Today’s blog marks the sixth month anniversary of Deep Dark Thoughts. I have been commenting on my thoughts and misadventures every week for half of a year, now. And what have I accomplished in that time? Well, honestly not much.
The world hasn’t changed, and nobody’s life has been significantly altered because I have chosen to sit down and post weekly rants of a thousand words or less. However, I do hope that I have at least added a little humor to your weekly routine.
Is this blog a waste of time? I don’t believe so. Not mine anyway. It is certainly a waste of yours, but then, that was the plan all along: to make a few minutes of your day pass a little more quickly than it might have otherwise.
Are people reading my weekly rants? In a word, no. Or if they are, they aren’t admitting to it, which I completely understand. I had reservations myself about admitting I had anything to do with this blog. And I’m the one writing it.
Or am I? (Insert dramatic music here: dun dun, Dun!)
But despite the lack of acclaim, money, power, or even general notice from the public, I do believe I have been gaining some small forward momentum. For example, the other day I asked my oldest daughter if I could use her real name on my blog. She said, “Absolutely not.”
I consider this to be progress. The last time I asked her about the blog, she had no idea what I was talking about. This time, by telling me no, she has admitted to three things:
- She knows I am writing a blog.
- She is concerned that someone she knows might actually see it and recognize her name.
- She does not want to have anything in writing that might suggest in any way that she and I are related.
Number 3 might have hurt my feelings a little bit except that she had already made that point very clear when she was in high school. Whenever I dropped her off somewhere in front of her friends, she would refer to me as “Jeeves” and then tell me to pull the car around back and wait for her to call. (Although why she thought her friends would actually believe she had a chauffer driving her around in a ten-year-old Saturn, I have no idea.)
However, by refusing to allow me to use her real name, my oldest daughter has also created a bit of a problem for me. If I write about my kids in Deep Dark Thoughts, I don’t want to continually refer to them as “the older one” and “the younger one.” That gets boring really fast. I thought about using fake names, but that might get confusing if I forget what names I was using or accidentally mix them up.
So, in the name of simplicity, I have decided that any time I refer to the girls I will call the older child Epic Mistake #1 (or EM1) and the younger one Epic Mistake #2 (EM2).
Before anyone decides to send me hate mail for calling my children mistakes, let me just be clear that I am not saying we had the kids by mistake. My wife and I very much wanted to have children. It’s just that we soon discovered we didn’t want these children.
The mistake wasn’t the fact that we had kids in the first place, the mistake was once we figured out how rotten the girls were, we decided to keep them anyway. From the age of two, our daughters have made it their mission in life to thoroughly deplete my wife and I of all financial, physical, and emotional resources we might once have had. These two vampires systematically sucked us dry of our very will to live, and yet we continued to allow them to stay in our home.
It is too late now to try to change anything or even to kick them out of the house, and even if it wasn’t, truthfully, I am too worn out to make the effort. EM1 and EM2 are adults in the eyes of the law and we no longer have any control over them, assuming we ever did. They are both able to choose their own paths and are free to plague the world as they see fit.
Sorry about that, world. They are your problem now, not mine.
Of course, like any parent, I will worry about them when they are off and living on their own. I will wonder if they are eating properly and taking care of themselves. I will hope they have good jobs and are making good decisions. And I will check the daily newsfeeds to make sure they haven’t been arrested for doing something incredibly stupid.
On the bright side, if they do get arrested, I will be glad I didn’t use their real names in my blog.