Little Red Headgames

At the risk of sounding anti-children—which, you have to believe me, I'm really not— I'm just going to come out and say it: I am tired of being manipulated by a stream of propaganda that exploits the utter cuteitude of sundry (and unsuspecting) small children.

In defense of my seemingly heartless position, allow me to explain.

I was recently driving down I75, the large thoroughfare that runs through Dallas and connects it to the myriad of suburbs that have cropped up over the years. The suburban sprawl of the Dallas area is remarkable, really—at this point there are practically suburbs for the suburbs. Cities/towns like McKinney, Allen, Richardson, and Plano have been absorbed into the unending fabric of the DFW metroplex, and it's difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins.

This is further complicated by confusing patterns in street-naming, obviously intended as some city planner's idea of a cruel joke. For example, while driving through Plano you are afforded three distinct options: you may exit at Parker, Park, or Plano Parkway. Oh but wait—Parker is closed, so you'll have to take Park to get to Parker. Or is it Park that's closed, and you're routed through Parker to get to Park? In all likelihood, you'll probably overshoot them both and make it all the way to Plano. Parkway. The road, not the city. You're already in the city. What?

As I was saying, I was driving down I75. Of course, to say I was "driving" would lead one to believe that I was clipping along at a splendid pace. In reality, I was edging along I75, squashed between an oversized minivan and a dusty Camaro with fuzzy dice swinging in the breeze. I had plenty of time to breathe in the mind-clearing aroma of exhaust fumes and reflect philosophically upon the crack in my windshield that seemed to be spreading, slowly but surely, all the way across the dash.

Suddenly, something on the overpass a few hundred feet ahead of me caught my eye. There was a sign on it, a large white sign draped across the bridge. It featured an adorable little girl, her blonde hair in pigtails and her eyes wide and wondering. Beneath the girl in large block letters was a message. It read, "PLEASE SLOW DOWN. MY DADDY WORKS HERE."

Here we have the newest tactic for making motorists obey the speed limits: heaping portions of child-induced guilt.

Some 5-year-old Ford model just made two grand for a one-hour photo shoot. Is her daddy really working ahead? Hell no. He's probably on Wall Street trading stocks and flirting with his nubile secretary who, incidentally, speeds like hell. But by god, this little girl is the symbol of a hundred little girls whose daddies really are working construction ahead. It's all hypothetical. And with that hypothetical daughter staring at me with those hypothetically pleading eyes, I'll be damned if I'm going to hit 80 with the crushing prescience that I might injure/ kill/throw gravel in the face of her hypothetical hard-hat-wearing father.

Modern advertisers are so damn sneaky.

I wonder if children know they're being used as such effective instruments of guilt. This brings to mind an incident that occurred at Amherst several years ago. The Little Red Schoolhouse—aptly named in that it is both little and red, and is also a schoolhouse—sits smack in the middle of the social quad. Not the ideal place for a schoolhouse to be situated, you say? A valid point. But the schoolhouse was actually there before the social dorms were built around it, and evidently the builder saw no conflict of interest between a diminutive schoolhouse where kids learn their ABCs and five large dormitories where older kids learn about LSD.

As was bound to happen, problems ensued.

The social dorms at Amherst are devoted to one primary principle: perpetual partying. In keeping with the P-theme, peeing is common, particularly public peeing by drunken exhibitionists. Not surprisingly, the brick walls of the Little Red Schoolhouse are often chosen as the ideal urinals, and a diverse artistic display of pee stains has enriched the wall for many years, adding to the history and legacy that is Amherst College. But in 2005, the playful antics of hammered college students took a decidedly more sadistic turn, and instead of peeing, there was violence: some rugby player, enraptured with his drunken machismo, took a slugger to one of the windows. A few days later, one of his teammates did the same. And the little children's dreams were shattered in shards of broken glass.

Within a few days, they had their comeuppance. The teachers at the Little Red Schoolhouse had devised a brilliant plan. A sign started circulating around the school, appearing on bulletin boards and stuck under dorm room doors. The sign was a simple piece of paper featuring a child's depiction of the Little Red Schoolhouse, a ruddy drawing in crimson and gold crayon with stick people with bubble eyes and big bubble tears rolling down their cheeks. The message, scrawled in heartbreaking child's handwriting, was simple.

“Please stop breaking the windows in our little red schoolhouse.”

Rip my heart out with a rubber eraser and fingerpaint it black.

A few weeks after the initial posters went out, some anonymous smartass from the socials decided to make his own set of posters in response. These circulated around the campus, too, to a chorus of smirks and closeted chuckles.

This picture showed a circle of devil-children running around the Little Red Schoolhouse playground, screaming and hollering and devil-dancing in infantile glee. In similarly childish handwriting, the mysterious defendant had written:

"Please stop waking me up at 7 am on Monday mornings. I'm hungover as shit."

Pumpkins on Pronunciation

I know, I know: I haven't written in something like three weeks. I am a despicable human being and an even more despicable blogger. Can I blame circumstance?

The truth is, I’ve been pouring myself into the world of copy editing; I lie in bed at night, plagued by thoughts of miscreant punctuation and wayward capitalization. “Should that comma have gone inside the quotation marks, or outside?” I think to myself, brow furrowed as sweat gathers on my upper lip. Then the guilt sets in, and sleep eludes me. “I ought to get up and change it now,” I think, and after three or four similar dilemmas accumulate—semicolon or dash? hyphen or no?— I abandon all attempts at not-quite-sleep-but-sure-as-hell-trying and get up to make the necessary adjustments. Where’s time for blogging in all of this?

However, there are rare occasions on which I venture beyond my intimate relationship with the Chicago Manual of Style and go do real, people-ish things with real, people-ish people. On Halloween, for example, I specifically carved out time for two hollow gourds: a peculiarly shaped pumpkin, and a boy named Dora.

The pumpkin needs no explanation, though I’ll give it anyway. When my siblings and I got out of the car at the roadside field, I was overwhelmed by the profusion of flawless pumpkins, all perfectly plump and orange, like a ghostly field of silicone replicas of what someone somewhere envisioned the “perfect pumpkin” to look like. It was The Stepford Wives in a pumpkin patch. And it was a sickening sight, reminiscent of emails from girls who end every sentence with an exclamation mark! And dot their i’s with little hearts! And think round and peppy pumpkins are positively precious!

Then I saw a different kind of pumpkin altogether, a pumpkin that bowed its puckered head in shame, an obvious outcast among the picture perfect. I promptly made my purchase. I had what I had come for: a one-of-a-kind, hopelessly imperfect, fabulously charming pumpkin with one unforgivable flaw: it looked like a butt.



The truth of the matter was, with its deep center cleave and two nicely rounded cheeks, the pumpkin looked so much like a butt that there was little else it could be; it practically was a butt. My brother was worried. “Are you going to carve that side?” he asked, pointing to the butt side, consternation apparent on his freckled face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s just… I wanted to have all the pumpkins face the street. And that one, well…” He looked embarrassed.

“Looks like a butt?” I said. He giggled nervously. “I know it does,” I said with a reassuring smile. “That’s why I bought it.”

And it’s true. I’ve never before felt such a strong connection between myself and an inanimate object with junk in the trunk.

The boy named Dora was a different story. I stumbled upon him at a Halloween party where, by the time of my arrival, most people were already pretty sloshed. Of course, no one can compete with a certain Z.C. who holds the current record for slosh’daptitude, supported primarily by his stunning debut of alcohol-induced vomiting—publicly, and yet with such grace and preservation—during a recent binge fest. Disappointingly, when I arrived at the Halloween party, nobody had a trash can clasped between their fine manly legs; no one was even throwing up. But a mix of excessive alcohol consumption and the inferior public education system in Texas ensured that my costume—a Freudian slip—remained an enigma to most casual onlookers.

Now, to be fair, I stole my costume idea from a certain S.S. (not the ship) who, she later admitted, stole the idea herself. Do two wrongs make a right? Perhaps. I never took moral philosophy. Regardless, I arrived at the party clad in a silken black slip with a picture of Sigmund Freud looped delicately around my neck. Most people looked confused.

Dora was one of those. He was dressed in a tight-fitting pink shirt with “I DORA” in thick black letters on the front. To complete the look, he was sporting a short black wig and a purple polka-dotted backpack, replete with a half-full bottle of 1792. Dora was ready to explore. He’d obviously been doing quite a bit of exploring already.

Confronted by my curious combination of a computerized image and lingerie, Dora was immediately perplexed. Still, he was eager, and obviously willing to try. So I worked with him a bit, and together we culled the clues. Our conversation went something like this: What am I wearing? “A shirt!” No; try again. Starts with an s… “Silk!” Yes, good, that’s what it’s made of. Now what is it? … (long pause) … “A slip?!” Bravo. You’re halfway there. Now who’s this? (pointing to Freud)

Here he was stumped. “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he assured me in his thick Texan twang, a twang so thick I thought it was some kind of costume-inspired accent for a good five minutes before I realized it was actually his own. “I know this guy!” he said. “I study psychology!” But he couldn’t quite spit it out.

After a few minutes, the name still wasn’t coming. And yet, determined to demonstrate that he did, in fact, know the man whose image sat comfortably on my chest, Dora began to throw out some keywords to prove his point. “I know this guy,” he repeated. “He talks about the ego. The ego and the i.D.,” he said excitedly, gathering steam. “That’s right, the i.D.!”

Now, I am well aware that the particular psychological construct of which Dora spoke isn’t the i.D. at all, but rather, the id (rhymes with “rid” and “lid” and “PDidd”[y]). I spell it as such to emphasize the way in which it was pronounced. Every time Dora uttered the word, it came out “i.D.,” as if you might tuck the id into your wallet and pull it out when buying booze at 7-Eleven. A couple of beers? A little pleasure? Sex with your mother? Yes, please. Your total comes to $3.99. Have a nice day!

Thanks to Dora’s southern twang, the word was transformed into a further bastardization of the original, resulting in a mix of vowels and consonants that might garner a rough phonetic representation of “ah-‘deeee.” Over and over again, Dora attempted to impress upon me the fact that he did know that guy hanging around my neck, and even if he couldn’t recall his name, gosh darnit, the man clearly had something to do with the ah deeee.

At several points, my friend Meghan quietly and gently interjected the comment, “Um, I think it’s the ‘id’”…all to no avail. Dora persisted in talking about the ah deeee. The ah deeee this, the ah deeee that. I half expected him to pronounce “ego” like the waffle, with the obligatory “leggo my” tacked on the front. Thankfully, we never got that far.

Maybe I’m too selective about the company I keep. But when given the choice, I think I prefer my butt pumpkin. Hey, at least I took an honest stab at holiday social interaction. As for a repeat occurrence? I’m not gonna go and get any big ah deeees.