Rat Traps and Broomsticks and Why the Children of Tomorrow Will Be Failures

Today's children are so overprotected, they can't play with anything anymore and have become completely insulated from the real world. For example my older cousins have a few kids between them now and they literally have no childhood.

Me: I brought baby  ______ a stuffed tiger!

Cousin: Ohhhhhhhhh sorry, we can't accept that, the fur is partially made from polyester and that can be irritating to the baby's soft skin, we don't believe in using synthetic fibres around our baby

Me: Oooooookkkkkkk...well I also got ______ this transformer toy....it's a robot...and a car...little boys like that right? There's no small parts it even says so on the packaging!

Cousin: We only let _____ play with educational toys. His leappad teaches him both reading and math skills.

Me:..............what. the. fuck. (this part was only in my mind)

Cousins: Bitch probably bought that piece of shit at Walmart

These children have ended up so sheltered that a trip to the park reduces them to tears. They don't know how to deal with life, they are too soft. Every fall, every bump, is a traumatic experience. When I was a kid my mom would release my brother and I at the park to run like free range children with the neighbour kids while she and the other moms took what I can only assume was a much needed break from us. I have so many scars accumulated in my childhood from god knows what but it didn't hurt me in the long run!

Not that I'm saying we need to go back to having a wood-burning kit in every home (I never had one, I was too young but both my parents did and I found one at my grandparent's house, it was awesome and extremely dangerous since a) you were literally burning designs into blocks of wood with a piece of hot metal and b) the power cords on them were so short you were guaranteed to be playing with it directly beneath an extremely flammable curtain) but come on people let your children live a bit!

Please note I am not recommending this product for children simply commenting on it's awesomeness

When I was a child we would go over to the afore mentioned cousins' house and my uncle would herd my brother and I into the basement and set up a dozen rat traps. REAL rat traps which could easily take off a finger. 

Rat trap i.e. finger eating machine/hours of fun! Though in hindsight I wonder how sanitary this all was since they were all obviously used to murder intruding rats...most were oddly discoloured now that I think about it.

He would then give my brother and I each a broomstick return to the adults upstairs while we tore around the unfinished basement smacking rat traps with broom handles. It was exhilarating. Sometimes the traps would jump into the air after being released and we would whoop gleefully and sometimes they would get stuck on the broom handles in which case we would use our tiny hands to try and pry these finger hungry death machines off of them so we could continue our game. Once we had succeeded in setting them all off we would race upstairs to tell our uncle to set them all up again. 

We did this from the ages of ~5-10...completely unsupervised...in a basement where there were likely actual rats...

Scary rat is angry at us for joyfully flaunting our murderous power

Once again I'm not recommending this to parents but in the 5 or so years my brother and I spent setting off rat traps in my uncle's basement we never once hurt ourselves. And this was only about 10-15 years ago, what happened in the short interim between my childhood and my current adulthood that completely revamped the way we raised children?

Now they cut down on children's homework in elementary school because it's too stressful, they don't give failing grades anymore, hell you can't even be cut from a school team because everyone should get a chance to play so everyone who tries out makes it (this may not be true everywhere but my aunt who has two young children currently enrolled in elementary school has told me this is happening in her school district). There's no competition! It's all for fun, that's not what the real world is like! If everyone is special, then no one is (loosely paraphrased from The Incredibles) and that is boring and setting children up to be failures.

Some people will be better at somethings than you will  be, these people will be better at everything than you will ever be at anything. Accept it.

So parents give your kids a fighting chance in the world today and, even if you are still anti-rat trap, let them try out for a sport and, if they don't make it, try not calling the teacher to complain and insist your son make the soccer team. He didn't make it because he wasn't as good as the other kids, so now he can be inspired to practice and he'll be better next year when he tries out again. Let them go on the monkey bars and if they fall so what? They can suck it up, and they'll be better for it.

Abuelita

My abuelita called me the other day and I was ecstatic. She is my absolute favourite person in the entire world and we hadn't spoken in ages but she's getting older and sometimes I wonder if she's really all there.

After the usual pleasantries regarding her recent trip (my abuelos had just come back from a 4 month vacation to visit our family in Spain) she asked me a seemingly innocuous question:


Did you go to mass on Sunday?


Oh fuck.

Suddenly I was struck with intense feelings of guilt, not the Catholic guilt you would imagine (despite growing up in a staunchly Roman Catholic family and attending Catholic school from kindergarden until grade 12 I have always considered myself an atheist) but guilt that my little Spanish grandmother had developed Alzheimer's in the time she'd been away and I would have to break her heart all over again by reminding her I never go to church because I am a filthy heathen who doesn't believe in God.

I thought about lying to her but then I started to get all panicky about being caught. I am a very bad liar. All it would take was one word to my mother and she would laugh about my heretic ways and how entering a church would surely cause me to spontaneously combust (this is one of her favourite little jokes). And that would just destroy my already fragile, rosary kissing abuelita! No I had to do it, I had to tell her the truth.

I could barely whisper into the phone: No


The pause seemed to stretch forever until I heard her sigh and say in her Castillian accent

No? 
Me neither. I guess neither of us are going to heaven.


...?

Thanks abuelita...at least we'll be together I suppose.

Adult Face

This summer I had a traumatic epiphany which I subsequently forgot about until two weeks ago and I thought it might be worth sharing with the masses or whatever.

I was back home living with my parents for the summer when I happened upon some pictures of me from my childhood. I was fucking adorable (they were from approx. 1992-1996, the height of my cuteness, none  of that bullshit fugly me that came after). I sat there in my father's den thinking "what the fuck happened to me?! I had so much potential and it all worked out to this? What a shit deal".

I carried the photo over to the full length mirror in the hall and put it up next to my face for comparison. I stared into the mirror and thought to myself: "There's still hope! That potential must be in there somewhere!" Then it hit me. There was no hope. This is it...this is my adult face and it's as good as it's going to get.

I'm sure some of you out there are thinking: "You're not an adult, you're only 21! You're basically still a child!" And you're probably right considering I am still confused for a 16 year old and constantly carded, not just at bars or the liquor store, but occasionally for R rated movies due to my small stature and child-like features. But to a child, reaching your 20's was synonymous with being an adult, as such, I would have considered my current self old. And as a dishearteningly awkward and unattractive child of 10 (this "phase" continued until I finally replaced my glasses with contacts and got rid of my braces...though who's to say it's truly over even now?) I nurtured a secret hope that I would one day blossom into a mature and beautiful woman; that this horrible time in my existence could be justified as the ugly duckling intermediate to my swan adult face.

All I could do was look and the mirror and think: "This? This is what I've been waiting for!? What the kind of fucking cruel joke is this?! It can only get worse from here, wrinkles and shit!" I took one last hard look at myself...and burst into tears.

That was how my mother found me, sitting in the front hall and sobbing, clutching the picture to my chest. It was not my finest moment (though definitely not my worst in that hall). My mother, full of maternal sympathy asked me what was wrong and once I had managed to choke it out she looked at me with the expression normally saved for when I come home a drunken mess and told me to get a hold of myself before leaving for her evening tennis.

Every once in a while though I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and am again disappointed by my sad excuse for an adult face...that is until I switch the channel to 16 and Pregnant and joyfully think, who cares what I look like?! At least I'm not them, bitch has a fucking baby! At 21 I can officially say I beat teen pregnancy, I win and all those Farrah's and Amber's out there can suck it! It's hard to feel down on yourself after that.

Hello one and all (or more likely, hello solely to future me)!

Seeing as this is my first ever attempt at blogging I suppose I had best give my readers (how ever imaginary or unlikely they may be) a quick background on who I am and why I am writing this blog.

Let's start with the latter. I have been told many times I have the memory of a goldfish so I figured that a blog would be the best way for me to remember my "golden years." This way when I am old and children tremble at the thought of retrieving toys from my yard for fear I may eat them, I can remind my self (and anyone who will listen) that I was once moderately cool. 

At the very least that's what I'll tell them as I regale them with stories of my past while they (whoever "they" are) slowly shrivel up and die on the inside knowing that I have conned them into spending an uncomfortable amount of time with a weird old lady who likely smells faintly of death and old cheese (what a lovely picture I've painted of future me). 

Also, if I don't start writing some of this down now I may explode.

I guess I should say a little bit about myself. I am a 21 year old, female university student in Canada. I come from a caucasian, upper-middle class suburban family. I am a bit of a nerd. I currently live at school in a house with three other girls (they shall remain nameless until I can think of a proper pseudonym for them). This is our 3rd year in this house and we all met in residence during 1st year. I am also slightly neurotic, hence the vagueness of this post. I live in fear that what I write will somehow be traced back to me since some of it could be rather NSFW (I haven't really shown it yet but I swear a lot and a disturbing amount of my stories involve some form of alcohol) and I would like to one day become a real adult and have a job and make money and do whatever else it is that real adults do. 

In short please know now that all names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved (mostly me). 

If anyone is still reading this I applaud you because this was boring as shit. I promise to try and do better for future posting. 

-SN

P.S. Happy Halloween? I guess technically it is since it is 4:21 am . Fuck school tomorrow. Actually I'll probably still go since it's only 1 class and I pay for this shit.