Dog Park; Our Children Are Terrible; Nerds

Come on you guys, send me some letters to my advice column! I promise to be shorter-winded if that is what you would like. Doesn’t anybody want to talk about grad school or their abusive boyfriend or cooking or not having children or some weird sexual issue? You know Dan Savage is never going to answer your letter–he gets a million a day! For me, there is only you. You and your weird sexual issue.

I have spoken here about the dog park and how weird it is as a culture. Here is the next level: the people at our dog park have now made a t-shirt with the names of all the dogs at the park on the back of the shirt. Guess whose name isn’t there!

Poor snoop.

Everyone’s talking about this heavy NYer about how American children are so spoiled that it’s unbelievable. Like our entire philosophy on children is totally perverted and warped from the ground up. In France three year olds can sit quietly through a 4 course meal and bake cupcakes unsupervised. In America we’re still breastfeeding our 10 year olds and tying our college students’ shoes for them. All these new books are coming out about how America is the only country in the world where parents work for their children’s approval instead of the other way around. One of the authors is American but raised her baby in France, and started researching her book when she realized that her child was always the stupidest, loudest, most ill-behaved child at any social gathering. Digging into that uncomfortable fact, she found that child-rearing tactics in America and France are basically diametrically opposed. The French believe in frustration and challenge as character-building. See also: the French school system. They don’t believe their children require 100% of their attention at all times. The article also talks about non-western cultures, like these tribal people who by the age of 6 are just cheerfully contributing to the family work without being asked. Contrasting this stuff with these horrendous studies where they put cameras in the homes of 35 Los Angeles families and it’s like, you are ashamed to even be alive.

But that article did not tell me anything I haven’t already been bitching about for years. The article I really loved in this issue was the one about the crazy scavenger hunt at U of Chicago! How have I never heard of this before??? I was so delighted, sitting on the couch LOLing. It’s apparently this huge nerd festival that lasts for 4 days every May. There’s a panel of judges who are appointed for life, and they spend months compiling these crazy lists of tasks and items with attached points. At midnight on the first day of the Hunt, each team sprints to this one building and has to solve a riddle or build a machine or something to get their list, then they’re off!

There’s a lot to like but here are a couple of my favorite moments:

scavvies have been asked to unboil an egg; induce a potato to break the sound barrier; eat their own umbilical cord (one student, having persuaded his mother to express-mail the membranous keepsake she’d saved from his birth, stuck it into a Twinkie and swallowed it); get circumcised (someone did); and bring a lion, a tiger, or a bear to campus. In 1999, for five hundred points, a pair of physics students built a working nuclear breeder reactor in a Burton-Judson dorm room in one day, converting thorium powder collected from the inside of vacuum tubes into weapons-grade uranium, using a device made from scrap aluminum and carbon sheets. A concerned nuclear physicist attested to the machine’s efficacy.

WHAT!!!!! NERDS!!!!

Here’s some items from this year’s list:

– Build a ten-foot bridge across Botany Pond using nothing but balsa wood and glue
– Secure a meeting with the mayor of Chicago
– Produce a scale model of the Great Lakes out of fire
– Build a laptop charger using only materials available in the sixteenth century (!!!)
– Introduce the judges in person to a published eschatologist (my favorite word!)

So for four days groups of judges go all around judging these things to see who has actually done them. Apparently the campus is filled with insane models and contraptions and people walking around with 4,000 toothpicks stuck in their beard, and of course everyone is in Nerd Costumes.

I also love the quotes from the very boring-sounding people on campus who don’t like the Hunt. And this cracked me up:

“Plenty of non-scavving students consider it a distraction, and the campus humor magazine, Shady Dealer, produced a parody of the list this year. Sample items:

Bite your own teeth.
Birth a child that is larger than you OR larger than the sky.
Convince Steven Tyler of Aerosmith to take responsibility for the Hindenburg disaster.
Live in Missouri for five or more years.”

The upshot is that I really wish I were a bigger nerd than I am.

Today I am getting a massage from what sounds like a deep healer woman. I made an unexpected windfall of cash playing these wildly lucrative shows with a certain very famous friend and I am using some of the money to get myself this delightful gift. If I were rich I would get a massage once a week and that’s really the main thing that would change about my lifestyle, also year-round hot-house orchids (JOKE). I’m going to tell her all my woes and just beg her to help me. She probably won’t be able to but still I bet the massage will feel awesome.

peace be unto you