Conflicting Thoughts on Children

Today, I went out and did a little bit of last minute shopping for my brother. I looked at the gifts that I had already purchased and tried to weigh them versus how much I respect and honor him. It’s hard to buy the right level of gift to show that he maintains his place in the hierarchy of family and friends.

While I was out at some of the stores, I realized why it was that I started making sure that I do most of my Christmas shopping online. I’m not good with large crowds of people around me. I have this sneaking suspicion that people are looking at me and judging me for the things I stop to look at, the way I dress, and the things I buy. I haven’t decided whether that makes me arrogant (to think that other people are thinking about me) or whether that means I have some mild form of Social Anxiety Disorder.

Anyway, aside from self-diagnosing possible neuroses, there was a point to the revelation about the crowds at the stores. While I was there, I was close to lots of children. Children scare me. That must surely sound strange, so let me explain myself. My family is very insular and isolated from other people. Most people’s families include cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, and sometimes even step-siblings and step-parents.

My family consists of myself, my brother, my mother and father, my aunt with all the cats, and an aunt and uncle (married couple living in Kansas City). I have no relatives beyond those listed here unless one goes out to something like fifth or sixth cousins.

My brother and I were the only children in our family, and I am the youngest. Because of this, I’ve never really been exposed to children when I wasn’t one of them myself. I’ve never been close to a young child. I’ve never held an infant in my arms. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’ve ever even touched an infant before. I’m not really sure how to handle being around kids. I have only dim memories of how I was as a child, and maybe it is because I look back with an adult’s eyes, but I recall myself interacting with the world in much the same way as I do today. Thus, I don’t really know how children think, how they relate to the world, or what to do with young people when I am supposed to interact with them.

I like children. I’m not usually the sort who wears his emotions on his sleeve, but something about the innocent look on a young girl’s face makes my heart catch. When I was an undergraduate, I used to take long walks around the city. On one of my walks, I wandered down a residential street where man was teaching his young son how to ride a bicycle. He had his hand on the bike’s backseat and was running alongside his son. Then, of course, the father let go and when the son realized this about 200 feet later, he lost confidence and fell over. The father then scooped his son up in his arms and grabbed the bike. Ruffling his son’s hair, he said that he was proud of his son and knew that he’d taken a big step today.

As I passed them, I had two thoughts. First, I thought that I must have walked onto the set of some Hallmark made-for-TV movie being shot in Lawrence. Second, though, I thought that I would have given quite a bit to trade places with the father on the sidewalk.

But against that feeling, I weigh one simple fact: I’m very clumsy. When I was at my undergraduate college, I was the guy who slipped on the stairs on campus all the time and fell over. Accidentally, I’ve broken plates and cups more often than most people do, I’m sure. I’ve tried roller-skating, roller-blading, and skateboarding, but I don’t have the balance to stay on them for more than a few seconds.

I’m told that babies and other young children are very fragile. Given that I have virtually no spatial ability and have bad balance, I’m awfully afraid that I would do something stupid and hurt the child. What if I dropped the child? Or what if I put it on a table and it rolled off? Or what if I didn’t hold the child in the correct way (I’ve been told you have to hold their heads, but I’m not sure about how exactly to do that in the right way)? Or what if I feed hotdogs to a small child (I recently found out you aren’t supposed to do that, but I’m sure there are thousands of other things like that I don’t know right now)?

Scary possibilities, indeed. Scarier still is that I hope to someday have children of my own, even though I think I might accidentally harm one through ignorance or being clumsy. If I did something for my personal gratification (had children someday), knowing the obvious dangers I would pose to them (accidental harms), would that make me a bad person?

I hope not, but right now, I just don’t know.

For what I wish would be the last time...

Well, not too much news today. Sleeping in is great, and I'm having a blast doing nothing but having fun. Unfortunately, I'm starting to get a little bit annoyed at the fact that everywhere I go, people seem to assume I'm gay. This last Spring, my parents each independently asked me whether I was gay (assuring me that if I was, they would be okay with it). One of my friends from high school revealed that he was gay and hit on me over the summer, and when I told him that I wasn't gay, he was shocked. He'd always just thought that I was gay for some reason. Then this Fall, I was at a debate hosted by the Federalist Society at our law school over whether to allow or prohibit same-sex marriage. I asked what I thought was a relatively sophisticated question, and rather than answer my question, the visiting professor in the debate responded with, "Well, there are things that I might do with my wife that you would do with a man..."

Now, I realize that I am a 24-year old man, who cares about interior decorating, likes to cook, loves broadway musicals and watching ice-skating, but none of those things make me want to get squelchy with another dude. I've no problems with gay people, but it's starting to get a little on the weird side. Am I wearing some sign on my back that I don't know about?

Well, I must be. Today, the family got a whole stack of Christmas cards at home, and in not just one, but in two of them people asked my Father about a boarder we have living in the house. One simply assumed that he was my 'partner' and congratulated my father on being so progressive to have a same-sex couple living in his house, and another asked whether the boarder was my lover.

Sigh.

I mean, seriously, people. If this is some sort of weird joke at my expense, I'm getting a little sick of it. I like women. As soon as I can find one willing to settle down with a guy who's likely to be significantly shorter than she is, I'll be set. I'm fairly sure that nobody else has to do things like this, but... World? You're on notice.

*Edit as of 12/21/05: It's not as direct as the others, but I’ll count it. In the comments to this post, some random dude from China suggested that I might be gay and recommended a movie with gay characters to watch. I’m up to 7. Maybe putting the world on notice wasn't the best thing to do. It upped my tally by 1. --MD

Thoughts: Inconsequential and Not

Random tidbits that are on my mind right now:

1. Where are our priorities as a nation? As of this posting, the United States has spent roughly US $227,722,790,000 on the war in Iraq over the past 3 years. I’ll be the first to say that removing a terrible dictator from power is a good thing. All persons, everywhere on the Earth, have a duty to make the lives of other people better. A people who live in fear from a despotic leader’s death camps and secret police are a people who should have been helped a long time ago.

But simply saying something is good is not the same as saying it is a top priority. Like every decision that expends resources, choices have to be made and questions answered when deciding to go to war or stay home. How many resources will be spent? What is the expected benefit for the resource expenditure? Are there any hidden costs? Are there other ways to spend the same resources which would create a greater net benefit?

Here, it seems that much greater good could have been done with the almost $230 billion dollars.

Without leaving the United States, that money could have provided for 30,162,086 children to attend a year of Headstart. The money could have provided a salary for 3,946,482 public school teachers for a year. 11,039,554 students could have had full-tuition scholarships to 4-year public universities. 2,050,440 new houses and housing units could have been built for homeless individuals.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of simply having benefits stay at home, in the United States. We ALL have a duty to ALL humans, whether they live in Kansas, Tennessee, Florida, or Azerbaijan. On a global scale, we could have fully funded the world-wide AIDS program for a complete 22 years. If that wasn’t amazing enough, we could have fully-fed every person in the world who starves to death or is malnourished (~816 million people) for a bit more than a decade. Finally, with that money, we could have ensured that every single child born in the world received basic immunizations for 75 years.

Making a nation of people free is a good thing. (If it works...) Feeding the world for a decade or immunizing children for three-quarters of a century is better.

2. Americans are very woefully under-prepared to understand basic science. Science is the only viable means of social progress humanity has ever discovered. Without the fruits of science, the world would be a very different place. No immunizations. No antibiotics. No refrigeration. No microwaves. No metal alloys which require complex smelting. No computers... The middle ages doesn’t appeal to me, and hopefully it shouldn’t appeal to you.

The survival of the world gets incrementally better the more humans understand about the world around us and how the universe functions. For all of the laughter you’ll get if you admit to being a Star-Trek fan, as a general rule, people wish that we had the kinds of technology that the people on television sometimes do. The ability to heal wounds with nanotechnology and the power to step into a transporter at home and appear in the office seconds later sound pretty good to me.

Unfortunately, as a country, we do not appear to be raising a generation of scientifically literate people. Only 40 percent of Americans believe in biological evolution, despite a widespread scientific consensus on that matter for a bit more than a century. A professor at Northwestern University Medical School, Jon M iller, has tracked Western nations' acceptance of biological evolution, and states that only Turkey has a lower percentage of people who accept the only scientific explanation of biology available to us. Fewer than 3 in 20 people know what a molecule actually is. Only about half of Americans know that humans and dinosaurs never lived on the Earth at the same time.

In the realm of the entirely too scary, I’ll put: 1 in 5 Americans does not know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or whether the Sun travels around the Earth.

It looks like I may be waiting a lot longer for my flying car and bubble cities, at least in the United States.

3. I’m now thoroughly addicted to "World of Warcraft." A friend introduced me to the game a day after my last final, and I’ve barely stopped playing it since. The graphics are astounding. Some of the scenery is positively breathtaking, and the game remains reasonably faithful to the Warcraft universe as I have come to know it through the first three games in the Warcraft series. The game is so entertaining that on the first day I played it by myself, I started at 11:00 am and didn’t look up from my screen until dinner-time. And what’s more, even though I’d played for almost 8 hours, I wouldn’t have guessed that it had been more than an hour or two.

One complaint: Too many monsters. My character (a Tauren Druid) can’t run through the plains without running into a few dozen wolves and mountain lions. I would just run past them, but the game makes them hostile toward me, so when I get near, they automatically start to chase me and attack me. When I was at a low level, it was a pain because they were tough battles and made getting anywhere a major hassle. Now that I’m at a higher level than they are, the battles are easy, but still make getting anywhere a major pain because I have to stop and kill the little critters just to keep moving. There are so many of the little buggers that it is hard to thread a path through the monsters such that you don’t alert them. Recommendation to W.O.W. people: How ‘bout just a couple fewer monsters per area? Or at the least make the game such that monsters which are of substantially lower level than you stop attacking you on sight.

4. Another friend of mine just bought a 60 inch plasma screen television with a fantastic surround sound system for the new house he also just bought. I’m so jealous. I know it would be wrong of me to buy something like that when there are starving people, but I'm still jealous and don't know whether I would be strong enough to resist buying fun toys like those if I had money and an income like his.