen, and turning in my paddles for the chance at maybe touching a girl’s boob. Of course that particular dream wouldn’t become a reality until the age of 25 or so, but at least nobody was calling me a “Gamorian” every time I got killed.

But then the language changed. Suddenly anyone who spent twenty bleary-eyed hours a day pushing buttons in their parents’ basement weren’t complete video game nerds. They were… “gamers.” I’m sorry, gamers? Slap an enigmatic title on it and suddenly it’s cool to be lame? Why couldn’t they have done that for the geeky things I was into? Rather than assembling plastic X-wing models in the secrecy of my own room, I could have been… a cementer. Nah, too easy to draw out the “C” and make it sound gay. A gluer? A builder? Exactoist! Crap, some geekery just doesn’t lend itself to badass verbage.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like playing the occasional bout of Mario Kart on my sister-in-law’s Wii as much as the next guy (and I’m sorry, but the fact that the end of this sentence doesn’t make anyone’s eyebrows go up is just plain wrong). But you used to be able to get that kind of fix with five dollars worth of quarters at the local video arcade. And since it was kind of a social situation, indulging that latent geekery provided at least some small probability that you might meet a girl who might let you touch her boob. But unless something goes horribly wrong, there’s no way that is going to happen on my sister-in-law’s Wii (seriously how does that not bug the crap out of everybody???).

Am I wrong? I can’t imagine I’m the only thirty-year-old in America who thinks the ubiquitousness of video games is a bad thing… the only thirty-year-old who looked forward to buying a car for no other reason than he could finally stop memorizing some stupid UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT combination.

The first time I saw Grease, the summer after third grade, I wanted to walk like Danny Zuko. He just had this… swagger, with all this up-and-down arm motion, as though the bones from his heel to his shoulder were fused together. So, I practiced. Yes, I actually practiced walking. Swing the leg up, lift the shoulder, and bring them back down… It was an exhausting routine. John Travolta must have trained for months for that role! I tried to get my friends to join me, but they hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t realize just how cool I was trying to make them. Wiped out, I too gave up after a week.

By fifth grade—right around the time we all started thinking girls were pretty rad—I had become obsessed with how I looked while walking. I’d be playing outfield in kickball (nobody would let me near a base), then have to come in when it was our turn to kick. I’d start running then quickly realize that it made me look too excited. So I’d downshift, walking casually as if to say, “Hey I’m walking, but I don’t care.” Suddenly I’d be critiquing how my feet and legs were moving in conjunction with the rest of my body. Bend your knees more. Should my arms be swinging? No, keep them still. But then I’ll look too stiff. This can’t look right can it? I decided that maybe running was, in fact, the lesser of two evils.

It got worse as I got older. By seventh grade, for whatever reason, my heels stopped touching the ground when I walked. The middle of my foot would hit, then I’d roll up onto the ball and keep on going. No big deal really, except that it caused my head to bob up and down enough that others began to imitate. I couldn’t even blame it on some really cool sports injury or terminal illness. The closest I’d ever come to a bona fide limp was the time I stubbed my toe on a teammate’s foot during a pee-wee basketball game.

I was already short and skinny with bad skin. I couldn’t let this be yet another trigger for adolescent ridicule. By eighth grade, I was once again practicing how I walked. It was a conscious effort, keeping my eyes on my feet and watching their progress as I talked myself through. Heel to toe. Bend the knee and swing it forward. And again, heel to toe… Some people think that walking with the head down indicates a lack of self-confidence. Well, sometimes it just indicates an inspection of motor skills.

With determination, I eventually broke myself of that toe-walking stigma, gliding gracefully through the halls, my head showcasing only the smallest, most natural hint of bounce. Of course, there were times when I was concentrating so much on my heel-to-toeing that I didn’t actually watch where I was walking and ended up bumping into open lockers.

These days, I can walk with my eyes forward and my head held high. The heel-to-toe concept is second nature. Of course, lingering pubescent trauma doesn’t go away that easily. Every time—and I do mean every time—I’m walking near a pretty girl, I become maniacally aware of the movement of my feet, legs, ankles and knees. If it’s just her, me and a whole lot of ground to cover—like that long walk to and from the reception desk—my eyes instantly drop to my feet, positive I’m tip-toeing, my head bobbing like a buoy with each step. So, I readjust. Now I’m certain I’ve overcorrected and am probably walking like Donnie Hubbard, that goofy, special-ed kid from high school whose head never broke the X-plane even while he was running. I double- and triple-check, perfecting each step until I veer into and trip over the magazine rack. My only recourse at that point is to tuck my chin into my chest, walk faster, and get away before she calls the cops.

So ladies, if we ever cross paths on the street or in the lobby, please don’t mind me. I’m not avoiding eye contact. I just think I walk like a dork.

The next person who tells me to “Ignore the bee,” is getting punched in the mouth. “Just sit still. If you leave it alone, it’ll go away. Swatting only makes it angry. Running, shrieking and whimpering will only get you stung.” I don’t care what any of you say. When a bee comes within a reasonable distance (read: when I can see or hear it), I am going to do everything in my power to keep it as far away from me as possible. I don’t care how ridiculous I look. I’ve done the sitting still thing. Believe me, I’ve done the sitting still thing.

I was probably no more than four at the time. My parents had taken us out for ice cream. Riding home in the back, contentedly licking my bubble-gum scoop and picking out the little pieces of gum for later, my perfect enjoyment was suddenly put on hold when I noticed a bee on my arm. Whether it had been attracted by the sugary smell or it just wanted to look tough by picking on a small child, I’ll never know. I could already feel the tears of horror welling up inside as I squeaked out, “Mom, there’s a bee on me.” Mom assured me to just sit still and it would fly away. So I did. I trusted her as only a child can. I trusted her as I watched the bee crawl up my arm. I trusted her as I watched the bee crawl inside my shirt. I trusted her as I felt the bee crawl around on my chest. I trusted her right up until the instant when the bee got stuck, freaked out and then stung me.

The ice cream melted down my hand and into my lap because I was too busy crying. So no, I will not sit still.

My in-laws make fun of how I deal with bugs these days. We’ll be sitting around having a nice quiet conversation when I suddenly sense that a mosquito is biting my-WHAM! Poor little bugger never saw it coming. Neither did my in-laws who are now nursing mild heart attacks in response to the gunshot sound of flesh striking flesh.

You know that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones realizes he has spiders all over his back, so he calmly brushes them off with his whip? Yeah, I don’t do that. The nanosecond the nerves in my back register anything smaller than a chair, my whole body contorts into a corkscrew, my hands raining down blows like shock and awe on the compromised area. WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP… This tripwire response, while effective, does generate a lot of false alarms. I have leaned back from the kitchen table only to fight off perceived attacks from grocery bags on the counter. After receiving numerous bruises to her fingers, my wife makes sure to caress my neck with her left hand, forcing me to draw blood on her diamond.

“Why do you have to be so spastic?” she and her family ask every time I defend myself against shoelaces, cats tails and curtain cords. But I know I’m right. My instincts may prove wrong ninety percent of the time, but I’m convinced that when a black widow spider finally perches itself on my neck, I’m going to be ready for him. Before his second leg even touches down-BAM! The in-laws, who used to poke fun, will, I’m sure, deal with their poisonous spiders calmly, reaching back, saying, “Hey what’s-” but too late, they’re already dead. It’s Us versus Them and you’re either quick or you’re dead.

I’m not afraid of bugs. Really I’m not. I dutifully perform my husbandly role of killing small things in our house. And I don’t do the wussy thing with the can of Raid either. I take the crunch under my shoe or between my fingers like a man. As long as I can see them, and they’re behaving rationally or dead, I’m just fine with bugs. It’s when they want to land on a living being ten-thousand times their size that I start to get suspicious. So don’t bother me with old wives tales. Don’t tell me to sit still and ignore them. A bee betrayed my trust once before and I will not be fooled again. And if I want to run, swat and scream like a little girl, I will.

Everyone knows that becoming a parent changes you, often in ways you never expect. First of all, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not, once you have a kid, you are no longer cool. It just doesn’t happen. You can try and hang onto it, try and tell yourself and others, “Hey, I’m still the same cool guy I was before,” but no, it’s gone. All of it. The only thing to do is to reinvent yourself as a different kind of cool. You know the kind of cool where you know all the lyrics to Laurie Berkner and High School Musical songs. “Nick Jr. cool.”

Still the thing that changes most once you become a parent, is your level of tolerance for gross things. You obviously have to get past a normal person’s gag reflex since you’ll be changing about nine thousand diapers per week. But it doesn’t stop there. What ends up happening is that grossness actually becomes a matter of convenience. That’s why you see mothers upending their infants, putting a nose to their diaper and sniffing. It’s just faster and easier to smell for poop than it is to undo a onesie, pull back the Huggies and check to see if there’s something inside. When you see a dad pick a booger out of his toddler’s nose, the ick factor is simply more convenient than searching the house for one of those little bulb suction thingies—which said toddler probably hid inside the VCR anyway. This elevated yuck threshold obviously goes hand-in-hand with the loss of coolness I mentioned, because you simply cannot be cool while sniffing a person’s butt on a daily basis. It just doesn’t happen. Ever seen George Clooney sniffing for poo? I rest my case.

But this grossness thing recently reached new levels of abominableness when my entire family became sick with the flu. On one of those fun-filled nights my one-year-old threw up on Lauren. But he didn’t just throw up on her. He threw up on her while he was nursing. You get that? He threw up… on her breast. This wasn’t just some relatively harmless baby spittle either. This was full on, chunky, stomach flu ralphage. And do you know what Lauren’s response was? After her initial, knee-jerk, “aw gross” reaction, she quickly composed herself and said, “Okay, well at least it didn’t get on the couch.”

The couch? She has vomit on her naked breast and yet she’s happy because it didn’t get on the couch? That’s how far we’ve come as parents—getting thrown up on has somehow become the preferable alternative to something else. When the heck does that happen anywhere else in life? Short of getting killed by an axe-wielding psychopath, how is getting thrown up on not the worst possible outcome of any social situation? I mean imagine you’re walking through the ethnic foods section of the supermarket and some guy just walks up and blows chunks all over you—lifting up your shirt and exposing your chest before doing so of course. Could you ever find a silver lining in that? Yet somehow, as a parent, having somebody puke all over your bare naked BOOBS is actually seen as a somewhat positive thing!

Man, I really hope my kids grow up to be rockstars because it would be a shame for them to siphon so much coolness out of me and Lauren and not put it to good use.

There are many reasons why I never ever ever eat at McDonald’s, not the least of which being I start farting about halfway through my burger and then don’t stop for about three and a half days. But also, I just find it utterly depressing that I have to deal with an entire team of people who are quite literally as stupid as a person can get without qualifying for a legal “disorder.”

I ordered a Chicken McNugget Happy Meal for my daughter tonight. Now there are two choices when one orders a McNugget Happy Meal: a Four-McNugget meal or a Six-McNugget meal. So when I stepped up to the register and placed my order with Mister Headgear, I said, “Yes I’d like a Four-McNugget Happy Meal, please.” You can imagine my surprise when I looked at my receipt ten seconds later and realized my credit card had just been charged fourteen dollars for a Happy Meal that should have cost about $4.50.

“Well you said you wanted four Happy Meals,” responds Mister Headgear.

Okay, I’m sorry, Mister Headgear. I know you’re stupid. But I also know that the corporation employing you understands that you’re stupid and has broken down everything you must know into about thirty simple phrases: Big Mac, Fries, Number Six, Super Size… I simply can’t imagine that I am the first person ever to come in here and verbalize this particular order. I know that you know you have a four-McNugget meal, so… why, Mister Headgear-wearing McDonald’s employee, wouldn’t you have at least clarified what you thought you heard me say before charging me for four freakin’ Happy Meals? Especially when you can clearly see I am standing her with ONE STINKIN’ KID!

Now please go ask your slightly smarter manager to give me a refund while I continue farting in your general direction.

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces me to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-olds in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, it’s suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU HAVE!“

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality comes from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain that scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but I will not let that little jerk, Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my inner three-year-old is going to notice.

As a father, I am really really looking forward to the age where ant farms become appropriate toys. I loved my ant farm as a kid and I can’t wait for the excuse to have one again. For the uninitiated, a typical ant farm consisted of two-panes of glass (or plastic) spaced a couple of centimeters apart which you filled with soil from your yard. You’d go gather up about twenty or thirty ants and jimmy them one-by-one into the ant farm with some food (the instructions suggested sugar water curiously enough). After that, you’d just sit back and let them go to work for about a week, digging tunnels and settling into their new home. That’s when the real fun would begin.

You’d start by collecting another twenty ants from a different anthill. Your next move was really a matter of taste. You could drop all twenty of the rival ants into the ant farm at the same time and watch as both sides fought to the bitter violent death, leaving behind only one or two befuddled sentries. On the other hand, you could drop them in two or three at a time and watch as the colony ganged up and tore them to pieces. Occasionally, one of the intruders would put up a good fight and take down a couple of the ravenous mob (especially if you were lucky enough to find a colony of red ants), but in the end he was still inherently doomed.

This was the way I chose to put my rival ants to work. I’d gradually up the number of intruders over the course of an hour or so, giving my colony plenty of practice against increasingly difficult odds. Then, after I felt that all of my six-legged soldiers had been sufficiently trained up in the art of war, I’d go out and find a huge freakin’ SPIDER. Here’s where the action really got interesting. Unlike ant-on-ant battles, which pretty much always came down to whoever had the bigger army, you never knew how a spider would fare against an entire colony. A spider is obviously big enough and tough enough hold its own against four or five ants at once. And if he positions himself properly the narrowness of the tunnels can actually work to his favor, preventing the ants from swarming him in numbers he can’t handle. But ants are nothing if not coordinated. It all boils down to how fast they can rally a multi-pronged attack, sending flanking units to the surface and attacking him from behind. Once the ants can pin down the intruding monster on both sides, forcing him to split his attention, it’s only a matter of time before they get past his long legs and onto his back. After that, the outcome of the fight is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It’s just a question of how many ants the spider takes with him.

When people think of little boys and ants, they usually conjure up images of us incinerating them with a magnifying glass, or dousing them with gasoline. They really don’t give us enough credit. We came up with way way way more messed up ideas than that. Ant farms gave us a staging ground to recreate the Roman Coliseum! We made countless drones fight for their lives purely for our own amusement. We let swarms of opposing armies slaughter each other just to see who would reign victorious. We put trained fighters into the ring with the equivalent of Bengal tigers just to see how many would die before vanquishing the beast

Now I know what you’re thinking: serial killers in training. But trust me, no mass murderer has ever wasted his time executing insects. They killed cats and dogs and birds and things. Things with faces. Things with personalities. Things you can love, sympathize and identify with. But who ever identified with a freakin’ ant? And I mean a real ant, not that cute puppet thing from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Sure we were messed up. All boys are. But hey, at least we purged our homicidal curiosities on creatures that everyone kills on a daily basis. Is it really so messed up that we got additional entertainment value out of it? And is it really so messed up that I can’t wait to share that simple joy with my kids?

(from 2002)

When the pastor asked if I promised to love, honor and support Lauren, I said, “Sure I do.” How hard is that really? Say, “I love you,” treat her well and lend a hand around the house wherever I can. I apparently forgot to consider the fact that my bride-to-be was entering grad school to become a midwife.

I suppose I should have seen the red flags. After undergrad, Lauren took a year off to work as a nurse. Boy did that put things in perspective. I’d be complaining after a bad day, “Geez, my boss was yelling at me, the printer kept jamming and my computer crashed.” She’d come back with, “Oh yeah, well somebody died.” And that would pretty much be the end of that.

I’ve heard that nurses are the worst hypochondriacs because of what they see on a daily basis. Yeah, I get that. Through Lauren, I’ve learned about pretty much every horrible thing that can happen to a person. I was surprised at just how many orifices one can bleed from. And I knew I was gushing from every single one of them. Acute pain was the worst. I felt every poke, prod and incision that Lauren described – usually in my back or stomach. In marriage counseling, they told us listening was important. They didn’t clarify the importance of doubling over in agony.

But I made it through. We made it through. We made it through her night shifts and her sleep deprivation. We made an agreement that for every gruesome story she told me and for every surgical show on the Learning Channel she made me watch, she in turn would have to watch a scary movie. She hates action and suspense as much as I hate sharp stabbing pain, so it was a nice trade off.

Now’s she’s in grad school for midwifery. At first I was jazzed up about the idea. I mean, she’s studying all the precepts of gynecology after all. And so is everybody else in her class! All girls! Sooner or later, I knew they were going to have to practice breast exams! And maybe they’d need extra practice after class! And they’d all come over to our place, and they’d all be naked, and they’d start to tickle each other, and then the pizza girl would show up with her twin sister, and then… and then… And then Lauren told me all about the fine art of performing speculum exams.

Yep. All the women know exactly what I’m talking about. And all the men are better off in the ignorant bliss I was in less than a week ago.

During her year as a nurse, Lauren only had stories. Now she has books. With pictures. Of very not nice things. As I sit writing this, she’s at her desk writing a paper about Gonorrhea. She keeps asking me to touch… places on her body. You know, just to show me how they feel during a clinical exam. Places that should never ever EVER be clinical between a husband and a wife. She recently brought home a video of not one, not two, but six births. And she made me watch every single one of them. Sure sure, I know it’s supposed to be a beautiful, miraculous event. Blah blah blah. It was like a tragic car accident. I was horrified, yet I couldn’t look away. I just lay on my side, curled into as tight a ball as I’ve ever been since… well since I was the potential subject of one of these videos.

But through it all, Lauren was right next to me. Hugging me, cradling me, kissing my temple. She kept telling me how much this meant to her and how much she loved me. She even promised to watch Lord of the Rings as a thank you. How could I not love, honor and support someone like that? It’s a no-brainer.

Lauren’s Masters program lasts eighteen months. She’s two weeks in. Every day I come home and ask her how her day was, even though I probably don’t want to know. But as she starts telling me all about babies and the birthing process and the miracle of life, I can’t help but feel the excitement in her eyes and the passion in her voice. Passion about something that is more than just a career. It’s a calling. So I just smile, remembering why I fell in love with her, and why I said, “I do.”

Then she asks me to come feel her cervix – and the scalpels pierce my stomach yet again.

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Weird.

I realized today that I don’t really like most Christmas music and haven’t since I was a kid. Actually I realized that a few years ago, but I figured out WHY today. As a kid, Christmas music is fun mostly because you’re always the one singing it. But as you get older, you’re forced to listen to Bing Crosby sing it. And if you don’t particularly like Bing Crosby, well… it doesn’t do much for your like of the music in general.

My daughter came out with a very profound statement the other day: “I was two on the day I turned three.”

I used to buy milk two or more gallons at a time. Then I read some stuff that said milk wasn’t as good for you as everyone thought. These days I buy vinegar two or more gallons at a time. I’m not saying the one is a natural byproduct of the other, but there you are.

I never realized just how insanely fun it can be to throw one tiny cat onto the back of another.

I don’t think I will ever reach a point in my life where I am too mature to laugh at a really fat kid falling down.

For years I’ve told people the story of a childhood friend who peed on an electric fence as if it were something that happened to me personally. Somehow a story like that is just funnier in the first person.

I don’t care if she’s only fifteen; hot is hot and show me the law that says it’s illegal to leer.

I like to think I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to strange foods, but I still cannot wrap my mind around tofu.

Little kids’ bodies are so ridiculously disproportionate it’s almost a marvel they aren’t defective. Look at one of them when they raise their arms up high.  The fingers barely clear their scalp for crying out loud!

The thing I really miss about my Geo is playing “Merge Chicken” against people in Mercedes SUV’s.

I have no idea how I used to eat Ramen noodles in such large quantities.

I somehow can’t bring myself to feel sympathy for anyone who loses an hour and a half’s worth of work because they forgot to save.

I never realized that I hadn’t seen a single red hot dog since leaving Maine until about a year ago when I read on Wikipedia that red hot dogs are actually a Maine “thing.”

I likewise never realized that I hadn’t seen a single whoopie pie since leaving Maine until somebody told me that Maine is apparently the whoopie pie capital of the world.

Britney Spears is hot. Her music is catchy. And everyone just needs to lay off.

At any given hour on any given day I would bet a minor sum of money that I could find at least one Law & Order or CSI incarnation on TV.

I still don’t know, nor care, what the top news story of the day is.

I saw a Humvee in the parking lot of Whole Foods today. Still weird.

I received this email forward from an older relative. Even though I can appreciate where the writer is coming from, and even tend to agree with a lot of its sentiment, for some reason it just hacked me off. It’s a typical “Our generation is better than the new generation” tirade, which acknowledges all the things that made the previous generation great, but fails to recognize all the things they did to screw it up for those of us who followed. So just to set the record straight, here is the original email in its entirety with my comments in bold italics.

======================================

Those Born 1930-1979!

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930′s 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and 70′s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

Yes and I’m sure many of you are still dealing with health problems and your own addictions to the same substances to this day as a result.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Of course, the oceans weren’t nearly as polluted back then as they were now thanks to you, so mercury contamination in tuna wasn’t as much of a concern back then.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

Look around at the gluttony of TV ads for designer pills intended to take care of everything from chronic asthma to irritable bowl syndrome to erectile dysfunction. Look at all the fun new forms of cancer you’re getting that your parents never had to deal with. Looks like all that lead-based paint and other chemicals you’ve been introducing into every product on the market had some unexpected long-term effects.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

Mind you, this was during a time when all your parents had to navigate were 45m.p.h. rural two lane roads where you encountered maybe ten other cars on your way to work. There were two intersections and one blinking light in town. Unless your parents were particularly idiotic drivers, the only chance they had of getting into an accident was if a deer jumped in front of them.

Today we’re driving on multi-laned highways with heavy merges, multiple exits to left and right, hundreds of signs pointing this way and that so that you’re never quite sure if you’re heading in the right direction or not. Not to mention the fact that we’re trying to run this gauntlet with about a thousand other cars, all going the same 65m.p.h. So forgive us if we’re a little more worried about what might happen to our children if we ended up in the middle of a ten-car pileup.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

Again, back then you actually had roads that weren’t jammed with other cars, and nice soft grass to ride on. But you’ve paved over everything since then, meaning we’re riding our bikes on asphalt. So yeah, we want a little more protection for our head in case we wipe out on yet another of your oil stained parking lots.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Great, and maybe if you hadn’t gone and polluted the water supply we’d be drinking from the hose too.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

This seems a bit disingenuous. Somehow I doubt that the “cootie” argument began with our generation.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because :

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We’d be outside playing too, except for the fact that you bulldozed the baseball diamond to put up luxury condominiums, you tore down the YMCA to build a WalMart and you drained the swimming hole to put in yet another massive parking lot for yet another massive strip mall (which you won’t allow us to skateboard on). You’ve kind of taken away all our outdoor places to go. We’d ride our bikes there, but again, refer to the previous bit about those roads that you made entirely unsafe for us to be riding on.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

Chances are you were playing at or near one of your friend’s houses with at least one parent or trusted neighbor keeping a loose watch on everything. Today, our neighbors are strangers and both parents need to work just to keep up in this two-income trap that you managed to set for us.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

Do you really expect us to believe that you’re going to allow us to race a handmade go-kart down your hill? You won’t even let us SKATEBOARD on all those nice big parking lots you built.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computer’s, no Internet or chat rooms…….

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

Your friends lived across the street. Our friends live ten miles across town via one of those multi-laned highways we mentioned earlier. You know what we find when we go outside? Traffic.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

Those trees were in the backyards of your own houses. But since you’ve created a housing race encouraged by zero-interest loans you’ve priced us out of our own neighborhoods. We live in crammed-together suburbs and apartment complexes where the only trees are owned by somebody else who puts a fence around the thing so that we risk impaling our testicles more than breaking our teeth should we fall out.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

Okay, but then YOU yelled at US for swallowing gum. Which way do you want it?

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

AGAIN, you had your own backyards to do that stuff in. Our downstairs neighbors tend to call the police when they see us holding a gun in our common back yard.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Yet again, your friends were a two-minute walk across the street. You’ve destroyed the idea of a town center so all our friends are scattered across a thirty-mile radius. We need phones and email if we’re ever going to talk to them outside of school.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

Because you still had parks and public pools and something called “recess”, it probably wasn’t such a big deal if you didn’t make the team. You had other things to keep you active. But since you’ve graciously ELIMINATED all these things for us, maybe we don’t mind creating a few extra Little League teams so that more of our kids have the opportunity to do something other than play those X-Boxes and Playstations you mocked just a couple paragraphs ago.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

Okay fine, I’m with you on this one.

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

It has also produced some of the most soulless, narcissistic, toy-hoarding, money grubbing greedy generations ever to grace this earth. People who gave up on the idea of making the world a better place once they realized that they could drive a BMW , own a condo and go on a cruise every year… Just sayin’.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

It’s also been an explosion of land, water and air pollution as you search for easier and cheaper ways to mass-produce all those innovations of yours.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And you dealt with it by selling out the idealism of your youth in favor of stock options, middle-management positions and items that sell for thirty-nine cents less at WalMart even though it put some of your friends out of business. Quite frankly, I’m not impressed with what you did with all that freedom, success and responsibility.

If YOU are one of them . . CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good

Okay, excuse me but YOU PEOPLE are the ones IN CHARGE of the government right now!!! YOU are the ones who made these rules and regulations. If you don’t like the way the world has gone, you have nobody to blame but your own self-righteous SELF.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Brave? BRAVE??? Are these the same “brave” people who spit, cursed and threw blood at the soldiers who returned from Vietnam in the late 60’s? Yes, your generation turned out a few gems, but so does every generation… ours included.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?

No, it makes me want to strangle all you sell outs from the older generation for ruining it for us. God willing we’ll do a better job with it for OUR children.