Soft Generation?

I am not yet 40, but I really think I am officially old. I don't feel old. I don't look (too) old, save for a few grey hairs creeping in. And I definitely don't want to act old too often (as my wife can attest). But, I am afraid that I am inescapably old due to the fact that I keep uttering one of the the Old People Pledges of Allegiance: "Kids today are soft." "They have no idea how good they have it." And the classic, "When I was their age [insert rambling discourse on how difficult your life was in the mid '80s compared to how easy kids have it today]..." You can't claim to be young and still insist on carrying on a conversation that begins with an Old People Pledge. If you are volleying a complaint about a generation below you, you are officially old.

Now, there are varying degrees of olditude, so the mere fact that you are acknowledging that you are old doesn't put you immediately into God's Waiting Room, but it does make you old. Never once in my 20s did I utter an Old People Pledge, because I was too busy having fun and starting a career to be concerned with the teenagers coming up behind me. And in my young to mid thirties, I was frankly too sleep deprived from starting a family to care what was going on in the generations below me. No, it wasn't until my late thirties that I started to even notice the generations below me, and a few more years after that to utter an Old People Pledge. But now that I'm here, well, you have to jump in with both feet, right? So I'll go ahead and say it: I can't freaking believe that many colleges are not requiring SAT scores of their applicants. Are you kidding me?? One of the most nerve-racking, nausea-inducing, your-whole-future-may-hang-in-the-balance-if-you-blow-this-test moments of my youth will now be a tape deck, or VCR to these kids - something they know existed a while ago, but they can't quite remember why. I mean, when I was there age (Pledge!) we spent the better part of two years taking the PSATs, preparation courses, pre-tests, and then took the SATs, usually multiple times. It was a right of passage to completely bomb one of the exams to such an extent that you convinced yourself you'd never get into college and you'd be digging ditches for the rest of your life. And the Rolodex of excuses you created for discussions with your friends, parents, teachers, and college admission directors was a work of art that you carefully honed and edited, and memorized: "Well, I really concentrated on Verbal this time, so my Math should really come up big time when I take it again." Or, "I'm not very good at standardized tests." Or, "I was absolutely killing it, and I ran out of time." And then there were the horror stories of the kid that so and so knew who screwed up the answer key and all of his answers were off by one line. Terrifying for a 17 year old with college ambitions. And so what if it was biased and didn't really accurately test how smart you were! that's not the point! the point is, it was a rite of passage that everyone had to go through and it either broke you or made you stronger. And now? Nada.

It is bad enough that there is no dodge ball in gym class anymore, no jungle gyms on the playground, and every organized sport up until junior high ends in a freaking tie, so none of the kids will ever have to lose at anything (God forbid!), now we'll soon have an entire generation who doesn't know the pressure of the SATs. Now wonder we are getting our butts kicked by economies all over the world! Plus, where else except an SAT prep course will you learn cool words that sound great, but you can never pull off in normal conversation? Words like ennui (melancholy), eschewed (abstained), and cadre (basic unit). If the next generation is happy at another friend's misfortune, they will never know they are experiencing schadenfreude, and a great story-teller will be just that, he will not be a raconteur. Yes, the SAT will slide off into history like so much detritus. And me? Well, I'll be on a train that leaves New York at 3:00pm traveling 50 m.p.h., arriving in Chicago at a time no teenager will be able to figure out.

Parental Guilt

So our youngest daughter came home from nursery school the other day with one of those handprint/poem thingys that they love to spring on you every year. Now, the kids have each had fantastic teachers over the years, so I don't want to sound ungrateful, but it is a wee bit presumptuous of a teacher to send home parenting advice in the form of a four-year old's art project, don't you think? Like I need any more people in my life laying a guilt trip on me. All of a sudden I am being told what I can be upset at my kids about? I have an idea - maybe my three kids can go over to their house for a month and coat their bathroom in a healthy layer of toothpaste, and spill milk, chocolate milk, lemonade, water, juice box, maple syrup, and three unknown, random, but incredibly sticky liquids on every piece of furniture they own. Then they can find melted candy bar, gummy worms, potato chip crumbs, half eaten lollipops, and chewing gum in their car. Then, my kids can ruin their $3000 paint jobs by creating Sharpie marker 'murals' on their walls. Then my kids can each run through a field covered in dog doo and goose crap and drag that mess onto every rug and carpet in their house until the whole place smells like the backroom of a kennel in August. Then, when they are absolutely about to go ballistic, I will hand them a laminated handprint and pithy poem that says "please don't be mad at me because I'm little and I'll be big soon", and see who they try to strangle first - the kids or the idiot who handed them this freaking poem!

I love the idea that being four years old is some kind of get out of jail free card. What, being four is suddenly a license to trash my house? At what age am I allowed to be upset with them oh Ye of Infinite Patience? Does there come a point where denting my car with a tennis racket becomes a punishable offense? Or am I to look the other way for all eternity because someday they will be older and ticking me off about more important things? So kindly save the guilt trip for someone else and just send home the egg carton caterpillars. Or so help me, I'll send my four year old to your house on a 95 degree August day eating the biggest Popsicle you have ever seen in your life.