Monthly Archives: April 2012

Do you remember that Rebecca Black video that went viral last year? (“It’s Friday! Friday! Gotta get down on Friday!”) While there were a lot of things that were truly annoying about that song (the way her “producers” turned the autotuner up to 11, for one) the part I found the most annoying was how a rich little teenage girl was singing about the fact that it was finally Friday. Because my first thought, when I hear any teenager talking about it finally being Friday, is “What do you care whether it’s Friday or not? You ain’t got no job.”

At least no job that requires any kind of celebration at the end of the week.

Yeah, I know: you go to school. And maybe you started working part-time at a local fast food joint. But school isn’t an obligation: it’s a reward for being lucky enough to have been born in a first world country. And those few hours a week you work at Sonic or McDonald’s—while clearly making a dent in the number of hours you spend cultivating your Netflix and Facebook habit—do not qualify you as a member of the proletariat. Not by a long shot.

I’m not saying that the whole “work” thing hasn’t been a shock to your system; I can clearly see that it has been—especially the part about how they expect you to show up every day, even when it’s nice outside. I’m just saying that perhaps finishing a four hour shift with a paper hat on your head is not quite the same thing as working swing shift in a coal mine.

Of course, it’s not even the physical part of a job that really entitles you to a celebration at the end of the week. No, the reason you TGIF isn’t because of how tired you are come Friday (although the prospect of sleeping in on a Saturday is always nice), but rather because of the mental aspect of working. And by that I don’t mean the thinking we need to do while at our jobs (to be honest, even when you’re an adult there are plenty of jobs at the “paper-hat” level of mental commitment), but instead having to think about the fact that we have a job at all—that we must work.

Because that really is the hardest about about having a job: the realization that, whether we are working our dream job or not (or even if our dream job has become a nightmare) working is still the only option we have left. That’s what makes us TGIF—what gives us the right to TGIF. And the cold, hard truth of the matter is that very few teenagers have reached that stage of working yet; most of them, whether they admit it or not, are still waiting for their “real” (and rich) parents, the King and Queen of Batavia, or whoever, to show up and rescue them. Or they think they are going to marry a rich husband and/or wife. Or (and this one is my favorite) they plan on becoming millionaires by the time they’re thirty by inventing something. No, they don’t know what yet, but it will be something really, really cool.

Sometimes, when I try to talk to teenagers about the reality of living in a world where work is a necessity they accuse me of trying to make the world seem like a dreadfully dark and hopeless place. I’m not, I always insist. I’m just trying to make you see how things really are. Which, now that I think about it, is probably a mistake: they have the rest of their lives to see how things really are. For now, I should probably just let them enjoy their dreams.

Even if that means listening to them go on about it being “Finally Friday!”

Recently, my house has begun to experience an adolescent boy “issue” that—even though I’ve read about plenty, and heard about from my fellow mothers even more—I had yet to experience for myself. Hard to believe, I’m sure, but true: since I didn’t grow up with any brothers, or even male cousins for that matter, living with my son, Clyde, has really been my first experience living with an (almost) adolescent boy. So, in other words, yeah, this really has been my first experience dealing with a subject which—despite its delicate and awkward nature, or perhaps because of it—still manages to be one of the main topics of conversation whenever mothers of teenage boys get together.

You see where I am going with this, right? You see that I am about to discuss one of the vilest of teenage boy conditions, one that is both an affront and an embarrassment to all decent people everywhere. That’s right: I am about to discuss the Stinkfoot.

Since this really is my introduction to this issue, my first question is this: how is it even possible for one person’s feet to smell so bad? I mean, if you think about it, from a purely evolutionary point of view it makes no sense whatsoever. For one thing, it has to completely rule out the option of hunting for your dinner; with feet like that, how could you ever hope to get close enough to an animal to see it, let alone kill it? It’s not an issue of “upwind” or “downwind”—ordinary wind could not possibly shift the miasma that clings to the air around these feet. The only hope would be to hunt some kind of game animal that feeds on overripe wheels of Parmesan—the Pastalope, for example. In that case the Stinkfoot would be at a definite advantage.

But forget about hunting: what about reproduction? Beyond mere survival, evolutionary biology would seem to demand that any trait that positively drove potential mates away would eventually, through the process of natural selection, be winnowed out of the species. And yet, somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Who knows: maybe the same part of the puberty puzzle that turns the stink dial on adolescent male feet up to 11 also turns the smell dial on adolescent female noses down to 0. That would certainly explain why migrating groups of teenage girls are so often enveloped in clouds of competing perfumes so strong they make birds fall from the skies in their presence. (An alternate answer, perhaps, to the age old question, “Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?”)

Whatever the reason for teenage girls’ apparent immunity to the smell, it is an unfortunate fact that this immunity wears off completely by the time those same girls become the mothers of teenage boys themselves. Mores the pity. Because it is not the teenage girls who have to live with the little malodorous malcontents—we do.

Maybe it is the malcontent part of the equation that makes the Stinkfoot so hard to bear; maybe it is the combination of really stinky feet and a genuine desire to displease that makes for such a deadly combination. After all, few of us past the age of puberty are blessed with feet that smell like roses, and yet the rest of us have the common decency to be ashamed when we notice it—ashamed enough to actually do something about it. The adolescent boy, on the other hand (or foot) is proud of his reek.

That part, at least, makes some kind of sense—evolutionarily speaking. After all, young, unpartnered males of every species have always tended to form packs, for both protection and socialization. And how do most animals find each other?

Of course: they follow their noses.

Well, it finally happened to us: we got chickens. (It does sound like a disease, doesn’t it? Like it wouldn’t surprise you at all if one day your doctor handed you a pamphlet entitled “Your Chickens and You,” inside of which you’d find such encouraging information as, “Eighty percent of adults in the United States will have chickens at least once in their lifetime,” and “Having chickens does NOT make you a farmer.”)

My son, Clyde, has wanted to get chickens for a long time now—ever since 2007, when we went to Africa. Yes, that was his favorite part about Africa: the chickens. It never failed: we would drive through the middle of a herd of elephants and Clyde would hardly bat an eye, but as soon as we got to a village with a few chickens running around he couldn’t have been more engaged. The same was true when we took him to Europe: somewhere I still have a picture of him crouched beneath a magnificent Dutch windmill, gazing rapturously at a nearby chicken. I can only be thankful that chickens are (apparently) not welcome at the Eiffel Tower or at the British Museum—we had his full attention there.

With such devotion to poultry kind, you probably think it’s cruel of us to have denied Clyde his passion for so long, and perhaps you’re right, but there was one very important thing stopping us from giving in to Clyde’s requests for chickens for all of these years, one obsession in the house that was easily as strong as his love for the bird, and that was my own, equally powerful, hatred for all things chicken.

In my defense, I must say that I came by my hatred honestly: when I was Clyde’s age we kept over a hundred chickens so that we could sell their eggs to local health food stores. Because the eggs were “free range” this meant that the chickens were allowed to roam over our property at will; this was great for keeping the bug population down, but not so great if you ever wanted to walk across the yard barefoot, or sit in a chair without thoroughly checking it first for “chicken leavings.” Also, because we sold our eggs as “fertilized,” we had a rooster named Henry that was the terror of the neighborhood in general, and me in particular. Many was the afternoon I spent trapped inside of my own house, waiting for Henry to go around back so that I could make my escape via Schwinn.

Of course, this all changed the day I finally screwed up my courage and stood up to him—never mind the fact that my version of “standing up to him” was to sneak up behind him with a broom handle while he wasn’t looking and swing for the back of his head like I was swinging for the bleachers. Unlike my time on the baseball field, however, this time my aim was true, and I knocked him out cold. You might think since—as far as Henry was concerned—the blow came from out of nowhere he would have been more likely to have found religion than to fear me, but somehow he knew who it was who had struck him down without warning, and we understood each other perfectly from that moment on.

Hopefully, with Clyde’s chickens it won’t come to that: for one thing they are guaranteed to be “sexed,” meaning that they are all supposed to be females. For another thing, I’d like to think that with age I have developed the ability to meet my problems head on, and not sneak up behind them and beat them with a stick. I guess time will tell on both issues.

In the meantime, it probably wouldn’t hurt pick up a few broomsticks.

When the first big snow of the winter comes, there is always—no matter how prepared you think you might be—that element of surprise. First there is the moment (usually five minutes after everyone should have left for school) when every child in the house announces simultaneously that their snow boots are “too small,” “too ugly,” or “stolen.” (No one has ever actually “lost” anything in my house—it’s all been “stolen.” It’s awful: the poorest, most desperate inhabitants of the worst slum in Rio de Janeiro are models of honesty and restraint when compared to the lowdown, dirty shoe and homework thieves who seem to reside at my house.) And then, of course, there is the bitter realization that even when their stolen snow boots finally appear (cleverly hidden beneath the other snow boots—oh, those tricky, tricky Brazilians), they’re going to be of little help without socks of some sort. And finally, there is the shock of discovering that—even with snow boots and socks miraculously applied, and even though the sun may be shining—two feet of snow on the ground and thirty mile an hour winds mean that it is still actually quite cold outside, and therefore something more than a light hoodie (or three) might be appropriate.

And then those moments pass, and before you know it (ha!) it is the last big storm of the winter, and everyone is an expert when it comes to dealing with the elements. Snow boots are waiting by the front door, socks are plentiful, and everyone knows that the best indicator of the cold isn’t the amount of blue sky that’s visible, or even how much you really, really want it to be warm, but rather the actual temperature.

At least, that’s how it should be by the time the last big storm of the season rolls around. And, perhaps, that’s how it would be (and is) in houses with only adults, but in houses with children it is a different story entirely. In houses with children, every snowfall—no matter how deep and recent the one preceding it was—it greeted the exact same way: with shock, amazement, and a complete and utter lack of preparation.

You know how every snowfall makes the Earth look fresh and new? I think it has that same effect upon the brains of children: as the fresh white flakes fall and obliterate all traces of the landscape you once knew, so too do they obliterate all memories of what snow is really like in the minds of the young.

Of course, they have no problem remembering the good parts (for them, at least) about snow; they have no problem remembering that snow can lead to snow days at school. If I so much as drop an ice cube on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, somehow their subconscious is able to hear it and recalibrate their internal alarm clocks (such as they are) to “two hour delay.” And yet, that same subconscious wimps out when it comes to giving out information like “where did I leave my snow boots?” or “don’t forget: snow is COLD.” Or maybe it’s just that the subconscious—cheeky little monkey that it is—enjoys watching a game of “my left (shoeless) foot” every now and again. It’s hard to say.

I do know that as much as my spring flowers might appreciate a late snowfall like the one we just had, I can’t say that the same is true for me anymore. Somehow, searching for boots and gloves in November feels like the start of a Grand Adventure; searching for them in March feels like the moment when you realize you just want your Grand Adventure to be Done Already.

Or at the least the part of your Grand Adventure that takes place in the slums of Brazil.

When the first big snow of the winter comes, there is always—no matter how prepared you think you might be—that element of surprise. First there is the moment (usually five minutes after everyone should have left for school) when every child in the house announces simultaneously that their snow boots are “too small,” “too ugly,” or “stolen.” (No one has ever actually “lost” anything in my house—it’s all been “stolen.” It’s awful: the poorest, most desperate inhabitants of the worst slum in Rio de Janeiro are models of honesty and restraint when compared to the lowdown, dirty shoe and homework thieves who seem to reside at myhouse.) And then, of course, there is the bitter realization that even when their stolen snow boots finally appear (cleverly hidden beneath the other snow boots—oh, those tricky, tricky Brazilians), they’re going to be of little help without socks of some sort. And finally, there is the shock of discovering that—even with snow boots and socks miraculously applied, and even though the sun may be shining—two feet of snow on the ground and thirty mile an hour winds mean that it is still actually quite cold outside, and therefore something more than a light hoodie (or three) might be appropriate.

And then those moments pass, and before you know it (ha!) it is the lastbig storm of the winter, and everyone is an expert when it comes to dealing with the elements. Snow boots are waiting by the front door, socks are plentiful, and everyone knows that the best indicator of the cold isn’t the amount of blue sky that’s visible, or even how much you really, really want it to be warm, but rather the actual temperature.

At least, that’s how it should be by the time the last big storm of the season rolls around. And, perhaps, that’s how it would be (and is) in houses with only adults, but in houses with children it is a different story entirely. In houses with children, every snowfall—no matter how deep and recent the one preceding it was—it greeted the exact same way: with shock, amazement, and a complete and utter lack of preparation.

You know how every snowfall makes the Earth look fresh and new? I think it has that same effect upon the brains of children: as the fresh white flakes fall and obliterate all traces of the landscape you once knew, so too do they obliterate all memories of what snow is really like in the minds of the young.

Of course, they have no problem remembering the good parts (for them, at least) about snow; they have no problem remembering that snow can lead to snow days at school. If I so much as drop an ice cube on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, somehow their subconscious is able to hear it and recalibrate their internal alarm clocks (such as they are) to “two hour delay.” And yet, that same subconscious wimps out when it comes to giving out information like “where did I leave my snow boots?” or “don’t forget: snow is COLD.” Or maybe it’s just that the subconscious—cheeky little monkey that it is—enjoys watching a game of “my left (shoeless) foot” every now and again. It’s hard to say.

I do know that as much as my spring flowers might appreciate a late snowfall like the one we just had, I can’t say that the same is true for me anymore. Somehow, searching for boots and gloves in November feels like the start of a Grand Adventure; searching for them in March feels like the moment when you realize you just want your Grand Adventure to be Done Already.

Or at the least the part of your Grand Adventure that takes place in the slums of Brazil.