What's the matter with kids today?

Every now and then (roughly once a week) I have an off-day. I didn't sleep well last night, when I got back from class I went directly to bed, and now I can't think of a damn thing to write. In an effort to combat such days becoming anything more than an inconvenience, I use these days as an opportunity to watch telly and hope for a muse.

I'm watching West Wing series six and one of Santos's (Jimmy Smits) campaign issues is a longer school year. Personally, as a child I would've kicked this congressman in the tits for suggesting extending the (to me) already long school year. Now, when I see kids in the mall acting like little entitled shitheads who know next to nothing of literature, science, and maths, I think putting them in school year round, six days a week, is a damned good fucking idea. Hell, if you lock the shits in and don't let them go home at the end of the day I'm not horribly opposed to that.

I'm not a fan of kids in the best of times, and can count on one hand the number of children I actively like as people. I like them because they happen to have enough critical thinking skills to make them seem like adult humans as opposed to dropout-adults-in-training like I usually have to deal with. I only recently began actively considering having children of my own, with no small amount of pressuring from my fiancee. I had several caveats such as no faery stories pretended to be real (tooth faery et al), public schooling unless there's no other option, and under no circumstances will they be taught that one way is right and all others wrong without significant information on all levels.

This hasn't brought me any lack of worries that our children would have poorly-developed imaginations. In the end I don't think that's such a problem, as at least half the films in my DVD collection are sci-fi or fantasy. Plus at first glance, ... all of the books on my bookshelf are sci-fi or fantasy. And if there was ever a worry about imagination, we single-handedly ended it by deciding we would read to our child from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Voices and everything.
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