Kelly Poe Wilson

So I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that I would like to propose a ribbon campaign.

I know what you’re thinking: really, another one? And I understand—after all, the mooching season is already well upon us (if you lined up all of the upcoming silent auction tables they would stretch from here to that condo in Telluride that I always bid on but never win). I also know that there are so many ribbon campaigns out there already that ribbons are either going to have to start pulling double duty (actually, triple and quadruple duty, as most of the “good” colors have already been taken numerous times), or people are going to have to start digging deeper into their paint boxes (as far as I know, puce is still available). But the thing is, I have a cause that really needs some support, and even though it’s for something that we probably will never be able to stop, I still think it would be nice for those who suffer from this condition to have the same comfort that all of the other beneficiaries of ribbon campaigns have; that is, to one day be driving down the freeway and see, on the SUV ahead of them, a magnetic ribbon that says “thinking of you.”

So what, you may ask, is this condition I’m going on and on about? Well, I’m referring, of course, to the heartbreak of pink eye.

Or rather, the heartbreak of being the mother of someone with pink eye, because as every mother knows, unlike ailments that actually debilitate your child, pink eye does nothing to incapacitate or otherwise slow down your child at all—all it does is keep them from going to school for 24 hours after they’ve had their first dose of antibiotics. (I’m sure this rule is responsible for more prescription fraud than all other drugs combined—“Keep your oxycontin and percocet, if I don’t get that scrip for antibiotics right now my kid is going to have to spend another day at home.”)

It’s terrible. And of course, the worst part about it is that never, in the history of pink eye, has it struck everyone in the family at once. Instead it comes into the eye of one child, migrates to the eye of another one, and then another, and then, when it seems to be gone completely, comes back to the first child again.

This cycles around and around until finally, through measures so draconian the Patriot Act blushes to see them (“All right! Everybody line up and get your eye drops!” “But I don’t live here . . .” “Shut your mouth and open your eyes! NOW!” “But I’m just the UPS guy—ahh! Put down the taser! I’ll do it!”) the outbreak is contained.

At least until the eye drop administer gets it herself.

The last time it swept through my house I got it after everyone else was (temporarily) over it, and so instead of going to the doctor myself I just opted to use some of the drops left over from the 55-gallon drum that we had ordered during the height of the infection. Big mistake. St. Conjunctiva doesn’t like it when you don’t make her the proper offerings (she likes to be worshipped at the copay altar, just like St. Otitis and St. Impetigo).

She punished me for my neglect by making me allergic to the generic eyedrops, meaning that I ended up laying my copay sacrifice on the altar not once, but three times. Pay me now or pay me later, that’s her motto.

Of course, all of this would be solved by the ribbon campaign. Or at least acknowledged. And really, that’s all we mothers of pink eye sufferers want: to be seen. Even if it is through red, puffy eyes.

I have a terrible confession to make: I like teenagers. I know that such a thing is supposed to be taboo—while it’s great to like babies and permissible to like children we’re all supposed to be united in out fear and loathing of adolescents—but I just can’t do it. I know I am supposed to kvetch about their music, and their hair colors, and their clothes, and even about the fact that they are ungrateful for their youthful metabolisms which allow them to eat french fries (remember french fries?) on a daily basis with no ill effects, but the truth is I like their music, their Ramona Flowers hair, their super-zippery pants, and even their efficient digestions.

And yeah, I also know that as a parent (especially one who writes about her children) I am doubly not supposed to admit to this, but instead am supposed to toe the party line and complain incessantly about how sloppy, forgetful, disrespectful and naïve they are. But the secret truth of the matter is that I really, truly, actually do like them.

I’m not saying that they don’t have the negative traits they have been ascribed to them, nor am I saying that I like them because of those traits. I’m only saying that just as there is a whole lot more to being a parent than the stereotypical sitcom image of the clueless dad and the harried mom, I think there’s a whole lot more to being a teenager than the equally stereotypical sitcom image of the surly, hoodie-wearing disaffected youth and the gum-chewing mallrat.

When you think about it, it’s kind of ironic: for all of the times we accuse them of being oblivious to the fact that we, as parents, are fully formed human beings, (and not just a set of car keys and a wallet with legs), we are also guilty of the same sort of oblivion when it comes to them, treating them as just a series of increasingly difficult problems to be solved. I know that I am certainly guilty of that, especially on those days when it seems like all I can do is respond to one crisis after another.

Because there certainly are a lot of crises in the lives of teenagers—not just problems, but crises. And that intensity is what makes it so easy for us to mock them. Of course, that is true of anyone, teen or not. Consider for a moment that guy in the next cubicle, who owns every Star Wars figure that was ever produced (and two of Jar Jar Binks), or the woman three desks down, who has every episode of “Glee” memorized. Of course we mock them, but in the midst of our mockery we’re also, if we’re honest, kind of envious of their passion.

There’s a great quote by the writer Edmund White, and it goes,

“I have no contempt for that time of life when our friendships are most passionate and our passions incorrigible and none of our sentiments yet compromised by greed or cowardice or disappointment. The volatility and intensity of adolescence are qualities we should aspire to preserve.”

I always try to remember that quote when I am tempted to roll my eyes at a teenager’s description of the worst teacher, the best new band, the dumbest assignment, or the dopest hat. I try to remember that just because fanaticism is so easy to mock doesn’t necessarily mean that cynicism is the better choice.

And that maybe, instead of just being envious of their ability to eat the entire contents of our kitchens while only adding inches vertically, we should also be envious of the way they still approach the world with something many of us gave up at about the same time we gave up french fries: a little tiny bit of hope.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes, when people are trying to reassure you, they just end up making you feel worse? Like when your dentist is working on your mouth and says “uh-oh.” The fact that he follows that up by saying, “Don’t worry: we can fix that,” is, in all actuality, not that reassuring. Or when your pilot comes on over the intercom and says, “The good news is that we are almost definitely going to be able to clear the first set of trees.” Or when you’ve been involved in a terrible accident and the first person on the scene looks at you and says, “Well, at least your right leg is still attached.” I’m positive that each of the above statements were meant to be reassuring, and yet, in reality, they were most decidedly anything but.

When it comes to truly anxiety-provoking statements, though, nothing beats the seemingly innocuous phrase my teenage daughter, Clementine, has begun to use constantly. I’m referring, of course, to the dreaded, “It’s all good.”

Consider the following true story of a recent “it’s all good” conversation. It happened the other week, when she and her friends borrowed our car—our only car, I might add—and, after being gone with it longer than anticipated, called me to say, “Um, yeah, we had a little car trouble, but it’s all good.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Don’t worry. It’s all good. There were so many people in it that we were able to push it out of the road no problem. It’s all good.”

Every time the phrase “it’s all good” came out of her mouth my stomach dropped a little bit further. And yet, she kept saying it. Like it was soothing or something. “Where are you now?” I managed to choke out.

“Don’t worry. It’s all—”

“Please, please stop saying that,” I begged, my stomach somewhere in the vicinity of my feet. “It’s not helping.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starting to doubt whether or not you have a real firm grip on what ‘good’ means. Or ‘all’. And maybe, even, for that matter, ‘it.’ All I know is that you cannot simultaneously describe something as both ‘trouble’—as in ‘car trouble’—and ‘all good.’ If it was all good you wouldn’t have needed to call me in the first place.”

“Chill. We’re taking care of it. It’s all—”

“Okay, just tell me one thing: is ‘good’ the new slang for ‘screwed up beyond all repair’? Because when I was a teenager we thought it was cool to say ‘bad’ for ‘good.’ Like ‘that car is bad.’ Meaning ‘good.’”

I could hear her eyes rolling over the phone. “Mom. People still say that. And no, I mean ‘good’ like in ‘good.’”

“Really? Because the time you dropped your iPhone you said it was ‘all good,’ too.”

“It was. It still works. Sort of.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of. Just bring the car back home, okay?”

Silence, followed by a much more subdued, “Are you mad?”

I smiled grimly at that. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. It’s all good.” And then I hung up.

Let her enjoy the “all good” anxiety for a while.

The first thing you need to know is this: for my son, Clyde, pizza is like crack. No, he doesn’t smoke it. And, as of yet, he hasn’t started stealing stuff to pay for it. But he does have the same obsessive, paranoid attitude toward his pizza that I imagine crackheads have toward their stash. Which means that, as far as Clyde is concerned, no matter how much pizza there is, there’s still never enough to go around. When it comes to the pie there is not, and never can be, enough. Certainly not enough to share.

Bearing that in mind, I wasn’t too surprised the other night when I saw him walk into the bathroom with some pizza: of course he would never trust the rest of us enough to just leave his pizza sitting there, waiting for his return—even though we had gotten five (five!) pizzas that night. And I wasn’t too surprised to see him go in there with not only one piece of pizza, but with two—one in each hand. And I wasn’t even surprised when, a few minutes later he came walking back out, still holding the same pieces of pizza (it had been a quick trip). I was a little disgusted, though, because he was still holding one in each hand, and that immediately led me to the question of what had he done with both of those slices while he was attending to business? Because I’m assuming he didn’t just go in there to check his hair. And that was when I realized, as I often belatedly do, that I really didn’t want to know.

He set them on the sink, I told myself firmly. He set them on the sink. Maybe if I repeated it enough times I would start to believe it, but considering that I had just that morning had to stop him from licking the bottom of his shoe, I had my doubts.

I used to be proud of the fact that my kids weren’t afraid of a little filth: the way they were the only kids at the campfire that would not only pick up their own hot dog and eat when it fell on the ground, but pick up other people’s as well. I started to question the wisdom of being proud of such a thing, however, the time one of them picked a hot dog up from off the ground and started eating it and we hadn’t brought any hot dogs—or other people—camping with us. Or the time one of them came strolling out of their room eating a piece of pizza, and we hadn’t ordered pizza for over a week.

Which brings us back to Clyde’s recent pizza multi-tasking.

I have to admit that it definitely wasn’t the grossest thing I’ve ever seen go into a bathroom—that honor goes to a former room-mate of mine who liked to eat his Frosted Flakes on the toilet every morning (at least it wasn’t Cocoa Puffs). And it also wasn’t the grossest thing I’ve ever seen come out of a bathroom, either. We live in an older house, with older plumbing, so believe me, I’ve seen more gross things come out from under the bathroom door than through it. (If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget hearing the words, “When did we get a brown carpet for the bathroom?”)

But Clyde’s stunt was certainly the grossest thing I’ve ever seen both go in, and then come out. And it was all because of Clyde’s love of the pie. I suppose people have done worse things because of their addictions—at least I’ve never come home to find Clyde passed out amongst a stack of empty pizza boxes and an empty spot where my TV used to be.

Yet.

The thing that has always impressed me the most about the Flat Earthers, the Obama Birthers, and the Westboro Baptist Churchers, is the depth of their beliefs. (Okay: maybe impressed isn’t the word I’m looking for; maybe flabbergasted would be more to the point). So, anyway, the thing that has always flabbergasted me about those people is how they genuinely seem to believe all of those hateful, misspelled signs they are carrying. And so, even though I generally despise the views they are espousing, I have to admit that it really does impress me how terrier-like they are in maintaining them.

In fact, so impressed was I with their doggedness in maintaining their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence that I used to think they must have some kind of a superpower (a lame superpower, to be sure—super cluelessness—but a superpower nonetheless). That was the only explanation that made sense to me. Surely, I thought, reality-denying of that magnitude was not possible for the average human to attain without some kind of help: there had to be something out of the ordinary going on for such devotion to nonsense to exist. A radioactive raccoon bite, maybe, or perhaps exposure to too much swamp gas. Or who knows, maybe even some serious Scientology—anything that would enable them to get that out of touch with reality. In other words, whether from inside the brain or out, I just figured they had to have some sort of chemical help.

And then, of course, I had a teenager, and I realized how wrong I was. Because once I had a teenager I realized that there are levels of denial that I had never even dreamed of, and that the people who think that the moon shot was faked, or that the Pyramids were built by aliens have got nothing on your average teenager.

Take seat belts, for example. Ever try and argue seat belt usage with a teenager? Forget about it: they are a a veritable font of misinformation on the subject.

“Put your seat belt on,” I’ll say, and the child who has been obligingly doing just that ever since she got out of her car seat will look over at me and say, with complete sincerity,

“You know, seat belts actually kill more people then they save every year.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“This guy at school. He’s a senior.”

“He’s an idiot. Put your seat belt on.”

“He’s not. He read it on this website.”

I’m so old I remember when the indisputable source was “my cousin’s girlfriend’s sister.” As in, “Dude, I’m telling you: my cousin knows this girl—well, I think it was his girlfriend’s sister or something—but she was actually on the grassy knoll. And she says that it was aliens that shot Kennedy. That other guy, though—he did shoot the Governor.”

The thing about a “cousin’s girlfriend’s sister” story was that at least it was relatively easy to debunk—a couple of probing questions and it would fall apart. (“Dude, I met your cousin: there’s no way he’s got a girlfriend.”) With the internet, though, it’s a little more difficult: there probably really is a website out there that advises against seat belt use. In fact, it’s probably right next to one where the Westboro Baptist Church gets their “facts.”

Who knows, maybe one day there will be a bit of confusion and everyone from that church will drive to a funeral protest without wearing their seat belts.

We can always hope.

There’s one thing that has always bothered me about the “little old lady who swallowed a fly” song. (Well, to be honest, there’s lots of things that bother me about that song, but I’m only going to discuss one of them at the moment.) I can understand swallowing the fly (who hasn’t inhaled a bug at some point in their lives?), and I can kind of understand swallowing the spider to catch the fly. Heck, I can maybe even understand swallowing the bird to catch the spider—but the cat? Really? I think at that point most people would just cut their losses and live with the situation. (Or go to the ER.) Or at least, that’s what I used to think, until I saw what happened when my daughter’s boyfriend lost his cellphone inside her room.

The first thing you need to know—and what anyone who has ever been in my daughter, Clementine’s room and lived to tell the tale will tell you—is how easy it is for such a thing to happen. And so, in the beginning, everyone was calm: the boyfriend simply asked to borrow Clementine’s cellphone so he could he could call his; alas, hers was also lost somewhere inside the room. So then he borrowed mine. And promptly lost it. Inside the room. Now, while most people would start to suspect that they were the victim of a malicious poltergeist, and maybe call for an exorcist (or an exterminator), he did neither, and instead borrowed another phone.

I think you can see where this story is going. (Even though, obviously, he couldn’t).

The question, of course, at this point becomes “Exactly how big is her room?” I mean,
to lose that many ringing cellphones, you’d think that you were talking about an area the size of the Bermuda Triangle. Curiously enough, though, by most estimations her room is just a little bit larger than the average walk-in closet. So how, you may ask, is it possible to lose that many phones in a room the size of a Yugo? The answer, unfortunately, is filth.

The sheer volume of filth that fills her room manages to double, triple, and quadruple the amount of surface area to the point where looking for a cellphone in her room is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s more like looking for a severed head in a landfill. Or at least, it’s equally disgusting. Because what’s the worst thing you’re going to find when you’re going through a haystack? Hay, right? When going through Clementine’s room, hay would be the best case scenario. Worst—and more likely—would be a dead pony, pressed flat between the layers of debris like some kind of grotesque flower. (I saw that on an episode of “Hoarders” once, except it was a cat. Still gross.)

Actually, it was a cat that finally ended up forcing her to clean her room and find the phones. Not a dead one, though. A very much alive one. One that was so alive that it decided to take a dump somewhere in her room. (I found the cat leavings when I was in there looking, unsuccessfully, for the phones myself. And then refused to tell her where it was).

Perhaps it was the last remnants of humanity left inside of her (after fighting against assimilation by the teenage collective), but that ploy actually worked: she cleaned her room, and found the phones. Of course, within days it was filthy again, and things like remotes (and yes, phones) were once more going missing. I considered feeding the cat about a pound of tuna and then locking it in her room to inspire a repeat performance, but was afraid I’d just end up losing the cat.

Come to think of it, maybe I can see the Little Old Lady’s point after all.

I’ve heard it said that the way you spend New Year’s Day is a good indication of how you are going to spend the rest of your year. If that is true, then I give up: I certainly don’t want to spend an entire year vacuuming up cheese balls and scrubbing silly string off of the walls. Yeah, you guessed it: I had a New Year’s Eve party this year, and if you’re wondering why you didn’t get your invitation, don’t. I didn’t get one either, because, as it turns out, it wasn’t so much that I had a New Year’s Eve party as that my house did. That’s right: I wasn’t there.

The funny thing was that my husband had been saying for weeks that he wanted to have a New Year’s Eve party, and I had just kept saying “no.”

“You think you want one now,” I said, “but just wait until you have to clean up after it the next morning.” I painted a convincing enough picture of doom and destruction that I managed to talk him out of it, something he reminded me of the next day when we were gathering up glasses (all thirty-one of them) from the various nooks, crannies, bookshelves, backs of toilets and couches where they had been stashed. (Yes, I counted them, because all thirty-one of them had to be washed. By me. I was actually a little impressed; I hadn’t known we even had thirty-one glasses. But then again, I guess I hadn’t ever really considered a vase to be in the “glass” category before, either. It’s probably a good thing I’m not one of those people who keeps Grandma’s ashes in an urn on the mantel.)

“Hey,” I told him, when he complained about finding a bottle of root beer on the roof, “you’re the one who wanted to have a party.”

“Yeah,” he shot back, “but I kind of wanted to be home when it happened.”

And therein lay the problem. In the absence of a party at home my husband and I had decided to go out on New Year’s Eve. Which is why our daughter, Clementine, asked if she could have a few people over while we were gone.

“How many?” we had asked her, instantly suspicious.

“Just two or three,” she had replied, the very picture of wholesome innocence.

Hmm. That sounded reasonable, we thought. After all, you really need at least four people to have any kind of fun. Think about it: any less than four and there’s not enough of a fight over Boardwalk and Park Place when you’re playing Monopoly. And forget about UNO—“skip” and “reverse” just don’t have the same punch in a UNO game with less than four. That was my thinking, at least.

Of course, the way things turned out, the only way the Monopoly game would have gotten used that night was if someone had decided to use the thimble and top hat for micro shots. Which, in fact, may have happened—I guess I’ll know for sure the next time I have a hankering to visit Marvin Gardens.

In Clementine’s defense, she didn’t actually invite all of the people who showed up. “Every time I came out of the bathroom there were another twenty people here.” My first response to that was, “Well, then, you should have stopped going to the bathroom,” but one glance at the thirty-one—thirty-one!—glasses lined up on the kitchen counter and I realized that not going to the bathroom probably wasn’t an option for anyone there that night.

Come to think of it, two bathrooms aren’t a lot for thirty-one people. I sure hope all of those glasses were used to hold drinks. Because that would be an even worse way to spend the New Year.

So, according to Wikipedia (and, as we all know, Wikipedia is always right), an eagles’ eyesight is so sharp that they can spot a rabbit moving through the brush from up to a mile away. To put this into perspective, this means that their vision is approximately six to ten times better than that of the sharpest human; or, to put it another way, that their vision is approximately ten million times better than that of the sharpest teenager girl.

I don’t know: maybe it’s also the same for teenage boys—after all, there are plenty of jokes out there about “going blind”—but since I only have a teenage girl (so far), I only know about the (ahem) fairer sex. And let me tell you, from where I sit, the fairer sex is pretty damn blind.

Or perhaps I should say, “from where I perch,” since in my house there is no place to sit: all of the flat surfaces have long been overtaken by huge piles of crap. Huge, invisible-to-the-teenage-eye piles of crap, that is. Take Clementine’s bathroom, for example (no, really: please just take it away). As a rule, I usually wait to issue the order to “get all of your crap off of your bathroom floor” until her clothes, magazines and empty Manic Panic jars start to mount higher than the sink. At that point she will go in, crash around for a few minutes, and then storm out, leaving the dirty clothes hamper full to the level of the towel rack with things like shoes, raincoats, and math books. The floor, however, will still be ankle deep in detritus.

“No,” I’ll say. “I want you to pick up all of it. And put it away where it belongs.”
With a heavy sigh she’ll march back in, scoop up the top layer from the floor, dump it on the couch, and then slam back into her room.

At this point my voice, never too pleasant to begin with, will start to take on a distinct upper crust British sneer. I’m not sure where it comes from: I think I’m channeling that one show—what’s it called? “Super Naggy?”

“PICK IT UP. ALL. OF. IT.”

Another sigh from her. “What? I don’t see anything else.”

And the thing is, she doesn’t. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that she insists on “cleaning” the bathroom with the light off. (We don’t call her “Little Lawyer” for nothing. I can almost see the wheels turning in her head as she pictures herself up on the stand, the ghost of Johnnie Cochrane making his case to the judge: “Your honor, I ask you—how could my client possibly be responsible for scrubbing the toothpaste off of the sink when she couldn’t even see the sink? Without any light, the bathroom looks all right.”)

But the other part of it is that she really doesn’t see it. The same way that we, as humans, can look at a field that is teeming with rabbits and only see scrub, she can look at a bathroom that is crawling with filth and only see tile.

Who knows? Maybe there’s some evolutionary reason for this: maybe the same way that teenage boys are supposed to be risk takers is because it is hard-wired into their brains to go after wooly mammoths and such, maybe teenage girls are supposed to be slobs because it is hard-wired into their brains to ignore piles of wooly mammoth guts and other crap on the floor of their cave.

Or maybe there’s no clear explanation for it at all. Maybe teenage girls are just slobs. I’m sure that’s what it says on Wikipedia.

There is a story about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford that involves the two great inventors spending the day together at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair. It seems that, after walking around and looking at the exhibits for nearly eight hours, they both realized at approximately the same time that they had promised to meet their wives for tea much earlier. This event, which was reported in the local papers, was looked upon with benevolent amusement by all—with the possible exception of their wives—as just another example of the quirky workings of two great minds.

Surely, the thinking went at the time, two such great men shouldn’t have to bother with trivial things like remembering what time they promised to meet their wives for tea. They had already given us electric light and affordable cars—what more could we possibly expect from them?

I was thinking of this story the other day when I came home from work to find my kitchen in its usual chaotic state, with the fridge door gaping open, the milk jug sitting on the counter, and the lid on the floor. Next to the milk, providing more than a little clue as to why it was out, was a trail of cereal leading all along the counter and back to the cabinet, where a box of the same cereal lay tipped over on its side, more cereal spilling out onto the floor. The whole thing had the air of a brutal breakfast crime scene (one where the cereal was the intended victim and the milk simply an unfortunate witness), but of course, having seen this same scene many times before, I realized it was neither: instead, it was simply the remains of Clementine’s breakfast.

You might wonder, reading this, why we tolerate such slovenliness in our house—you might even assume, given the magnitude of the mess, that we encourage it—but I assure you that the answer to both is the same: we don’t. Believe me: as many times as we have come home to this terrible scene we have chastised Clementine about it. But no matter how upset we get, or what we threaten her with, in the end her answer is always a variation of the same theme: “I’m not like you: I have better things to think about than making sure all of the cereal is off of the floor.”

She always says this so dramatically, and in such a please-don’t-bore-me-with-your-bourgeois-sensibilities tone, that I can’t help but be reminded of the pair of errant inventors, sacrificing their amicable marital relationships in order to bring us cruise control and the electric chair. And I can’t help but wonder what invention of equal importance Clementine must be working on to justify turning my kitchen into a cereal wasteland every morning.

Who knows? Perhaps she is working on how to make a blacker form of black. Or perhaps she is mapping out the location of the lost eyeliner mines of the Incas. Or perhaps she is even pondering what must surely be the greatest teenage conundrum of all time: why are my parents always on my case about stupid stuff like homework and cereal?

Of course, perhaps I am maligning her. Perhaps what she is really thinking about is the cereal; perhaps all this time she actually has been working on the problem of how to get the cereal out of the box and into the bowl without spilling it on the floor, and these daily trails are just proof of the failure of yet another one of her Rube Goldberg-like inventions.

It could be happening that way. After all, wasn’t it Edison who said, “I have not failed; I have just found ten thousand ways that don’t work”? Which means, at that rate, I’ll only be cleaning up cereal for another thirteen years.

Well, it happened again last night. Somehow, although I had locked all of the doors and the windows, they got back into the house and made a huge mess in the kitchen again. When I woke up this morning there were cereal boxes that had been ripped open and emptied, ramen noodles scattered on the floor, and as for the cookies I had just baked last night? Forget about it.

I suspect, of course, that Clementine has been letting them in. She thinks they’re cute. We all did, at first, and who could blame us? Those dark black circles around their eyes and that bushy hair that stuck straight up made them look like some sort of emo toddlers. And then, the way they would use their little hands to root through the cabinets for food was so cute that it was almost human. And, of course, there was that look they got in their eyes; sometimes, on those rare occasions when they would look straight at you, I swear you could catch a glimpse of something almost like intelligence in there.

But the fact is they’re wild animals, and they belong outside. In the long run, it does neither them or us any good to let them inside, because if one thing is certain, it’s that where they go, trouble always follows. Still, even I had to admit that they were pretty cute, and that it was with quite the heavy heart that I eventually went online to look for ways to get rid of them.

I didn’t have to look far before I found a website called Get Rid of Things dot com that sounded perfect. (Sadly, the fact that it was so easy to find the site only confirmed their status as vermin in my mind). One click later and I was reading the following advice: “Although often portrayed in movies as cute, curious, and smart as the dickens, what movies fail to show us is what an incredible pain in the ass they can be. They are quite at home in the middle of towns and cities, and because of their dexterity, they are quite adept at dumpster diving. Also, they are omnivorous, and will eat fruit, fish, meat, veggies, bugs, lo mein, jello, slim jims and just about anything else they can get their little paws on.”

The website then went on to offer the following advice for keeping them away.

1.)Protect your trash.

2.)Keep your yard clean.

3.)Make them feel unwelcome.

4.)Scare them away.

5.)Trap and relocate them.

Then the website went on to mention things like lacing the area with ammonia or predator urine, putting up scarecrows, and, as a last resort, shooting and killing them. While I thought the last few bits of advice were a little over the top, I was downright appalled at the final one. After all, as annoying as I find them to be sometimes, I still don’t think it’s legal to kill them. Even with a permit.

And then I realized that I had gone to the wrong How To Get Rid of Things page. I had thought I was on the one about teenage boys, but as it turns out, I was on the one about raccoons.

Eh. Except for the killing part, all of the advice still seemed spot on: in fact, I went back online to see if I could find a reliable source for some teenage boy predator urine. That was before I remembered that I’m already living with the perfect source: the father of a teenage girl. Now I just wonder how hard it’s going to be to convince my husband to pee into a cup.