When my daughter, Clementine, was younger, I called her the “Little Lawyer” because she was always trying to get out of trouble on a technicality.
“Did you leave your cherry popsicle on the back seat of the car?” I’d ask her.
“What ‘popsicle’?” she’d reply. “All I see is a wooden stick in a pool of some strange red goo.”
“Would that be the same ‘strange red goo’ that’s all over your lips?”
“Impossible to say, isn’t it?” she’d answer, licking her lips clean of all evidence.
And so on.
At the time, this actually made me kind of happy (the lawyering—not the popsicle), because I believed that this meant that even though she was being a pain in my ass now, one day she’d grow up, get her law degree, and then take care of me for the rest of my life (or at least get the judge to lower my bail) .
Now that she’s a teenager, however, (and within shouting distance of actually having to think about what she’s going to do for a living) she’s given up on lawyering, and started leaning towards a new career, one that is not only just as frustrating, but also has almost zero potential for future income. That’s right, she’s studying to become a philosopher.
I realized it the other night, when I tried to pry some information out of her concerning one of her new friends. “Who is this person?” I finally asked in frustration, after getting one evasive answer after another. That’s when she looked at me in pity and said, “I don’t even know how to answer that question: who is anyone, really?”
“All right,” I said, “think of it this way: if a tree fell in the forest, and it fell on your new friend, what would the obituary say?”
Of course, that was no help: she still acted like I was trying to hack into their bank accounts—either that, or discover their porn names. (And no, I wasn’t asking her questions like “What was the name of their first pet” and “What’s their mother’s maiden name.” I was asking her what grade they were in, for cryin’ out loud.) Talking to her was like being trapped in a conversation with the ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre. Which would have been cool, I guess, except for the fact that somehow I got stuck in the Simone de Beauvoir role. (You know, the philosopher who is most famous for picking up Sartre’s socks? I always imagined their conversations to go something like this: “Are these your socks on the floor?” “What is a sock, really?” “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.”)
Of course, Clementine’s new role as a philosophy major in training extends to areas other than the eternal question of “what really exists, really.” For instance, she is also interested in discovering the answer to the age old question of whether or not it is ever possible for someone to really “own” property. (It would seem that her answer to this is ‘no’—or, at least ‘no’ for other people—like me. In other words, it is okay for her to go into my room to steal my phone charger—“Can anyone ever really own a phone charger?”—but not okay for me to into her room to get it back. ) And while this might seem to be a contradiction, apparently it’s not. After all, isn’t the ability to hold two competing thoughts in your head at the same time one of the prime goals of philosophy?
Or maybe that’s insanity. Which would be better, in my opinion—she’d have a better chance of getting into law school that way.