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Okay, I know it’s been well over a month now, but I just have to weigh in on the whole Adam Lambert/American Music Awards thing. (*Spoiler Alert* Anybody out there who hasn’t yet gotten a chance to watch Adam Lambert’s man-kissing, trolley-stopping—this is a real term; look it up—dancer-dragging, and, lest we forget, face-in-crotch-smashing, epic performance at the AMAs needs to youtube it right now.) I also know that the whole incident has already been covered extensively by every publication from People to the Wall Street Journal, but, really, I have to comment on it, too.

Not because I’m a huge “American Idol” fan. (Actually, I’m a little scared of Ryan Seacrest, in the same way I’m a little scared of Dick Clark. There’s a “portrait of Dorian Grey” thing going on with both of them that I’d rather steer well clear of.) And not because I’m a big fan of awards shows in general (I don’t even like award sceremonies where I’m the one getting the award—why would I want to watch somebody else doing it?) No, the reason I need to comment on the Adam Lambert thing is because of the argument so many commentators have made against Adam and his performance—namely, the one where they said “But what about the children?.

What about the children? Okay, let’s forget that the American Music Academy must have been aware of the fact that the song in question, “For Your Entertainment,” is an homage to rough sex. (Which is probably why is was scheduled at air at 11 pm. On a school night.) And let’s forget the fact that when Pink performed a similar song and dance at the AMAs a few years earlier, no one batted an eye (much). Let’s forget about everything except for the one argument that has yet to be made, and the one that I am making now.

What about “Barnyard”?

Have you seen this show? It’s a cartoon that’s on in the mornings before school, and one whose advertisers consist entirely of Nerf, Barbie, and Hasbro. In fact, I think it’s pretty obvious that, considering its time slot, its advertisers, and its medium (animation), this is a show that is marketed to kids. And yet, the star of the show is a pre-operative transexual bovine. In other words, the lead character is a milk cow named Otis. A guy cow with an udder.

The first time Clyde watched it I didn’t think anything of it: I could only hear the dialogue from the next room. The next time, however, I was actually in the room, and I couldn’t help but notice that whenever Otis stood up on his hind legs (which was a lot)–well, let me just put it this way: Otis would have no problem getting beads at Mardis Gras.

“Who’s that?” I asked, intrigued by the combination of Barry White’s voice and Pamela Anderson’s physique.

“That’s Otis,” Clyde said.

“And is Otis supposed to be a guy cow, or a girl cow?”

Clyde rolled his eyes at me. “A guy cow. His name is Otis.”

Oooo-kay. Hey, I don’t have a problem with it: the more the merrier, I always say.

But I can’t believe that the same people who are going to let that slide at 7 am are the ones throwing a fit about one hot guy kissing another at 11 pm that same night. Then again, we’ve always been more tolerant of our animated friends then our real ones: the only time Bugs Bunny ever put on any clothing at all was to dress in drag and try to seduce Elmer Fudd. Come to think of it, he even sang and danced while he did it, too.

That storm we had last month was some storm.

It reminded me of the storms we used to have, back when I first moved to Flagstaff twenty-five years ago. Back when it snowed on Labor Day (once), and Veteran’s Day (often). And yes, I know: everything was better back in “the old days.” But it really did use to snow more—just ask Al Gore. During this most recent blizzard (blizzard—how cool is that?) I ventured outside during the height of it, walking downtown at 2 am. It was incredible: the wind howled, the snow swirled, and I felt like the last person on earth—at least until another lone pedestrian swirled up in front of me, only to silently disappear again back into the darkness.

I ended up walking down the middle of the street, in part to reinforce my delightful post-apocalyptic fantasy, but also because, in the middle of the storm, none of the sidewalks were yet shoveled.

That was okay—mine weren’t either. Who shovels snow in the middle of the night? (Besides temporary city workers, of course. Bless every one of their hourly hearts.) The next day, however, was a different story.

The magic of the blizzard was gone. In its place were just these enormous piles of snow, and sunlight so bright it hurt your eyes. I felt like I had had a one-night-stand with Ol’ Man Winter, and awoke in the morning to nothing but empty bottles and regrets. And shoveling.

Or at least, that’s what I woke up to. And my neighbors. What you woke up to, I’m not so sure.

Yeah, I’m talking to you. The one who didn’t greet the morning after with a shovel in your hand. Or if you did, you only wielded it long enough to shovel out a path to the four-wheel drive Ford Valdez you keep parked in your driveway.

Look, I’m happy for you. Really. Words can’t express how happy I am that you finally got a chance to put that behemoth into four-wheel drive, even if it was only long enough to make it up and over the berm the snowplow left in front of your driveway. But here’s the thing: you still have to shovel your sidewalk. All of it. Every last bit. Even the parts that you, personally, don’t walk on. (This means that you can’t just shovel a path from your front door to your mail box and garage.)

You do this not because it’s the law (although it is), and not because it’s a great cardio workout (ditto), but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the neighborly thing to do. And you do it because, if you don’t, and you happen to live on one of the streets that my kids need to walk down to get to school, I’m going to kill you.

I really don’t know how to make it any simpler than that. When you don’t shovel your sidewalks, my kids are forced to walk in the street to get to school. And, I don’t know if you realize this, but my kids are idiots. The fact that they are surrounded by two-ton vehicles being piloted across ice-slicked roads by people who are forwarding funny porn shots on their iPhones does not even cross their tiny little minds as they push and shove each other in front of oncoming traffic. They are idiots. They are children.

But they are mine. And I happen to like them. A lot.

So, shovel your damn sidewalk. And when the snowplow finally comes by and plows your street, piling all of the snow back on top of your nicely shoveled walk, shovel it again.

And again.

Because it’s the neighborly thing to do. And it’s the law. And, oh yeah: if you don’t, some crazy, irate mother just might kill you. (That would be me.)

There’s been a clip going around the internet that shows a comedian on the Conan O’Brien show commenting on how spoiled most people have become. He cites as an example the impatience we routinely display when flying: we complain about the food, the small seats, the lengthy security measures—everything. What we fail to take into account (at least according to him) is how utterly amazing it is that we are flying at all. Yes, you have to take your shoes off in the terminal. Yes, they serve you thimblefuls of water, after confiscating your 2 liter bottle of Fiji. And yes, it never fails that the person in the window seat always has the smallest bladder. But come one—despite all of that, you still end up getting to sit in a chair that whisks you through the sky at 500 miles an hour, shaving not days, but weeks off of the time it would have taken you to make the same trip just one hundred and fifty years ago. It is, any way you look at it, pretty amazing.

I was thinking about that comedian when I saw a news piece the other week about a woman and her two-year-old son who had been kicked off of an airplane in Texas because her son was making too much noise. It wasn’t so much the callousness and unprofessionalism on the part of the airline that made me think of the comedian’s bit (although that was rather spectacularly awful customer service on their part), but rather the response I read in the comments section at the end of the article. By a margin of nearly ten to one, people were applauding the airline’s decision.

Not only applauding it, but saying the airline didn’t go far enough. The one comment that really struck me was the person who said that the pilots should have waited until they were in the air—and then thrown the child and his mother off at 30,000 feet.

After reading that particular piece of venom, I couldn’t help but think about the first time I travelled outside of this country with one of my children, and noticed that people in other countries had very different reactions to seeing someone travel with a child.

They smiled. A lot.

In a way I wished I had never seen that, because I think it might make it easier for me in this country—if I had never found out what a mature, rational response to the presence of a child was, I might do a better job accepting the resentment and hostility that is the unwelcome accessory that every traveling parent carries with them.

If I sound bitter, it is because I am. Throw the child out at 30,000 feet? I remember a case a few years back of a businessman who got so drunk on a flight that he jumped up on the drink cart, pulled down his pants, and did his best imitation of a soft-serve ice cream dispenser, and nobody advocated throwing him out at 30,000 feet.

Instead, they made excuses for him. “Oh, well: he was under a lot of stress.”

You want to talk about stress? Try flying with eustachian tubes the size of coffee stirrers, a bladder the size of a tangerine, and people who glare at you if you so much as breathe. Try being pulled out of your daily routine, whisked to a different time zone, and put to bed in a room and a house you’ve never seen before. All without being able to understand why.

And people wonder why children are sometimes less than perfect angels when they fly.

Pearl Buck once wrote that the true test of a country is how it treats its weakest members. Of course, she wrote that seventy-five years ago; today it would have to carry the addendum on planes.

The other day a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that her son had come home from school with a difficult question. Not, “Why is the sky blue?” or even “Where do babies come from?” but a much trickier question.

“Mom,” he said, “what’s a douchebag?”

My daughter, Clementine, thought it was hysterical that someone wouldn’t know what a douchebag was. In fact, she was busy chortling away about the ignorance of some people when her father stopped her by saying, “Okay then: what is a douchebag?”

“Duh,” she replied. “A douchebag is obviously a bag of douche.”

After we stopped laughing, we tried to tell her the truth. My husband even told her a funny story about going into his grandmother’s bathroom and seeing the mysterious, frightening contraption hanging over the shower rod, next to the largest bra he’d ever seen and a pair of support hose as thick as inner tubes, but Clementine refused to believe him. For one thing, the whole concept of grandmothers being old is hard for her to grasp: her grandmother drinks margaritas and tubes down the river, and the scariest thing in her bathroom is the magnifying mirror. (Oh wait—maybe that’s just scary to me.) And then there’s the little fact that, as far as Clementine is concerned, the original meaning of “douchebag” is unimportant; all anyone needs to know about it nowadays is that it is an insult of the lowest sort, on par with saying that “you look like the kind of guy who has a Fedora in his closet.”

She’s right, of course. (About both “douchebag” and the fedora.) When it comes to insults, the true meaning of a word doesn’t really matter: it’s what it means to the giver (and, of course, the recipient) that’s important. When I was in seventh grade the worst thing you could call a guy was a “pud.” To this day I have no idea what pud means, but I am willing to bet that if I were to run into one of my male classmates from 1980 and call him a “pud” to his face, he would take offense. He might even fight me over it.

I always suspected that “pud” was a made-up word—something some clever seventh grader (or, more likely, some clever seventh grader’s even cleverer older sibling) came up with as a way to insult and annoy someone. And it worked. It worked so well that soon not only was everyone at my school saying it, but it was even being written as graffiti on the bathroom walls. And then, it was banned.

I don’t remember what word replaced it. I think there was a minor movement at one point to start cursing in “Battlestar Galactica” curse words, like feldegarb and frak, but that was only ever really taken seriously by the nerds, and we (ahem: I mean they) were all too busy rolling twenty-sided dies in the library to be bothered with trying to spread the word about anything.

Probably whatever word it was replaced with was eventually banned, too, just like I’m sure “douchebag” soon will be at Clementine’s school (if it isn’t already). Not that that will in any way solve the problem of kids calling each other names—but it will solve the problem of adults looking like they’re not in control.

At least to other adults.

There was a recent incident in the South where students, forbidden to wear “gang” clothing to school, instead started shaving vertical stripes into their eyebrows, supposedly to denote which gang they favored. This had the predictable result of “all eyebrow shaving” being banned. Did this change anything at the school?

No. But it did make the adults look like a bunch of total douchebags.

The other day I read an article in the New York Times about how screaming was becoming the new spanking. At first, I was happy to find this out, because screaming has always been my first choice in discipline: it’s something you can do it without having to either put your drink down or get up from the couch. It also has the advantage of not leaving a mark—at least, not a physical one. On a psychic level, of course, I’m sure that it’s a different story, but hey: they’re going to need something to talk about in their future therapy sessions, aren’t they? So yeah, all in all I was pretty stoked when I saw the headline. And then I made the mistake of actually reading the article.

Turns out, screaming is only the new spanking in the sense that it is just as bad for your kids as spanking ever was. Which means, basically, that it’s a no-no.

Okay then: no spanking. And no screaming, either, apparently. So what does that leave? Experts would probably say “talking with them,” or “setting reasonable limits,” or even “teaching accountability.” But then again, experts don’t live in your house, do they? (They certainly don’t live in mine.) In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen an “expert” in person. (Maybe that’s because every time they venture out of their protective little bubbles there are parents waiting for them armed with tar and feathers. Now there’s a headline I’d like to read: “Experts say ‘Daycare Causes Aggression.’ Parents Begin to Warm Up Tar.”)

But to return to the original problem: if screaming and spanking are both out, and all the “experts” have been lynched, then what’s left?

I say cursing. Non-screaming cursing, of course, which is actually the scariest kind. (What’s scarier, the guy who’s shouting “I’m going to !@#$ kill you!” so loudly that the veins in his neck are popping out, or the woman who quietly whispers “I’m going to !@#$ kill you,” in your ear, and then smiles?)

Of course, there is one problem with cursing: it requires a little thought. Because unless you have some variety to your swearing, you’ll end up repeating yourself to the point where they just tune you out. At least with screaming (and spanking, for that matter), you don’t really need to have any nuances. A scream is a scream is a scream, and a spank is a . . . well, you get the idea. But with cursing you need to be able to change it up every now and then or else it will start to feel stale. On a personal level, I like to keep my cursing fresh by my daily BBC America viewing (no one can curse like the British), but somehow I doubt that telling Clyde to get his “Arse into the loo and brush his bleeding teeth,” would do the trick.

Which means I’ve had to learn new and better swear words in American.

This isn’t as easy as it might sound: for one thing, we don’t get HBO or Showtime. I suppose I could go hang out in the high school parking lot and try to pick up some tips, but there are three problems with that. One, it’s creepy. Two, high schoolers tend to concentrate all of their cursing on the same word, with an occasional “mother” thrown in for variety. And three, it’s super creepy.

Besides, if my cursing is going to have any effect at all, it needs to be something new, or at least old words put together in new combinations. Luckily, I know just the place.

Who knew that one day I’d be able to say “All I ever needed to know about disciplining children I learned at the trailer park?”

Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly stressed, or worried, or guilty, or any emotion that arises from my being stuck inside of my own head for far too long, I like to go to Clydeland. And then I always feel better.

Clydeland, of course, is the place where my eight-year-old son, Clyde, reigns supreme. It is a land free of nuances, or subtlety, or double meanings. In Clydeland, what you see is what you get.

This is the complete opposite to how I normally live my life. In my normal life, I think about stuff. A lot. Yeah, I’m the person who stands in the pencil aisle at Staples for twenty minutes debating whether to buy the “good” pencils or the cheap ones. (In my defense, it’s a complicated formula. First I have to figure out the price difference per pencil, and then how long I am likely to actually own each pencil. So while I’m standing there with my eyes crossed, I’m really doing math. “Let’s see, if cost=x and days of possession=y, then allowing for Clementine’s ability to lose anything in the first five minutes of ownership, and Clyde’s ability to break anything in the first ten, hmm, okay, let’s see, carry the six, divide by two—damn, I wish I had a pencil.”)

So no, I don’t underthink anything. Which is why it’s sometimes nice to hang out with someone like my son, Clyde.

With Clyde, it’s all on the surface. True, he’s only eight, but something tells me that he’ll never be one of those people who will one day say, “Yeah, I know you said x, but I could tell that you really meant y.”

Case in point: the other day Clyde and I went to see “Where the Wild Things Are.” Now there was a movie that had lots of stuff happening on many different levels. It had to, otherwise they would never have been able to take a two-hundred word book and turn it into a ninety minute movie. (Yes, I know all about “Saturday Night Live” skits being turned into films. They just prove my point.) And, because the movie had so much stuff going on in it (which, for me, was heaven) I couldn’t resist trying to discuss it with Clyde on the drive home—in particular, I tried to talk to him about the parts that had been a little bit scary.

“You know,” I said. “The Wild Things weren’t real. They were just metaphors for all of the different parts of Max’s own personality.”

Clyde thought about this for a moment and then asked, “But what about the boat?” (He was referring to the boat that Max sails “through three days and nights to get to the island where the Wild Things are.”)

“Well,” I said. “The boat was a metaphor for how we sometimes have to leave ourselves to find ourselves again, and . . .”

He stopped me right there, a disappointed look on his face. “So he doesn’t get to keep the boat?”

“There was no boat. It was a metaphor.”

Silence again. Then a small, hopeful voice. “Okay. Does he get to keep the metaphor?”

I sighed. Obviously, to Clyde, a metaphor was now a type of boat, like a catamaran. Or maybe a dory.
So I said, “Yes. He gets to keep the metaphor.”

“Good. It was a nice boat.” Clyde smiled, and once again, all was well in Clydeland.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It was a nice boat.” And a lovely metaphor. But more than that, it was also nice to just be able to hang out for a little while longer in the land of Clyde.

The other night I got a letter from the principal of my daughter Clementine’s school. Now, receiving a letter from your child’s school is never a pleasant thing, but as I opened this one up my trepidation quickly turned to disbelief. At first this was because of what the letter wasn’t about: namely, it wasn’t about Clementine’s recent choice to turn her “Just Say No” ribbon into one that said “Legalize It.” (What did they expect? You can’t spend the first seven years of a child’s schooling encouraging them to use critical thinking and creativity and then, when they hit middle school, all of a sudden tell them they have to “Conform—now!”) After I gave the letter a closer look, however, my disbelief was because of what the letter was about.

It seems that there had been an “incident” in one of Clementine’s classes (again, amazingly not centered on her), wherein certain students had been caught sharing . . . (here I held my breath, prepared to strip Clementine bare and search her for track marks) a bowl. And no, not a “bowl” in the “legalize it” sense, but a “bowl” as in . . . a bowl. Of noodles.

That’s it.

The students shared a bowl of ramen at school, and, apparently, the bowl and spoon were not properly sterilized between servings. This, of course, naturally led to the fear that perhaps there might be some cooties (I mean germs) clinging to the edges of said bowl, and that the students might have passed these germs around in a process that, in most parts of the world, is simply known as “lunch.” This fear seemed even more ludicrous when you take into account the fact that, since almost all of these students are currently going through the change (and no, not menopause—the other one), they really don’t need to share eating utensils to be able to swap spit—they’re swapping spit all the time, if you know what I mean.

I mean, really: they were sharing a bowl, for crying out loud. And this not only merited a letter home, but also a follow-up phone call (for all those students who were so humiliated by their role in the bowl-sharing that they didn’t give the letter to their parents). The worst part of the whole incident (hereafter referred to as “Ramengate”) was that, as a parent, I felt like it had an extremely detrimental effect on my parental authority. Not because someone was able to feed my child something that I didn’t personally vet, but because it made all adults—and by extension, me—look like complete and utter doofuses.

Seriously: one of the hardest jobs the parent of a teenager has is trying to convince them that we are not all blithering idiots. That maybe we know just a little, and that when we say something like, “You should try wearing gloves in the snow—they really keep your hands warm,” or “If you put your math homework in your math homework folder, then you’ll be able to find it more easily when your teacher says it’s time to turn in your math homework,” we might just know what we’re talking about. Who knows? These small victories might even lead to larger ones later on, so that when we say something like, “Any guy who won’t wear a condom isn’t worth a second glance,” they might actually listen to us.

Unfortunately, however, the first step to getting a teenager to believe that we are not all blithering idiots is to stop acting like ones. And that means not freaking out if two people end up eating out of the same bowl.

No matter how many cooties they might end up getting.

Okay, here’s how old I am: I can still remember when the first answering machines came out. Everyone thought that they were so cool, especially those first few lucky families that could actually afford one. I remember one family in particular that spent hours arguing over the outgoing message—the kids thought that it should start with a Who song (“Who are you? Who-who-who-who?”), while the parents preferred the theme from The Twilight Zone. Absolutely no one spoke in favor of brevity—back then answering machines were still so new that we hadn’t yet figured out how really, really annoying long outgoing messages were.

Of course, some people still haven’t figured this out: I have a friend who as recently as last year still had a recording of his then two and four year-old daughters—both of whom are now in high school—singing “Jingle Bells” in its entirety as his outgoing message. And, to a toddler, “Jingle Bells in its entirety” means “just the chorus, over and over again.” Although, now that I think about it, his message is so long, and so annoying, that most people (myself included), end up doing just about anything to avoid calling him, even going so far as solving our own problems. My god—the man is a genius.

Anyway, the point is, I can still remember when the only one way to leave a message for someone was to hang a note on their door. And I can also still remember when everything changed, and there were suddenly dozens of ways to leave messages: pagers (a rather bizarre idea, in retrospect: somebody calls and leaves you their number, making it your responsibility to hunt down a phone and call them back), car phones, cell phones, Blackberries, Bluetooths, etc., etc. I’m sure the chip implanted directly into the brain can’t be far away. But until that day comes, the modern reality is that there are now scores of ways to leave a message for someone. Which means that there are now scores of ways for that message to get lost in translation through your local teenager.

No matter what technology you are using to get a message to me, if it has to pass through the filter of my teenage daughter, Clementine, it is doomed. I’m not saying I won’t get the message—I will (eventually)—I’m just saying that by the time I get it, it might be unrecognizable.

There are several different ways for her to destroy my messages, and since I never know which method she will be using, I can’t know what, exactly, I need to do figure the message out. Was it a “sin of omission” message, where I’m only getting every fourth or fifth word? (“Kim called. Concert. Maybe. She said ‘sorry.’”) Was it a message mangle, where the entire message was turned around? (“Regina said not to come over for dinner tonight at six. Yes, I’m sure she said don’t come.” Or was it an abbreviated message. (“Bob called. He said to tell you to bring some ham tonight.” Actual request: bring hamburger buns.)

The thing is: we have voice mail. All she really has to do is nothing (and, as a teenager, she already excels at that), and I’ll get the message. But no, she has to answer it, take a message (or pretend to), and then give me some bastardized version of it.

It’s almost as if destroying the message is her goal.

Maybe it is—after all, everyone knows that all of the best parts of Shakespeare’s comedies arise from miscommunications. Maybe she’s just trying to bring a little Shakespearean excitement into our lives. Or maybe, just like with my friend and his annoying lisping toddler message, she’s just trying to get people so frustrated with me that they’ll never call again.

My god—the girl is a genius.

This is an open letter to every person who has ever had to deal with my son, Clyde, in any way whatsoever. Please know these two things: one, he does own underwear. And two: I’m really, really sorry.

Really.

But back to the first thing: I know that it may be hard for you to believe, but Clyde actually does owns lots and lots of underwear. What’s more, most of it is still in pristine condition, because—as you no doubt know all too well—he doesn’t ever wear any of it.

Now, I know that there are lots of people out there who like to “go commando.” Britney Spears comes, rather infamously, to mind, as do a host of other soon-to-be-famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons celubutantes. In fact, I could easily believe that absolutely no one wears underwear anymore—that, in fact, underwear has gone the way of the bustle and the farthingale. That is, I could believe that, if it wasn’t for the fact that every time I go to a department store I seem to be confronted by enormous, shimmery pyramids of underwear. (This is in the women’s department, mind you—in the men’s department all of the underwear seems content to keep to itself, not only maintaining a very proper, respectful distance from the socks, but even going so far as to have each piece remain chastely inside of its own bag.)

So yeah, obviously somebody, somewhere, is buying underwear. Of course, whether or not they are actually wearing any of it still remains to be seen. (Or rather, more saliently, remains not to be seen.) Either way, it’s a mystery—as it should be.

With Clyde, however, it is never a mystery. On the contrary, it is often as plain as the nose on his face, or rather, the—well, I’m sure you don’t need me to draw you a picture (and in fact would probably prefer that I didn’t).

In Clyde’s defense, it is possible that he is simply confused about when it is and isn’t appropriate to “let it all hang out.” Perhaps he just needs a clear explanation of the rules, something along the lines of the Idiot’s Guide to Underclothing—hopefully one that comes complete with pictures, flow charts, and real life examples.

For example, the book might list a scenario such as this: if you are involved in any sort of rough physical play where there is a very real chance that your pants might become ripped well past the Incredible Hulk stage, then you should wear underwear. Or: if your waist is so small, and your hips and buttocks so non-existent that pipe cleaners and broom sticks gaze upon you with envy, then you should wear underwear. And finally: if, like with tying your shoes, zipping up and/or buttoning your pants is a skill that still eludes you, you should definitely wear underwear. (You’ll notice I said nothing about being one of those guys who likes to wear their pants halfway to their ankles—those guys always wear underwear. Unfortunately, they also always seem to wear underwear that is of the gray, holey variety. Guys, guys, trust me on this: when you’re on a date and suddenly need to pick something up from off the ground, you don’t want your date’s thoughts to be trending in the direction of “Does this guy even know what a washing machine is?”)

For years, before I had kids, I always said that I didn’t want my kids growing up to be ashamed of their bodies. But then I had Clyde, and my opinion has undergone a radical change. In fact, lately I’ve even started to think that maybe a little shame is a good thing—if, by “shame,” you mean underwear. And believe me: I do.

In 1988, Pat Robertson stopped by Flagstaff to give a speech as part of his presidential campaign tour. There are two things that I remember about that speech: one, that people wearing white plastic cowboy hats look just about as stupid as you’d think they would, and two, that wearing a Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition t-shirt to a Pat Robertson rally really is no way to make friends.

I know the first because for some reason Robertson’s advance guard distributed a ton of the white plastic monstrosities (what was their selling point? “Looks good on absolutely no one”?) before his visit, and I know the second because that’s what a friend of mine chose to wear as she stood six inches away from Robertson’s podium and heckled him. I was standing at her side at the time. (Why? Because she had said, “Hey, I’m going downtown—want to come?” Always, always get specifics.) As we endured a near constant stream of the most non-profane vitriol I have ever heard (Robertson supporters would never curse; it was kind of like being chewed out by your grandmother—the one who doesn’t live in the trailer park), I remember thinking that at least it would now never be possible for me to be any less popular than I was at that particular moment in time. That, barring an unforeseen appearance on the Jerry Springer Show, that particular moment, at that particular Pat Robertson rally, would always mark the absolute low point of my unpopularity.

And then I went and had children. Worse yet, I had children who are allowed outside of their plastic bubbles during the flu season.

You’d think, from the reactions I get, that we’re living during plague times, and that my kids are not only walking around covered in plague boils, but also carrying a rat in each pocket. “Is he sick?” the cashier will ask me sharply when my son, Clyde, gives a little sniff. “If he’s sick then he should stay home.”

“No,” I’ll protest, “he’s not sick. He’s just a sniffler. He’s always been a sniffler. Nothing to worry about.”

“Hmm,” she’ll reply, clearly thinking that I am lying, and that, in fact, I have just recklessly sliced open the seal on my quarantined front door so that I can blithely run amuck, wantonly spreading germs in my wake. And then she’ll reach for the Purell. Of course, she won’t have to reach far—it’s impossible to walk ten feet anymore without seeing a Purell dispenser. Hand sanitizer has become the good luck talisman of the 21st century—whereas our ancestors used to carry blue beads to ward off the Evil Eye, we carry little blue and white bottles to ward off the Evil Bacteria. Personally, I’d rather have the blue bead—less chance of it spilling in my purse.

Really, though, it’s enough to make me wonder: what kind of pioneer stock are we descended from that we now are not only incapable of hunting and gathering our own food, but won’t even use a grocery cart unless the handle has been sanitized first? Because, you know, it might have been touched. By a child. Who sniffles.

Here’s a little secret about the flu: you’re going to get it. Or you’re not. That’s it. Unless you’re planning on rolling around town in a giant hamster ball, it doesn’t matter how many times a day you wash your hands; you’re still going to get sick.

Or you’re not. Just quit obsessing about it, okay? Stop reaching for the Purell every time one of my kids gets within fifty feet of you. And while you’re at it, take off that white plastic cowboy hat. It really does look stupid.