how television is turning your kids into gay, Latino communists (or: Jesus I'm up early today)

Have you voted for BSC for best local blog on the Chicago Reader best of 2011 internet poll yet? If not, giddyup!

Well, today seems like it’s gonna be interesting. My kid woke up at 5am complaining of an upset stomach. This is code in my house for having to shit. I don’t know how he got clued in on the euphemistic nature of our fecal discourse at such a young age, but I guess what they say is true: they grow up so fast.

Anyway, for his entire life as a toddler, we’ve had this thing on his doorknob that makes it impossible for tiny hands to turn. It’s like those resistance bands that you hang on your door that ‘turn your dorm into a full gym’ but it’s just a little thing you snap around your doorknob that ‘turns your toddler’s room into his prison.’ It’s a very helpful device, but like most non-dyson vacuum cleaners, it’s got a serious and fundamental design flaw that we just discovered; namely, while my kid’s hands may be too small to turn the doorknob with this thing on it, they’re not too small to remove the thing from the doorknob entirely.

So, now he’s up and cruising around at 5am. He’s gotten my wife up and taken his dump, but he’s banging around and just kind of hollering and threatening to wake up the baby (which would be a fucking nightmare for several reasons too horrifically domestic to go into here). AND when I finally went out to check on what was going on (my wife handled the first shift then went back to bed) he’s gotta dump again. Not squirts, regular dumps…I know how it is. Sometimes you just have to take a few dumps in the morning. BUT, then he said he was cold and wanted to cuddle and that’s the kind of thing that melts the ice in my soul…so here I am. As a person responsible for taking care of kids all day, this is very much like getting called into work two hours early at the last possible second. My workday has just begun and I’m still in my underpants and it’s still hours before I usually get out of bed.

I tried to nap but all he wants to do is route trains all over my face and shit. So, I’m up. It’s currently 730 and I’ve been up, doing this shit for a long time. This is problematic for several reasons, but the big one is that we’re already running out of shit to do for the morning and his goddamned sister isn’t even up yet. I’m watching this cat in the hat show and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a show that is dedicated to the notion of teaching kids that their parents fabulous gay friends are the most exciting people to hang out with.

I mean, I’m assuming most of you have never watched this show. The cat in the hat is gay. There’s no way he’s not. He’s flamboyant, he speaks in a gay accent (or affectation…I don’t really want to get into that can of worms, but suffice it to say his voice is gay sounding) and he wears a silky bow tie and he’s got all sorts of exciting gadgets due to (presumably) his massive amounts of disposable income. AND he likes to burst into showtune type songs, and well, not to put too fine a point on it, but this cat is just obviously supposed to be gay.

And hey! That’s great. I think what is sorely lacking in my life is a gay friend who, burdened by the shackles of not being able to marry and having to jump through thousands of unfair hoops to adopt, wants nothing more than to watch my kids all the time and take em around in his fancy (highly dangerous ) car on all sorts of wacky adventures. That would solve a lot of my time issues.

I mean, in this particular episode, the cat takes the kids to his buddy, the bear, also a single dude that lives alone but bursts into songs and hangs out in bars full of other bears (probably).

I’m sure there’s a weird, creepy rightwing conspiracy attitude that could easily look at children’s programming and see it as preparing kids for the scary takeover of all the non white Christians by the brown, jive talking sodomite masses; Diego and Dora are mixing English and Spanish and they’re just Mexican, without a hint of trying to be white at all! Ni How Kai-Lan is teaching our kids to fall in line and obey our future Chinese overlords. Dino Dan is exposing our neighbors to the north as the dinosaur harboring good natured pussies that we always thought they were. And now, we’ve got the cat in the hat, a beloved character from our collective past recapitulated as a highly flamboyant homosexual who always wants to hang around with your kids!

Well, listen, my kid’s gonna need to understand some latino and Chinese culture if he’s gonna be able to function in the world that he’s gonna live in, and if my childhood is any indication, your parents’ gay friends really ARE the most fun babysitters, so, well, I guess I back this conspiracy fully. Hmmmm….I dunno though, my childhood was a long time ago…

In fact, some kid put an advice query in the sock drawer and it wigged me out completely. He said his grades were good: a 4.1 GPA and 2110 on the SAT’s, both scores that were literally impossible when I went to school (I do remember hearing tales of potential 4.5GPA’s for people who got all A+’s, but I didn’t go to any schools that went for that shit). If I don’t even know what grades are anymore, maybe I’m just a desiccated old fossil who wouldn’t know anti-god propaganda if it was on television right in front of my kids.

Eh, who knows? I think these shows seem fine. I wish I was still asleep though.
Sigh.