daisychain
On May 2, 1903, pediatrician Benjamin Spock was born in New Haven, Conn. The author of 1946’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, he revolutionized popular child psychology just in time for the baby boom, instructing parents of the postwar generation to discard such dictums as those in John B. Watson’s 1928 Psychological Care of Infant and Child: “Never, never kiss your child … Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.” Spiro Agnew credited Spock with the generation’s later unruliness.
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The final prophecies
The end of the school year approaches. I would sculpt some sort of eloquent farewell, but there are too, too many important inquiries to address. Instead, I’ll leave you with a brief series of motivational questions (you do not need to answer out loud): What does your future hold? Are you always going to be unhealthy and unintelligent, a bloated empty meathead of a man, a thin-skinned malformed drip of a woman? Or are you going to shape up? In the future, are you finally going to start living? If so, when does your future begin? Why not now? What better time to start over again than the end of a semester? And what better way to start over again than with a synthetically enlarged penis or artificially augmented breasts? God bless America. We all need plastic surgery.
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Hazards of class participation
I almost never raise my hand in class. It’s not because I don’t have anything to say or because I don’t think my classmates deserve to hear my exciting new insights, it’s because I’m afraid that my words will reveal my deepest darkest secret—that I’m a bumbling idiot. I think keeping that knowledge from others is well worth losing 10 or 15 percent of my grade.
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We can work it out . . . or not
It’s a good thing that my alarm clock is an inanimate object, or it would be doomed to a miserable and unloved existence. I have a very intense and complex relationship with the damn thing. It’s an intense relationship because of the extreme nature of my hatred toward it, and it’s a complex relationship because I can’t decide whether I hate it more when it neglects to wake me up, causing to me to arrive in class late and disheveled, or when it does its job and I am forced to regain consciousness.
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Random Rants
Hat cha-ching: a plan, Stressed editor can’t rant, The double standard of patriotic fruit
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