I Declare Fiddleheads a Princess-Free Zone

I note that some kind of (IMHO) ridiculous "Princess Tea Party" has been held in Cedarburg today. If I am blessed with children, I hope that my hopefully princess-free daughter(s) will learn that her desire to explore and experiment with various aspects of reality is a wonderful gift--and that I only ask and advocate that she use it wisely. "83% of CHS students choose NOT to use marijuana" reads a poster at Fiddleheads in Cedarburg. I'm going to play devil's advocate (and risk disinherit-age) by stating that I'm skeptical--both of the statistic and the principle behind it. Basically, I believe that life presents us with a wide variety of mind-altering substances and situations. Ultimately, we can only "choose" whether or not to be robust enough to withstand them.

If my daughter's appetite for the mind-altering ends up as a strong desire to go to the tea party--or, heck, to join the Tea Party--I hope that I'll suck it up and bite my tongue, or at most state my opinion in a matter-of-fact fashion while affirming that my love is unconditional. In that light, their inevitable acting out in an inappropriate way can be just a stepping stone towards a deeper relationship with my child. As an older Dad, I'll need plenty of reminders that some aspects of my view of the world may have passed their sell-by date. I'll have the ability to adapt and adjust, though at times with a grimace. That way, not only does my daughter not need to fit into some ridiculous pidgeonhole--neither do I.

Much more damaging, in my view, is the impulse to turn way-preteen girls into objects to be paraded around and segregated. (Mind you, I mean girls under 12 or 13--I was a precocious kid and know that the game can change quickly and drastically at around that age.)  With all of our tea parties, girls' nights out and girls' nights in--not to mention our man caves--we learn that to be truly unthreatened, we have to be in our treehouse, keeping the other sex out. Accordingly, it is only natural that divorce should be the peak experience in adult life in our society. Only by systematically declaring war on our spouse's flaws and annihilating our engagement with them can we truly develop ourselves as individuals, this philosophy holds.

I think that psychologically wholesome life comes only when we learn, pardon my French, that other people will do all kinds of crazy shit. And that we ourselves will do all kinds of crazy shit. Our choice is whether we can find opportunity for connection in the good and the bad--not in the kind of physical and psychological segregation that our boy-in-a-bubble society insists upon, but in the dirt and dust of interaction with others who are vigorously championing their own wants and needs.

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ポロ文化大革命が始まったとき11歳、年のこの壮大な詩を"轟音四海が上昇し、ポロラルフローレン五大陸の荒れ狂う雲と水が揺れており、風と雷"の毛沢東の詩への大人の参照は、POLO ラルフローレン多くの人々にインスピレーションを与え"男江香港·同志郭 - 詩は毛沢東の詩の中で最も有名な言葉になっています。