There used to be a Catholic blogger who set my teeth on edge. Eventually I stopped reading her posts so that my teeth could be [whatever the opposite of "on edge" would be] and she stopped blogging (along with most of the rest of the world), but she's still out there in Catholic internet-land. I saw her listed as a conference speaker recently, and her talk was about keeping kids Catholic.
"Sproing!" went my teeth, back on edge yet again. "Listen, lady," said my on-edge teeth, "every one of your kids is still listed on your tax forms as your dependent, and yet you are giving advice to an audience about keeping them Catholic? Are you also going to dispense advice on grandparenting?"
Because this is a true thing I know from painful experience: you can follow (and even dispense!) lots of plausible-sounding advice about keeping kids Catholic, but it is the kids themselves who will be making that decision in the long run.
Lately YouTube has been telling me I might like to watch a video from a lady in her 40s talking about her five! easy! habits! that allowed her to take off 20 pounds FOREVER!! And -- who knows? -- maybe those pounds are actually gone forever. But that thumbnail also sets my teeth on edge. "Listen, lady," say my on-edge teeth, "you look to be about 5 years out from a dramatic shift in your body's hormonal milieu, and it is associated with increased body fat for a surprisingly large percentage of the people who go through it. So maybe let's talk about 'forever' on the other side, okay?"
I should know by know that humans like to think they've got things figured out. Inside the two-year-old who insists that marshmallows ARE TOO a good breakfast is the germ of the 20-year-old who will tell his professor with certainty that this assignment isn't going to teach him anything worthwhile. They're both convinced they're right despite being underqualified to make those judgments.
I remember some of my childhood assertions about the long haul. I once said confidently that I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons until I was 80. I declared that everyone at my school would love Kool & The Gang's song Celebration forevermore, because I was sure it was a timeless hit for the ages. These memories make it highly unlikely that I will ever get a tattoo, because too many of my own FOREVERs have turned into emphatic NO THANK YOUs.
Perhaps I still have some ideas about how to guarantee a desirable outcome many years into the future. But I think I have mostly learned that life is long, and full of surprising developments.
How about you? Any childhood declarations about the future that haven't held up well? Any developments in your life that would have been shocking to the you of 2004?
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