I'll start with this.... I was driving this morning, as you do, and noticed a car in front of me in traffic. It had a bumper sticker that read, I think, "Make your own reality - turn off your TV." There you go.
The thing to note here is that I said "I think." The bumper sticker was written with white text on a sky blue background in a really small, ornate font. I've got above average vision and reading it was a real task. This was an extraordinarily hard-to-read bumper sticker. It was the "medical journal" of bumper stickers, if you will.
One more detail? The person's rear bumper was wrecked.
I'm not going to go ahead and assume that the bumper was wrecked because some person like me was obsessively trying to read it and ended up rear ending the guy, but I will use this as an opportunity to ask the question... why would you get a hard-to-read bumper sticker? If you know the main purpose of bumper stickers is to give other motorists reading material, does it make any sense to get one that's going to challenge them to the point where they're endangering yourself and others because they can't keep their eyes on the road? Does it occur to the person at the point of purchase that the thing they're buying seems nice, but ultimately does more harm than good? Is there a common sense filter that they run through before they get to the finish line? Am I asking too much?
(That was the set-up. This is where I segue into the real story.)
I hear a lot of commercials on the radio for this product called Your Baby Can Read . In short, you go through a process where you teach a baby (3 months old, 15 months old, whatever) how to read words years before they'd learn how to read on their own. There are flash cards, pictures and testimonials from proud women saying "Evan is 19 months old and he can read 500 words. Your child can't do that. He's probably autistic anyway." (Yes, I made that last part up.)
So, here's the question for the folks who buy this thing: So, your 15 month old kid can read.... now what?
I know... there's some pride in knowing that your kid is almost literate, but what does it mean? You're now the proud parent of the world's most useless literate person? I mean... you do know that a 15 month old child, quite literally, cannot wipe its own ass, right? So he can read? You gonna make the motherfucker get a job or something?
You have wasted your time and life on something that was going to happen anyway. You woke up at 3 AM, stood on your lawn and did a special magical dance to force the sun to rise. You kneeled next to your stove and offered a sacrifice to the Ramen gods to help them make your cooking water reach a boil. You met Matthew Fox at a party, gave him a blowjob in the coat closet, then paid him $500 to forget your name and never, ever call you.
A 15 month old kid doesn't need to read. You know what he needs? Cookies. A plastic sheep that he can stick in his mouth and suck the paint off of. Someone to wipe his aforementioned unwiped ass. You to turn your back long enough for him to steal your cell phone and mash the buttons. Milk, for the aforementioned cookies. You, overachieving parent, are a fucking idiot. I look forward to reading your "My 15 month old child can read bumper sticker" in a really tiny font.
What next? "My Evan learned to drive at the age of 2. Sure, he ruined our lawn by parking the car on it 17 times a week, and the car smells like stale feces because he's a disgusting pre-human animal with no concept of cleanliness. And sure we're always out of gas because he drives back and forth between the zoo and candy store like he's Rain Man or something. And, yes, our car insurance is about $35,000 a month because we're stupid enough to put a fucking 2 year old on our car insurance and the lady at Geico was like, 'seriously, a 2 year old?' and I was like, 'yeah, but he's smart and he can read' and she was like gasping while furiously typing on her calculator for 10 minutes and apparently there's some law about how kids can't drive until they're older or whatever but I'm not concerned with reality because my mother never loved me. But whatever. My baby can drive a car. And yours can't. Because he's autistic."
(Again, I made that last part up.)
