Sunday, July 02, 2006

4th of July, mise en place

To start our holiday weekend, on Friday (or Saturday morning, really), my older son got arrested for tagging, not the folksonomy kind, the graffiti kind. Too bad he didn't stick to cardboard ... since we live in a smallish city, without a lot of blighted industrial areas that are actually improved with graffiti, graffiti is a big ticket here, because kids are making their mark on private property, or even worse, state government or university buildings that are sandstone or brick and historic and hard to clean.

John's mark

And after I got done writing this post about my kid getting arrested, I went to check on my brother's blog, and read about him taking his kid to a baseball game. His post made me think a bunch of things 1) I wish I was as good a writer as he is; 2) I need to explain to him how he will become a bad parent* when his kid is a teenager; and 3) one of the good things about the slow-movingness of baseball is that people can talk during the game - for example we recently talked about World Cup soccer while the Brewers were trying to beat the Minnesota Twins.

*When your kids are little, you can be a good parent - you are hip, you are coping, dealing with your job and the needs of the small tyrants in your life; when they have tantrums, well, little kids are like that. When your kids are teenagers and out getting drunk and doing drugs and vandalizing, it is obviously because you are a bad parent who never gave them any moral principles - it couldn't possibly be because teenagers tend to make stupid choices, no matter how carefully parents try to raise them, instilling values and common sense.

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