Miscellany

I hate spiders. Too many legs. Unneccessary.

I went on the preliminary nature walk the other day, so as to have a basic idea of what the kids will be doing on their photo hikes (grade-specific challenge at the museum in which I work), and part of the plant-identifying portion was feeling the leaves of the plants to test for insect-repellability and water retention. I reached out at one point to touch the leaves of the lovely lantana flowering bush when I noticed, not an inch away from my finger and no less thick, was a green spider perfectly camouflaged among the greenery. I flipped out, as did the head of education who witnessed the encounter.

I don't know why I dislike spiders so. Being as into zoology as I am, I find them interesting, even beautiful, but put next to one I freak the hell out. I was gunshy for the rest of the trip, meticulously checking each leaf I was about to touch and every leaf in a foot-wide radius from it. Just now, a spider came running out from under this desk and scurried for the steps into the dining room. It's now history. Hell, it's geography.

There's a coloring book in the store at work. It's filled with pictures of drangonflies, butterflies, beetles, and particularly hideous visions of arachnids. There's a ton of merchandise in the store that's arthropod-related, ranging from coloring books to transformers to snacks. Yes, snacks. Made of bugs.

Nobody said they were selling.

It's funny, but these blanket marketing angles toward children, while seeming patronizing and underestimating, are sadly pretty indicative of pre-teen desires. You get some bugs, some dinosaurs, random things that look like some underwater echidnoderm that will slosh around in your hand and some tub or another of a viscous material that makes a fart noise and you've just made an executive gift basket for the juvenile Academy Awards.

Having played Santa Claus at our Christmas event this year, I was privvy to a lot of the requests proferred to my person (the best being one little boy who asked for a real live horse, whose brother then asked for a puppy, had felt the need to one-up his brother and asked for a puppy that would grow into a real-live horse), and you'd be amazed at the narrowness of the requests made. It was really nice grouping in a statistician's sense.

Bionicle, Bratz merchandise, Yu-gi-oh.... maybe three or four others outside of public-domain-gifts (pets, "cars/trucks," good will towards men...). As much as we'd all like to float around our world with the idea that we're all beautiful snowflakes, each different and special, we need only to look to our youth here in America to see how pigeon-holed we've become. There are eight, literally about eight things out there that EVERY kid wants at least one of, and out of so many kids with such a variety of personality and upbringing and means, you'd think there'd be more variation. But there isn't. Weird.

I don't know if this speaks to marketing executives pushing their products on the kids. I don't know if this speaks to humans as a whole not being as individual and complicated as we'd like to believe, and only is this acutely visible during our sipler, larval state. I don't know if this speaks to the marketing executives affecting our lives to such an extent that they have created these mindless Children of the Consumer that are so swayed by whatever trend happens to come along. Whatever it is, we are, from a young age, consolidating our independence as far as mass psycology is concerned. This merely helps to translate into religion as we get older, as hussied-up jailbait and warrior robots are traded in for Jesus.

And yeah, who wouldn't want to get rid of the Aguileralites... but warrior robots? Is there no place for the battle-droid in our adult lives? In the aged heart, is there no room for the Transformers?!

Which brings me back to the coloring book. The first page of the coloring book is a beetle, then a butterfly, then a dragonfly, and so on. Then you get three beetles, then five dragonflies, than eight spiders, etc. Soon, to those flipping through it and not actually painstakingly filling in all the little shapes and crannies, the pictures begin to look familiar, as stencil after stencil is revealed to be differently-oriented reproductions of the same few images. Sometimes mirrored next to each other. Each one more complex from the mixing and overlapping, but nothing new or even indicative of fair amount of effort.

The coloring book seemed designed solely for the purpose of keeping the kid that gets it busy. Give him the coloring book for a while, a box of crayons (both reasonably cheap, much cheaper than a babysitter or daycare for damn sure) and let him occupy himself by trying to fill in all the little outlined sections with corresponding colors. Nothing stimulating, nothing even to challenge his motor skills or reaction time, like a video game. Just let him color within the lines and shut the hell up for a few hours. A few hours a day, if we can swing it.

The more I look at products aimed toward the youth of America, the more it seems like our goal as parents is to get these little shits out of our hair. And we wonder why they're underdeveloped. We wonder why they're slow learning to read. Why their incapable of independent thought. Why they've atrophied before they could even develop.

It's better to burn the core of a mind out by running it too hard than to let the battery die from disuse. You can always repair, but after a while, a dormant mind won't be able to start.

Also, what's with "Mystic River"? It's like they decided they'd add a thesis statement right there at the end and didn't want to add any subtextual backing of the postulate in the actual preceding film.