grinds my gears!

Wow, look at me, posting twice in a day.

It's that time people: time for another episode of GRINDS MY GEARS!

People Who Have No Control Over Their Children

I'm so sick of being in public and seeing people with no control of their children. Like, seriously. Get a grip. Now, I will fully admit that I have no children and therefore have no concept of the difficulty of raising children. Furthermore, I also admit that even the best parents can't avoid the odd breakout from their child. But there's no excuse for the majority of crap I see in public places.

Case in point: Today I went to Costco. It was a total zoo in there. All I was buying was ink cartridges for our printer (although I was very VERY tempted by this totally awesome stapler). So, I get to the line ups, and every till is just backed up for what seemed to be miles. Now, at this point, I have a sinus headache, I'm standing on sore feet, and I want to go home. But I can patiently wait in line.

So there I stood. And next to me stood a mother with her two children. The boy was probably 13 or so. No complaints about him. The daughter ... well, that's another story. She was probably ... grade 3? And she's standing there - make that SQUIRMING there - and making a lot of whiney noise. She's fidgeting, she's throwing her arms down at her side, and she's whining. I have no idea WHAT she was whining about, because I didn't care to listen all that carefully. So there she is. The boy mentions (quietly) that he needs to go to the washroom. So off he goes. The girl starts to follow him. This ensues:

"mother": come back here (also in a whiney voice. Parents, please stop whining at your children. Seriously. You're the adult)
child: well he got to go!
"mother": well, he's older (still whining)
child: I'll go with him! [of course the teenage boy is gone by now]
"mother": [feebly] no

*child walks away*

"mother": I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. *stands still*

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? SERIOUSLY. I almost looked at her and said "I CAN!". DAMN! That kid would be back in my hands and whooped so fast nobody would know what happened. GIVE ME A BREAK. It's not like this is a very small baby who can't stop crying in a grocery store. That I can handle. I sympathize with that. But this is a grade 3 kid who should know where the boundary lines are and not to cross them. Is your place in line so important that you can't abandon it (when the people in front of you haven't even emptied their cart yet) and grab your kid? Think about this: why don't you want your small girl going to the bathroom in the first place? Probably because you don't want her getting abducted or something. So let me get this straight. You standing there helpless because you have no control of your child but don't want to create a scene by chasing her, and let's not forget that the heavens should FORBID you losing your place in line - is worth running the chance that your child could be abducted, NOT TO MENTION that she's obviously running the show at 10 years old.

DAMN.

Let me say, I have a lot of faith in parents. There seems to be 3 major categories: parents that know what they're doing; parents that don't give a rat's ass what's going on with their kids; and parents that, if they knew better, would do better. I'd like to believe that this woman just had no clue what she was doing, and that given some skills, would do better. But seriously. Get a grip. You're an adult.

RK

Grinds my Gears!

It's that time again ... for another edition of GRINDS MY GEARS!

First of all, I will admit, that I used to be the sort of person I'm going to describe below.

The "I'll Run a Marathon Someday" People

I'm sure you have met at least one of these people in your life. Maybe you ARE one of these people. You know, the sort of person who says "I'm going to run a marathon before I die", but they've never run more than 20 minutes in their whole life. Let me explain something to you. If you are not a runner, you have absolutely no business saying "I'm going to run a marathon before I die". You know why? Because you have no clue what you're talking about.

First of all, these people have absolutely, positively, NO CLUE how long 42.2 kilometers is. They don't realize that in many cases it's at least the distance of driving to work and back.

Secondly, these people have absolutely NO CLUE how fast they can run a mile, or a kilometer. If they did, they'd realize that at present, they, as a non-runner at let's say "average" physical fitness, are probably running a 8 minute kilometer. I think that's generous. They therefore have no idea that they should even do this math: 8 x 42.2 = 337.6. That's over 5 & 1/2 hours to run 42.2 kms. That's a freaking long time.

Thirdly, these people have a romanticized idea of what it's like to run a marathon. All they can imagine is the sense of pride they'd feel upon finishing and the sense of awe everyone else would feel toward them. What they can't imagine is hours and hours of tireless training, running in the snow, rain, blazing sun, and wind, and those long long runs on the weekend. What they can't imagine is the way your body shuts down after 2 hours of running. What they can't imagine is frantically running around the woods trying to find a portable toilet. What they can't imagine is how they would need to completely and utterly change their eating schedule and diet to be able to have the energy to run long miles and to avoid those foods that slow them down. What they can't realize is that the mental discipline required is at least twice as difficult to cultivate as the physical discipline required.

That is why those people GRIND MY GEARS!

As I said earlier, I used to be one of these people. After having run 1/2 a marathon, I can honestly say I'm not sure if I even WANT to run a marathon. What I can say is that I would like to run many more 1/2 marathons. Perhaps when the half does not feel like as huge a challenge I'll be ready to take on the marathon. I felt confident that I could run the half when I finished my 10 km race feeling like "yeah, I could do that again". If I ever feel like that after 21.1 kms, it might be worth the challenge. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to enjoy running my short runs (now 7 kms) in the week, and my long runs (I'm hoping to up those to 15 kms) on the weekends. But I've gotta wait for my feet to heal first. Ug! Grow, skin, grow!

RK

grinds my gears...

I feel the need to blog about some things that grind my gears today. Aren't these your favorite posts? I'm not red-hot angry, so it may not be as amusing as I would hope, but oh well.

-Age of Sexual Consent-

I'm going to unabashedly adopt some of Roy Green's arguments here. So, way to go Roy Green. (Roy Green has a show on the Corus Radio Network on the weekend, and today was covering for Charles Adler on Adler Online.)

In Canada, as a 14 year old person, you are prohibited by law to vote and to have a driver's license. You can't drink alcohol until you're 18, or 19, in some provinces. However, you are "allowed" to have sex with your 77 year old neighbor as long as you want to (as long as he's not your grandfather, or an "authority figure" in your life).

Hello?

I'm sorry, but have any of you MET a 14 year old lately? My cousin Chantelle is 14. I love her. She's awesome, and she's smart, and she's got a good head on her shoulders. We've talked a lot, and I know that she has absolutely good sense when it comes to drinking, drugs, and sex/dating. However, I would hazard to guess that she is an unusually bright, common-sensical and upright young woman. I've taught piano to teenagers. I couldn't have gotten them to consent to practice their scales! So why is it that they would consent to the pedophile who lives down the street to them? Because that pedophile is pushing different buttons and manipulating them.

I don't mean to discredit 14 year old young women or men, but their capacity to reason properly when it comes to sex is just not developed. I'm a lot closer to 14 than I am to 40, and it's not that hard for me to remember back. I didn't have good capacity to reason when it came to sex until AT LEAST 16, and that was with a good upbringing where it was talked about. Why WOULDN'T a 14 year old have sex with an older person if they are neglected (or abused, or even something as simple as misunderstood) at home, and nobody gives a rat's ass what they do? Of course they're going to be flattered when an older person, even in their 20s or 30s are hitting on them. RIDICULOUS.

And why has the bill which proposes raising the consentual age to 16 not been passed in Canada? Oh yes, that's right, because it didn't get passed in the senate.

We conservatives all love the senate. We love the octogenarian liberals who can't see the light of day because they can't see over their huge paycheques that we, the taxpayers, pay them to do nothing. We love that they won't pass any common-sense bill that comes their way. We're not paying them to DO anything, obviously. We're just paying them to smoke cigars, take summers off, and golf.

-Babies in Wells-

Today I read a really sad article in the Calgary Herald (page A9 in yesterday's paper). This is not funny at all. I will post it below:

"The remains of dozens of fetuses and newborn babies have been found in an abandoned well in India, apparently aborted or discarded after birth because they were female.

Police are investigating whether a clinic in the state of Orissa identified the infants' sex before birth, which is illegal yet widespread in India, and then disposed of them at their parents' request.

A 12-year-old boy raised the alarm after finding the remains of seven baby girls stuffed into bloody polythene bags in a disued well near the Krishna clinic in the district of Nayagarh on July 14. Police said Monday that they had found the skulls and body parts of 23 more infants over the weekend. - Times of London"

I can't even attack this one with humour - that's just awful.

However, here is my solution (whether or not it would be AT ALL plausible in India is a totally other thing):
Baby Drop Off Centres! This of course is not really "my solution", it's just a good solution that I've heard about through the media. Currently, in many states in the US (almost all, I think legislation is just pending in less than 4 states now), pregnant mothers can take their unwanted babies to these Drop Off Centres, no questions asked. They can just drop the baby off, period. They are encouraged to give medical information, but they don't have to.

This is seriously such a good option. Perhaps in India there would be no one who would even want these babies, but I'm sure you could work some sort of international adoption thing. Seriously, with all the people who are unable to conceive, these options should become available everywhere. It's much better than having desperate mothers stabbing their babies (just google that, you might be surprised), or worse yet, throwing them in an abandoned well in India.

On a feminist note, I just want to point out that all the babies and fetuses were girls. I don't know Hare Krishna well enough as a belief system to be able to analyze it on feminist grounds (plus, there's no concrete evidence that members of this faith system were responsible for these babies), so I won't. Furthermore, I don't know Indian culture in general well enough to criticize it from a feminist perspective. So I'm just saying - they were girls. No boy fetuses in the well. I wonder why.

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Those are two things that grind my gears.

For information on Hare Krishna and other world religions, see www.religioustolerance.org. It's a nice starting point.

RK