I spent $200k on an education I could have gotten with $10 worth of late charges at the library $20 worth of data charges on my phone

I just spent 30 minutes explaining what encyclopedias are to my 7 year old.  The majority of the time I was talking it felt less like an explanation, and more like a justification for their existence.  I should have known which tone the conversation was going to take based on the question that sparked it, “Daddy, when you were too young to have a phone, what did you use to google stuff for school?”

“When I was a kid no one had cell phones and most of us didn’t have buttons on the house phones.”

“What’s a house phone?”

“The kind that your grandmother has.  Never mind that, when we wanted to learn about something we looked it up in an encyclopedia.”

“Is that what they called google then?”

“No, it was a series of books with topics sorted in alphabetical order.  There were 25-30 books to a set and they were so expensive people use to save up for a set and one year after they bought them they would be out of date.”

“Then why did you buy them?  Why didn’t you just borrow them from the library.”

“Probably because people thought it made them look better if they owned a set.

“Oh, like when you drive around in your Porsche?”

“No, cars make you look cool.  Encyclopedias made you look smart.  If you have them now you’re a hoarder.”

“What kind of stuff was in them?”

“Almost everything.  If you were writing a report on gorillas you could find a whole page on gorillas in the G book.”

“How did you write a whole report on gorillas by just reading one page?”

“We wrote big, and we double spaced.”

“It doesn’t sound like you could learn much from those books.  I’ve read a whole book on gorillas and I saw a bunch more at the library that had different stuff in them.”

“You couldn’t learn everything from them, you just got a summary.”

“Like the search results from google?  If you want to learn everything you just have to click them and read the next page.  What did you do?”

“You could go get other books on the subject, I usually just made the rest up.”

“Why didn’t you just start with the other books and then you wouldn’t have had to buy that expensive set of encyclopedias?”

This led to 25 more minutes of conversation that I see now I could have prevented if I’d simply answered, “Because back then we were stupid.”

Stacy Keach has been around a lot longer than I thought

I’m growing tired of parents who insist on encouraging children who obviously suck, and then make excuses when they fail.  You get one lie.  Lie to me or the kid.  If you tell your kid he can be a doctor and then explain to me the reason he sweeps the floor in a sock factory is because he was sick for a month in the 2nd grade, you’re fucking with the natural order of the universe.

I honestly don’t mind hearing your excuses as long as you give them to me in front of the kid.  But I get really aggravated when little Keanu Diesel is eating cereal with his feet and you whisper to me it’s because he fell off the bed and landed on his head when he was eight months old.  Maybe that wasn’t the cause of his problems.  Maybe that was the first sign that he’s a dumb motherfucker.  Admit this to yourself and the rest of us will stop clenching in fear every time your teenage water head walks past a lawnmower.

At the same time lets all admit no one can be anything they want to be.  Obama can be president but he wouldn’t make it three days running a go cart track in Myrtle Beach.  The eight year old that spent his parent’s lot rent on the same track will never be president.  His parents work in the mill and hate being told what to do so they come home everyday and the roles reverse and now they’re the boss and they get to tell him what to do so they control every aspect of his life conditioning him to be unable to function effectively without someone else in charge until he finally realizes his father’s main function in life was to hold his spot at the mill.

One lie people.  Anything else is all yin and no yang.

I can’t say it any better than my girls.