Kids
Looking for small, irrational roommates with rage issues and separation anxiety? Have kids.
Midnight. A tiny naked boy, red cape looped around his scrawny neck. One wee, defiant fist thrust into the air, the other on his hip, legs splayed. Standing on your bed, on you, bellowing, “Never!!” Into your bedroom, into the wild night. You have dared to ask that he get into his bed — back into his bed — for the third time. The fourth. You sit, bleary-eyed and weak-kneed, beaten to a weary emotional pulp by small, unhinged people.
Your academic training is useless in the face of children. You will explain why we do not put blueberries in orifices other than our mouths. You will field impossible requests from tiny dictators and weave magic for tyrants with attention deficit. You will say “no” in an increasingly callous way and you will hear, a thousand times, “why.” It will buzz in your dreams like a whiny mosquito. You will be dazed by toddlerian twists of logic and tripped up by twisty teen nihilism. One of them will say, “Geography is a waste of time. We only name things so that we can control them.”
You’ll reply, “It didn’t work with you, did it?”
Your athletic prowess will not help you. They are fast and slippery, with the stamina of wild, migrating birds. They are waxing as you wane. The sheer will…
