My amount of enjoyment from the MGMT song "Kids" is the same as the amount of displeasure that actual children bring me. Sure, occasionally, a friend of mine has a kid who I like to see, and sure, there's the occasional stray child who does something cute or hilarious in public, but on the whole, I still find kids to be awful.
(I was going to have a picture here, but immediately regretted my decision to image search for "three year old child" in public. So...no picture)
As I was waiting to fly to San Francisco the other day, some parents were sitting nearby with their two kids; one fourteen months old (as she kept begrudgingly telling people) and one probably three or four, maybe five-- I don't know, I've always been terrible at knowing how old kids are. This one could talk, but still looked like his dome had some resizing to do, so what's that, three? Anyway, the parents looked exhausted, frustrated, and bored as they absently agreed with their children and told them to sit still.
Here's the thing about kids: they're basically retarded. I know they're just developing and all that, but, for all intents and purposes, they are the equivalent of the mentally challenged. Think about it: when someone has a mentally-disabled teen and you ask, "How old is he?" and they reply, "Well, he's fifteen, but he has the mental and learning capacity of a five year old," your internal reaction is, "Oh my!" Ok, well kids are ACTUALLY that old. A three, four, and five year old have the mental capacity of a three, four, and five year old. The only difference is that nobody refers to a five year old as having, "The same mental capacity as a retarded fifteen year old."
So, it didn't surprise me when this kid started saying dumb shit. First, it was, "I want that toy! I want that toy! I want that toy!" to which the parents replied, "You can't have it now, but you can definitely have it for your birthday," which went over about as well as the Kevin James movie "Zookeeper."
The kid didn't understand and frankly, neither did I. If you can buy this kid something that will shut him up in the present, why hold out for his birthday to give him something he probably won't even want anymore? Just give the kid the toy and on his birthday, make it very clear that he got one less gift because of it. I'm not going to be with your screaming child on his birthday, but I am going to be on his flight for the next six hours of our lives.
Eventually, the kid shifted his line of chatter. This was either because he got bored with it or because he decided to exact revenge in the form of obscenely redundant chatter. He started listing what each of the transformers from the movie did, only because he's an idiot, he just went back and forth between two, shouting each out for all the hear.
"BUMBLEBEE TURNS INTO A CAR!"
"Ok, honey."
"BUMBLEBEE TURNS INTO A CAR!"
"Uh-huh."
"OPTIMUS PRIME TURNS INTO A BIG CAR!"
"Ok."
"BUMBLEBEE TURNS INTO A CAR!"
"..."
"OPTIMUS PRIME TURNS INTO A BIG CAR!"
"Yep."
"BUMBLEBEE-"
--And so on and on and on. And what infuriated me the most, and what made me positive that I'm not ready to have a kid, wasn't the redundancy, and it wasn't the shouting; it was the fact that this stupid brat was WRONG. And the parents weren't correcting him (and probably weren't paying any attention at all to the actual words, but simply were agreeing habitually like me whenever a waiter or waitress describes for me a daily special that begins with any kind of fish). The parents were simply letting this kid shout about Transformers, while I sat there, wanting desperately to turn and yell at the kid, "NO, Optimus Prime wasn't a BIG CAR, he was a fucking TRUCK! A big RIG!"
("Were we so different? They're a young species. They have much to learn. But I've seen goodness in them. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. You all know there's only one way to end this war: we must destroy the Cube. If all else fails, I will unite it with the spark in my chest." Ok, the last couple of sentences aren't relevant, other than the fact that the dialogue sampled there shows how mentally-disabled the Transformers movies are...)
Of course, that would make me the weird one-- the guy shouting at a small child for being wrong about an inconsequential bit of trivia. And that urge, to shout at the child instead of retreating into what must be an ever diminishing hellscape of a parental mind-cave, is what separates me from those parents, and what tells me I'm still not ready for a child of my own.
"KIDS TURN INTO PEOPLE!?",
Witz
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1 comment:
When you have kids, make sure you spend time with them and raise them the way you want them to be. Kind of like a dog. If you ignore it, it becomes obnoxious.
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