Running it twice

Child rearing is a rollercoaster of emotion.  Sometimes, like in my last blog post, you have to watch your kid go through wretched stuff that you wish you could defend them from.  Pinkie Pie had an adult man approach her and try to rope her into a 'relationship' on the street.  Many people messaged me or commented hoping that the police would get involved and do something, but the reality is that when I called them I got redirected to a nuisance line and left on hold.  After a long time listening to 'hit X for graffiti, hit Y for parking issues' I finally gave up.  The police do not have the time or inclination to do anything about this, in large part because no actual laws were broken.

It is tough to tell your kid that an evil predator is out there and that the people charged with protecting us from such predators will do nothing.  I don't blame the police in this case though - I wouldn't want to try to give the police enough money to be able to put tons of hours into every case of some asshole being awful to someone else, and I don't want them to have the power to smash into people's lives when they don't have any reason to think a law was broken. 

Sometimes you just have to tell your kids that bad stuff happens, and that you will do what you can to protect them... and sometimes what you can do is little to nothing.

But there are good times.  For example, today I realized that Pinkie Pie had never heard the Boot To The Head skit by the Frantics.  If I said Boot To The Head, she wouldn't understand what I was talking about!  This cannot stand, obviously, so I found it on youtube and got her to listen to the clip.

Apparently the original Boot To The Head contains an anti-gay slur by Ed Gruberman, the jackass in the sketch. Thankfully the version I found does not have that phrase, as it has been changed. I don't know if the version I first heard many years ago was the original or the new version, but I hope it was the new one. I certainly wouldn't share it with her in the same way without that alteration.

There are many hilarious things that have a wonderful first time experience.  You can't get that again, but sometimes the process of watching somebody else have that first time experience can be almost as good.  Watching Pinkie Pie giggle and twitch with joy at Boot To The Head was so good for me, and now we have another shared bit of culture we can enjoy.

I have her trained to say "Party on Garth" after I say "Party on Wayne".  She has never seen the movie in question, and indeed I can barely remember it.  Still, those little bits of shared memory are a source of happy feelings, and I like that she is happy to be a part of nostalgia she doesn't quite understand.

Parenting a teenager is not the easiest thing, but I gotta say, it is *so* much better than parenting a toddler for me.  There are still struggles, but the good parent moments are superior when the little person can actually grasp what I am talking about.

Evil in the world

This weekend I went through one of those unpleasant parental firsts.  Pinkie Pie got her first experience with sexual harassment at the hands of an older man, and I had to figure out what to do about it.

He met her on the street, managed to convince her to give him her phone number, and then proceeded to text her over the course of the next hour or so.  He told her he was in love with her, that he desperately needed her, and asked for pictures.  He ignored the fact that she isn't attracted to men in any way, smashed right through her 'but I have a girlfriend' objections, and wasn't fazed at all when she told him she is only 14.

He continued to message her with desperate and bizarre statements, making it clear that he required her in his life and could not cope without her.  He even claimed to run some sort of 'love and connection' business, for which he even had business cards.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie trusts us, and brought his messages to us to ask for help.  I talked with her about all the obvious manipulation and gaslighting, and explained what he was trying to do.  She had been feeling worried and bad about the whole thing, and was happy to block him.  As far as lessons go, I am glad she got past this one without much damage.  I think she is over it, and is moving on.  

I, on the other hand, keep having thoughts of tracking this bastard down and smashing him into hard objects until he breaks into little pieces.  I doubt that the police can or will do anything, since while it is obvious to anyone who glances at the messages what is going on, he hasn't actually done anything illegal, as far as I can tell.  In this, we are on our own.  I don't know if there is any point in messaging him myself, threatening outrageous bodily harm should he ever be near her again - it certainly isn't an idle threat, but I have no idea if that would make things safer for Pinkie Pie or not.

Making it safer for her is my only concern.  Making things safer for all the other 14 year old girls out there is important, but I can't do a lot about that.

I am not one to overreact in terms of what I will let Pinkie Pie do.  She is going to continue to have the same freedom to wander about as before.  The world isn't perfectly safe, but I won't build a cage for her.  The best I can do is teach her how to handle this sort of thing and hope that I never actually need to beat the hell out of some asshole who tries to hurt her.

Her friends, to their credit, were entirely supportive and were talking about going out to beat this dude up or try to scare him.  I made it clear that they were not to do such a thing under any circumstances.  They noted that it would be a pretty bad look for a bunch of white kids to be out beating the hell out of a black guy in a bout of vigilante justice - not an observation I would have expected from my friend group when I was a teenager.  They are way more woke than I ever was.

I don't want this to escalate to violence or intimidation of any sort, and I particularly don't want kids involved in any way.  If that sort of thing was ever called for though, it is definitely not on them - it is on me.  Here's hoping it never comes to that.

Failing to stick the landing

 Wendy, Pinkie Pie, and I have been watching Avatar:  The Last Airbender for months now.  We have a pizza and Avatar night every week, and tonight we finally finished the series.  Wendy and Pinkie Pie are way more into the show than I am, but I am definitely still enjoying it so far.  

Unfortunately, like many shows, this one failed to wrap up the series in a way that satisfies me.  It actually stumbled into what I consider one of the most common and unfortunate issues in entertainment - failing to resolve a difficult, tense choice properly.

One of the key things the show highlights about Aang is his conflicted feelings about killing.  He wants to defend the world, and it is made clear that his destiny is to fight and kill the Fire Lord.  He wants to fight, and to win, but not to kill.  In many places in the story this is a major source of issues and angst for our hero, and in fact there is a whole short arc devoted to him trying to resolve it.

Aang's decision to kill or not could be a powerful climax to the series.  He could kill the Fire Lord and regret it, saving the world but costing him personally.  He could refuse to kill and watch the world burn, which would be devastating in a different way.

Instead they decide at the pivotal moment that he doesn't have to make this choice.  He can just win without killing because magic.  Yay!  What a relief!

The problem is that all the tension in the scene falls completely flat.  What did training matter?  What did Aang's struggle over killing affect?  He just went straight to an answer he could have used in the first season, removing the need for much of the story so far, making many of the struggles of the protagonists entirely moot.

It seems as though the writers were desperate to have Aang not kill people, so desperate that they were willing to throw away half of their story.  It isn't as though a refusal to kill makes a story bad, far from it, but making that moral choice a cornerstone of your story and then just abandoning it is sad.  Thing is though, if Aang isn't willing to kill, why was there so much killing in the series?  Smashing ships, crushing tanks, exploding aircraft, there is no end of mass killing of bad guys by the heroes, Aang in particular.  Aang and his gang, without any sign of moral quandary, murder huge numbers of people throughout the series.

The people they murder without worry are the unnamed randoms, the soldiers without stories, the poor, the low.  But murder a lord?  We can't do that!  Killing the highborn *matters*, in a way that killing the lowborn does not.

Let me be clear - the murders of soldiers aren't shown on screen.  Avatar doesn't explicitly show the grisly deaths, but tossing people in the middle of the ocean, or crushing a vehicle they are in to nothing, is definitely lethal.  You can't ignore the fact though that the gang will kill without worry so long as the victim isn't someone important.  As soon as the victim is important, powerful, known, suddenly they will risk anything and everything to keep that person alive.

It manages to be both classist and cruddy storytelling at the same time.

Little debts

Pinkie Pie was put in a difficult situation the other day.  She went out to find bits for a Hallowe'en costume for herself with a friend.  We gave her $40 to buy the bits, and told her this was half of her birthday present.  She was happy with this.  When she arrived at the costume place, they didn't have what she wanted.  They had something her friend wanted though, and her friend had no money.  Pinkie Pie wasn't too sure what to do about this, but eventually agreed to buy the thing for her friend.  This got extra complicated when they arrived at the register and the stuff ended up costing a lot more than she had thought, and used up almost all of her money.

These sorts of situations aren't easy to navigate.  How much do you loan to friends?  How hard do you lean on them to get the money back?  What do you do when you have the money... but it kind of isn't your money?  Are you able to say "Never mind, I am not buying that" once you get to the register in a store?"

Lessons like this aren't ones they teach in school.

Pinkie Pie ended up paying for the stuff.  She came home and talked to Wendy, and Wendy decided that this counted as Pinkie Pie's birthday present still, but if Pinkie Pie could manage to get the money from the other kid to repay us all that money that was loaned, we would buy her another birthday present.

This didn't sit well with me.  I didn't do anything for a while, but eventually decided I needed to speak up.  The other kid had paid back $8 by then, and we were recording the money owing on the fridge.  I did not like looking at that recording of the debt, and it made me uncomfortable.  Pinkie Pie has to learn how to deal with debt with her friends, especially friends who have different ideas about how to manage money than she does.  I can't fix that.  But Pinkie Pie's friends owing *me* money... that doesn't sit right.  The extreme imbalance in our power levels in the situation combined with me not actually signing on to this whole debt situation is a mess.

I don't want to put Pinkie Pie in the position of enforcing a debt between me and a kid.  That isn't fair to her, and I know how much being caught in other people's debts upsets me when I have no control over the situation.  I think if you are the one enforcing a debt you need to be the one who can forgive the debt if you choose to.

We talked about it and decided that we should give $8 back to Pinkie Pie and tell her that she doesn't have to pay us back.  She lent the money to the other kid, and she is welcome to collect it or not as she sees fit.  We are removing ourselves from the situation and that $40 is entirely Pinkie Pie's problem, not ours.  That doesn't make it easy for her necessarily, but at least she isn't caught between her friends and her parents now.  She can write it off, or try to get it back, or whatever, but it is only her that is involved in the situation.

Lending money to friends is messy.  We all have to learn that, one way or another.  If she ends up learning how to cope with this and it only costs her $32, then it was money well spent.