the children are our future...
perhaps out of sheer boredom or impatience or whatever, i turned on the television at 11:00. and, like the train wreck that television is, i've sat here for 20 minutes watching awful awful network saturday morning adolescent-oriented programming. oh my. now, here's the point at which i start to sound like an old codger, but have you guys seen the absolute crap-of-the-world that people are trying to sell to kids these days? aside from the fact that toys and their various marketing strategies are so obviously gendered that it makes me want to go all rosie-the-riveter (i'm not sure what that means), if ever i have children some day (and such lucky little angels they would be!) ain't no effing way i'm buying them crap like bratz dolls. back when i was a kid, my parents made me play outside. what happened to encouraging kids to read or use their imaginations? god, i feel like a relic... a silly, self-important, full-of-hot-air relic. it's only a matter of time before i'm the scary old lady up the street in the dusty old house with lace curtains and an overgrown lawn that the neighborhood kids think of as an evil witch. oh wait, that's not possible because that would require that the neighborhood kids have some creativity.
ugh. i need NPR and my knitting projects STAT!
totally unrelated, i just thought of a conversation that george and i had the week before the semester started. we decided that we should open a restaurant called "subpoena's". get it? because you would be served? served with food? get it? brilliant!
posted by emily @ Saturday, September 30, 2006
3 comments
3 Comments:
That restaurant idea is fantatic!
I've always said that if I have children, they are getting two toys and only two toys: A stick, and a rock.
If they can't figure out anything fun to do with them, then they deserve to be bored.
-elizabeth
a stick and a rock, eh?
see, any child comprised of one-half of my genetic material would certainly hurt him/herself repeatedly with a stick and/or a rock (e.g., tripping over it, poking him/herself in the eye, chewing on the rock and breaking a tooth, trying to use the stick as a lightsaber and damaging the other kids, using the stick and rock to start fires, trying to pole-vault with the stick, et cetera). so, to prevent the near-inevitability of having children with glass eyes and prosthetic limbs, i think my potential spawn will only be given cloth-based items, probably things that i will either sew or knit, and the other kids will make fun of them for having a crazy mother, thus building character and forcing them to find creative ways of retaliating such as mind control and razor-sharp wit.
it worked for me and i turned out all right.
or something.
a boy named sue, eh? if i ever have kids, i want to live in the same neighborhood as you two. when i was like five i was crossing a busy urban street, unattended, in a depressed area comprised principally of several races to which i do not belong, to buy my dad cigarettes from the shop on the corner.
kids should be free to screw up, physically, intellectually, whathaveyou. let them play outside unattended. give them bad grades when they don't do their work. tell them they're wrong when they're wrong.
our culture is creating a bunch of self-centered egomaniacs with appallingly thin skins and little sense of the consequences of their actions. it's gotta stop.
harvard doesn't provide half the education that learning to fend for oneself at an early age does. and it's in the name of getting into harvard that kids' lives are scheduled to the second. i pity children who can't come home, through their books down on their bedroom floor, and go back out to hang out with ten neighborhood kids until the sun goes down. and the bitch of it is, you've gotta find one of the few neighborhoods where there are like-minded parents, because without other kids doing the same thing it's neither as fulfilling nor as safe.
seriously. cats. can't screw them up: no pressure to send them to harvard.
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