Stupid Cold

4-15-10

Morning. It is not good. The cold has won.

The last week or so I have been fighting this cold that seems to have infested our household. It was minor across the board, which made it tolerable. A few sniffles here and there, a sore throat but nothing a little tea couldn’t help, and the occasional need to bundle up. It wasn’t bad. Of course, it was lying to us all.

I made the mistake of underestimating its power. I let down my guard and stayed up late 2 nights in a row, lulled in by the melodic sounds of Adam and Glee. I crawled into bed last night and didn’t even hear more than 5 minutes of Hawkeye and BJ before I fell asleep. I didn’t know that I was now the perfect candidate for the cold to use to show how powerful it really was.

I woke up this morning, coughing up nasty for 5 minutes. I feel weak and light headed. My nose, although functional, has just enough congestion to warrant copious amounts of tissue. My head throbs and my throat feels like I swallowed some play doh and it is stuck around the edges. My eyes burn and their eyelids are fighting to stay closed. So far I have kept them open enough to function, but it has been tough.

I could go home. But really, I should just tough it out. I have some training (again) this morning, and you figure in a couple weeks I am taking a day off, so I shouldn’t bail. We will see how it goes today.

I may actually break my Spring Fest streak. I have a couple of reasons. One, it hasn’t been the same place it used to be when I was a kid. It hasn’t been that for a long time. It is now just a crappy carnival that happens once a year at Aviation. The rides are over priced. The games suck and the prizes suck harder. Even the craft booths are pretty weak. If I took the boys, they would want to go on a ride. So I would end up spending $25 bucks or more on rides. If they were going to go on rides, it would make more sense to go out to Disneyland since we already paid for that, and they are better rides! So my proposal is to hit up Disneyland first thing Sunday morning since that seems to be an excellent time to go.

We were watching the afternoon news yesterday when they covered the huge story of the day. There was some kind of sexting scandal at a local high school. Several teens were in trouble for naked pics of girls sent to them on their phones. Everyone is in an uproar and based on the tone of the story, you would have thought there had been another Columbine.

Holy fuck, it was annoying.

Ok, let’s try to break this down since I do understand that in reality we probably don’t want our teenaged kids showing naked pics of themselves, especially when they are in digital form, allowing them to be sent to the world with a few clicks of a phone. I would imagine there are plenty of fathers who would kill any boy who possessed a photograph of their naked daughter. I also maintain that there are plenty of fathers that would high five their sons if they had pictures of their teenage girlfriends.

But all that aside, is this really a story?

When I was 17 years old, at least a half dozen of my friends saw me naked, and not just in picture form. Mind you, I wasn’t sleeping with any of them. I wasn’t even romantically involved with them. It was harmless fun. Of course, I can safely say a couple of them regretted it the next day, but really, they have nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t think that anybody involved thought less of anyone that night. If anything, I think it was one of those fantastic stories that I will think fondly of for the rest of my life. My inhibitions were down, I was confident and I was awesome. Not to mention, I had a much better body back then and hell yeah, I got to flaunt it! Then again, some of said flaunting included mustard, so that wasn’t as cool.

A couple of years later, a group of teenaged friends and I were drunk at a party that also involved a naked night of wacky. A bit more happened, and somebody even brought out the camera to document our idiocy. Once again, looking back at that I crack up. My understanding is the photos were eventually destroyed (this was pre-digital, so it was way easier to burn), but I can safely say I wouldn’t care if they still existed. To me, they represented my own rebellion against being more prudish as a younger teen. Do you think people look back at pictures of themselves at Woodstock as a bad thing? They were probably stoned out of their mind, naked, muddy, and with a bunch of strangers. Who cares? I know that in both of my party experiences, no one was hurt.

So that brings us into the digital age and the now. With celebrity sex tapes being best sellers and Playboy being mainstream, who hasn’t seen naked people on a regular basis. Teenage boys no longer have to sneak looks at their dads’ skin mags because they can get far more racy stuff with a few clicks of the mouse. Hell, they can get more out of just turning on HBO! No amount of naked is shocking anymore to people.

My question then is, who does it hurt when some 16 year old snaps a shot of herself in the nude and sexts it to her boyfriend? Realistically, these two have probably already done the deed and I can safely say as a parent, I am pretty sure I would be less freaked out to see a naked pic of my kid than a naked pic of my kid in the act of things with the boyfriend. If the girl is foolish enough to assume that her boyfriend isn’t going to show every friend he knows what he is getting, then no amount of PSA’s are going to help her. She knows it will get out, and to some degree, she is ok with it.

Ok, obviously there are some laws out there that say you can’t have sex until you are 18. Or more specifically, you can’t get caught. Plus, there are laws saying pictures of underage kids is child porn.

Can we dive into that for a second? I don’t know the exact rules, and I am all for them when it involves the horrid things the bad people do. But when a 17 year old girl takes a picture of herself, is that really grounds for kiddie porn? The worst thing is that it isn’t the girls who get in as much trouble. It always seems like the guys who were sent the picture are in just as much trouble. But this picture can’t possibly be enough damning evidence to put these kids on some kind of sex offender list or expelled from school, or can it? I just don’t get it.

I know that we don’t fully comprehend the permanence of things posted on the net. When you post a picture of yourself these days, it is open to viewing from friends, family, employers, your church, predators, advertisers, kids, clowns, future boyfriends, former boyfriends, that guy who cuts your lawn, and who knows who else. We hear stories all the time of people not being hired, or even worse, fired because they have a picture on Facebook where they look drunk or are wearing some low cut top. It is bullshit on every level, but it is what happens. If you think a goofy shot of you taking a shot is bad, then think about the shot of you doing a body shot, naked on a table. I am thinking that is gobs worse in terms of people judging you.

Teens do not understand that despite the fact that it is completely unethical for employers to judge someone based on their free time, it isn’t something they can change by simply flooding the net with more images for them to be judged by. This country is really freaking conservative when it comes to certain things. We want so badly to be risqué and cool with our Girls Next Door and Girls Gone Wild, but really, we don’t want to be seen looking. These same teens who flash folks at bars are the same teens that will grow up into adults that will unfortunately condemn teens later for doing the exact same thing. No longer is it is just turn down that damn rock music, it is cover that boob up.

Our punishments for these kids shouldn’t be so severe. We need to let kids make these mistakes and own up to them. This is coming from a hard core helicopter parent, too. I don’t think a few naked pictures will end a career. Look at Vanessa Williams. Look at Drew Barrymore. Look at any number of people who have taken pictures of themselves and ended up doing just fine. It is all in how you deal with the photos. You can’t let one picture (or I am sure in the case of some of these girls, several) decide who you are. And we can’t let the court systems do this either.

A quick shout of to teenage boys, btw. Are you guys fucking idiots? Do you want to continue to get pics of your girlfriends? Do you high five your buddies when they get one? Didn’t you secretly praise every 16 year old who banged a hot teacher? If you want this trend to continue, stop being stupid by posting them on a web site. Dude, that is how you get caught, and it is a sure way to end all correspondence from any hot girl for a while.

Does society as a whole blame themselves on this? It is our fault. We make teenagers do so much more these days than even when I was one. They have gobs of school work. So much school work, mind you, that they are up late every night doing homework. Then there are the tests, and extra curricular activities that they need to have in order to get into a good college. They bust their asses to be allowed to pay big bucks to get a piece of paper that says they are now smart enough to work. Oh, and don’t bother to tell them just how many people they are up against in the job market. It is no longer good enough to be the best. You have to be the best of the best, with honors. And even then, it doesn’t guarantee you any security. And it isn’t just high school where you are under this much pressure. Hell, if you ask some people, my poor 5 year old is behind because he didn’t attend a really good preschool. Being a kid is no longer allowed. When you get to high school, you are practically an adult. So engaging in adult activities seems pretty reasonable when you think about it.

I don’t want to flat out say I am for sexting with teens. I think if teens are stupid enough to do it, then let them see how embarrassing it is for the entire school to see the picture of them butt naked with a crappy pose with bad lighting from a camera phone. And here is a thought, let the fucking parents deal with it!!!!!!!! This doesn’t need to be a law enforced thing right away. When your parents walked in on you and your boyfriend when you were making out when you were 16, did they call the cops? NO! They kicked the shit out of you and the boy, but it was taken care of in the home. Parents need to stop assuming the schools and the courts will teach their kids. You had a kid. You did stupid shit as a kid. Now is the best time to make up for the stupid shit by explaining to your son or daughter what happened to you when you did stupid shit. Hell, if you still want to be cool, then tell them the stupid shit and how much fun it was and how in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t make you a crappy person. Tell them how some things were sucky and how you wished you had done other things. Tell them good and bad stories and let them in on what it was like to be that age. And start gaining this relationship early. Too often kids are raised by cartoons and crappy teachers. Maybe step up and be a fucking parent once in a while.

I think my point on all of this is that if we keep making sexting so taboo, it will only mess up our kids even more. We let them watch movies where people are scalped and shot and maimed and who knows what else. We let them play video games for hours on end that zone them out while killing countless avatars. Is a naked pic so bad?

Seriously, I don’t think I will set up a college fund for the boys. I think I will just stick with a therapy fund. Mommy is crazy.

I wonder if I would look better as a man.

I need to open a bank account and call it my frivolous fund. I can put money in there when I can and it will be specifically for things like tattoos and other silly things that are happy making to me, but costly considering they don’t do anything specific.

I have a craving for pancakes.

My eyelashes are lame. I may need to start using mascara.

Do you think that Morse code operators try to figure out what their pounding headaches say?

This is one of those days were I am grateful no one comes to my cube. I can zone out pretty good and still make it look like I am working on something in case someone does come up to me.