Adolescent Pod People

Adolescents suck. Just wanted to get that out front. I know, I know...this is your baby and you have to love her. Yeah, yeah...I do love her and adolescents suck. Or maybe I should more appropriately say adolescence sucks. I am beginning to think the whole point of being an adolescent is to provoke your parents into enough of a killing rage that they end up in jail. The theory behind this seems to be that they then get the satisfaction of saying 'see...you never really loved me' as they die in your arms in what is sure to go down in the annals as the ultimate in death scenes. If someone knows how to cut off their nose to spite their face, it is an adolescent. No one, absolutely no one on earth knows how to show more contempt than an adolescent. And they are stupid creatures too...do they really believe that they have come up with such a fresh new way to lie no one has heretofore been able to get past?

Did I buy that when *I* was an adolescent? Course, I did adolescence with a bang. They are still talking about my turn and as far as I know, they use my own to train all the ones who came after me. Wouldn't it be funny if my child is the way she is because someone handed her a manual that told her how to act and it was modeled after me? Talk about having your chickens come home to roost, huh?

I have this evil fantasy. You have some poor parent being booked for murder. The murder of their own child, what crime could be more low, put em in with the really hard guys and throw away the key. Only then it comes out that the child was an adolescent, and under these special circumstances the parent is freed for having killed either in self defense (of their sanity) or for having been provoked beyond the ability of any human being to endure. They then enact all new adolescent murder laws that have these kids quaking in their boots for about five seconds before they snort contemptuously and rebel against it by setting out to provoke every adult they come across, only this time packing uzis to defend themselves. Then there is this whole underground railroad kind of thing they use to travel safely from place to place until they are adults, at which point all their crimes are forgiven for having been committed by the obviously insane and they are then allowed to rejoin society as productive members who then help to hunt down other adolescents.

I need a vacation.

In one of his books, Stephen King talks about the Manhattan Project, and one of his characters opines that they weren't just messing with atoms out there, but different atoms. If anyone is made up of different atoms, it is an adolescent.

I want to say not even very interesting atoms, but what do *you* call it when you have a twelve year old who is pissed about having to take a review test in science and so to spite you refuses to do any work at all resulting in her having to sit and do nothing else whatsoever until it is done, and her sitting there for forty five minutes? To show you that she'll show youby golly even if she has to sit there bored as a stump and miserable all day while you go on about your business? I think that's pretty interesting, in a weird pathological kind of way. I wonder what we would get if we took a little biopsy of an adolescent? I bet if we put it under the microscope we wouldn't find anything that resembled human tissue, except in the most offhand, fuck you kind of way, you know what I mean?

And from a detached place, it's pretty funny to watch. You say all day it doesn't hurt me if you refuse to do your work, but they don't get it. By god they are going to sit there and not do that work even if they lose everything they own, just to show you who's in charge and prove conclusively the hospital did indeed switch babies on you. You think that somewhere out there is your real child who is at this very moment sitting in school, soaking up knowledge and information happily after skipping to school this morning, fulfilled in the knowledge that she did all her chores and her homework and even cleaned the closet for you, just to be nice. The truth however is that even if the hospital did switch babies, yours is out there telling some teacher somewhere to bite her, and refusing to clean her room until you finally go in there and throw everything away, just to show you by golly.

And what more can you expect? After all, she is yours. And you have to remember the evil curse your parents put on you:

MAY YOU ONE DAY BE BLESSED WITH A CHILD JUST LIKE YOU SO YOU'LL KNOW WHAT I WENT THROUGH.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have fucked with Bella the way I did (don't ask). Because of THE CURSE. I want to say I shouldn't have messed with Bella the way I did because it was mean and nasty and because it was unkind and as a mature adult I can see that I was unkind and how hurtful my behavior must have been for her, and how I have matured now so I know better.

However. There is still that stubborn adolescent in me that is going to refuse to give that ground to Bella no matter what. Fuck her I say, and laugh out loud remembering. So when my child turns to me and insists that I am a bitch she doesn't have anything to learn from and gives me the finger when I tell her to read the paragraph which will give her the answer to which part of the circulatory system of a tree the 'pith' is, who do I blame? My mother for putting THE CURSE on me, or my own example, passed down somehow through our shared DNA like the shape of her face or her love for candles? Different atoms? If so, she gets them from me, too.