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Family

I have written before about how I am not a parent. I have also written about how people seem to be getting more and more rude. I am starting to see how the two things are starting to correlate. It seems to me that at some point the entire point of being a parent got lost and the whole idea of setting up rules and teaching kids how to behave in public fell by the wayside. In turn, this has created a generation of people who honestly feel they don’t need to consider other people around them and that the entire world revolves around them.

Not long ago both of my parents went to a movie. As they sat a mother and her two children sat directly behind them. The young boy proceeded to then repeatedly kick the back of my mother’s chair. Repeated looks back in an attempt to notify the mother that her son was behaving rudely produced no response. At some point it was just better to move so they moved. My mother, however, informed the mother that she may want to take a moment to teach her son not to kick the backs of people’s chairs. The mother responded like a deer in the headlights and proceeded to let her son keep kicking the back of the chair throughout the rest of the movie.

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The Parent License

Submitted by Bryan Alaspa in Family

I am not a parent. This is probably regarded by the universe as a good thing, I would wager. I am depressingly single and my marriage ended rather badly and it was probably a good thing we never had kids. I am starting to think that too many people are having kids because they think they should instead of actually wanting to and I think this is a bad thing. Now, saying in that fashion probably makes it a sentence and an idea that you would agree with as well. It is a little bit like saying you are against child abuse. Sure, everyone is, but actually finding ways to stop it involves more work and invasions of privacy that make it less than feasible.

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Too Little, Too Late

Submitted by Nichole Hirt in Family

Why does it always seem that people (okay, family and friends) are only supportive of my endeavors after they have browbeat, belittled and shamed me into believing I am pursuing worthless goals and encourage me to give them up?

Here's how it usually goes...

Me: studied dance for years, finally became a member of a professional dance company after graduating high school.

Parents: Bitched every single day about the time and money my lessons cost, eventually made me pay for everything dance related with the money I earned working 30 hours a week while maintaining a 3.7 GPA, told me they would not send me to college if I majored in dance, rarely attended performances and never attended one of my performances as a professional dancer (my father never saw me dance, not one time... ever).

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The Best Holiday

Submitted by Bryan Alaspa in Family

When I was a kid the end-all and be-all of holidays had to be Christmas. I am guessing this is not an entirely shocking statement. Most people love Christmas, I would think, especially as a kid. If you were like me then you would plan and dream about your presents for what seemed like months in advance. Back when I was a kid I spent a lot of time looking through catalogs at toys. I would peer at the damn pictures of various Star Wars toy sets and day-dream about playing with the stupid things. Then it was just a matter of waiting and enduring the sleepless night before Christmas before tearing into the presents. By the end of the day, of course, you were pretty much bored with all of the toys and already planning for next year.

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THE SILENT TREATMENT

Submitted by chicagopoetry in Family

I'm getting sick and tired of Sirus' silent treatment.

As you probably know, Sirus lives in the cabinet beneath my bathroom sink. It's not my fault. He was simply getting too large to carry around like that. I had to wear him like a backpack at one point.

To think, he was born out of my earlobe. Well, maybe it wasn't technically the earlobe. Now that I've been on TV I have to be careful about what I say; I have to be ever so accurate. Everyone is watching and people love to take things out of context. Okay. It was actually a big lump in the greasy nook behind my ear. That lump was there for weeks and it was hurting, so I finally took it between my thumb and index finger and squeezed it and out popped Sirus within a squirt of blood and pus. As I was dabbing my ear with a ball of toilet paper, Sirus squirmed there on my right shoulder like a tiny boiled shrimp, sort of like a maggot with human facial features.