Best-educated moms are also more likely to ‘opt out,’ research finds

— Life Inc.

Opt out of what?

It turns out “opt out” means opt out of the workforce. How is a mom staying home and raising her kids considered “opting out”?

We must make do with today’s
Happenings, and stoop and somehow glue together
The silly little shards of our lives, so that
Our children can drink water from broken bowls,
Not from cupped hands

— Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “Aubade”

This book should be read by everyone — especially anyone with grown children and/or older parents.

Kyrie Irving

My son (age 19) and I are driving to Staples Center to see the Lakers take on the Cleveland Cavaliers, listening to the pre-game show on the radio. Because the Cavs are basically a one-man roster, and that one man is Kyrie Irving, there’s a lot of talk about Irving on the pre-game.

One of the analysts offers up his opinion that Irving is as good as he is at such a young age (he’s 20) because Irving’s dad was hard on him as a kid and pushed him and didn’t let him take breaks.

As always, when the topic of someone’s dad bullying him to greatness comes up, the boy gives me a melancholy look to say that my lack of abusiveness as a parent is the reason he’s not a professional athlete. “You let me take breaks,” he says.

“You know,” I say, “I think for every guy who says, ‘My dad wouldn’t let me back in the house until I made 100 layups with each hand and now I’m in the NBA,’ there’s 900 other guys whose dads tried the same shit and these guys got nowhere and now they’re extremely angry about it. You just never hear from those 900 guys because they’re nowhere, as I just said.”

• Parents who let their kids grow up stupid and blame the schools
• People who yawn or sneeze a LOT louder than necessary
• People who use the expression “we tip our hat [or cap] to those guys,” especially if they’re wearing a hat and they don’t physically tip it

My boy, a college sophomore, and I are watching the Lakers play the Charlotte Bobcats on the TV . . .

“Did you know,” he says, “that I’m a full two months older than [Bobcats forward] Michael Kidd-Gilchrist?”

“Hmmm . . . really?”

“He grew more than me.”

Kidd-Gilchrist is 6’7″, 232 lbs. He turned 19 in September.

It used to puzzle me how parents could stand to live at a distance from their adult children. Now I think it’s because it’s a bit embarrassing to have your kids see how absurdly vacant your life has become now that your parenting days are over.

A lot of species, once they get too old to have and raise offspring, they just die. They don’t hang around forever and make everyone uncomfortable.

Maybe a little distance isn’t such a bad thing.

According to a new survey, just over 10 percent of Berkeley High ninth and 11th graders reported carrying a weapon onto school property, while about 35 percent of 11th graders reported attending class drunk or high.

If I had a kid at Berkeley High, I’d be moving out of town yesterday, but I’m reading in the Daily Californian that this news has been “met with surprise and joy from administrators,” the reason being that a similar survey two years ago reported about 17 percent of ninth graders and 16 percent of 11th graders carrying weapons onto campus, and 48 percent of 11th graders attending class drunk or high.

Progress!

“We’re very pleased with the survey results all around,” said Director of Student Services Susan Craig, “and at the same time we’re not at all complacent.”

If by “pleased” she means “horrified,” I couldn’t agree more.

In other news, Barack Obama got more than 90 percent of the Berkeley vote in the recent presidential election, while Mitt Romney got 4.6 percent and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got 3.2 percent.

The liberal voter looks to government to solve problems that many people prefer to take on themselves, like raising their children.

My favorite poem of the week — again from Modern & Contemporary American Poetry – was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by Bernadette Mayer, especially the final image of the stressed-out new mother reading The Wild Boy of Aveyron, about a feral child raised by wolves.

American fashionista Richard Blackwell (1922-2008) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My kid calls me out for wearing white socks with black sneakers . . .

“Thanks, Mr. Blackwell,” I say to him.

Then it occurs to me that a 19-year-old is not going to get the Mr. Blackwell reference.

“FYI, Mr. Blackwell was a flamboyantly gay fashion critic.”

Satan

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Yahoo confirmed Monday that CEO Marissa Mayer gave birth to a boy on Sunday night, only about three months after taking the helm at the struggling company.

The 37-year-old Mayer will work from home and continues to lead the company and “is involved in all critical decisions [sic] making,” a Yahoo spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.

“She will be working remotely and is planning to return to the office as soon as possible (likely in 1-2 weeks),” Yahoo said in an emailed comment to the news agency.

— NBCNews.com

I applaud young Marissa Mayer for this courageous decision!

She is a role model for all the little girls out there who want to grow up and neglect their children.

Working moms, my precious darlings –

Don’t let anyone tell you that a woman is a better mom if she’s actually home with her kids.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t have it all. You can have it all. Everyone else is doing it. Don’t be left out!

Kids don’t need a lot of attention. They basically raise themselves!

We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

– Penelope Trunk

God bless America! Your children are being raised by strangers and nobody cares.

See you all in Hell!

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord . . .

Cops: Teens beat man because ‘they were just bored’ — NBCNews.com

Strange piece of “journalism” from NBC News . . . basically just a rewrite of a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer in which a 45-year-old man named Pat Mahaney received a senseless, brutal beating from six boys, ages 13 and 14:

Mahaney was taken to Mercy Mount Airy Hospital, where he was treated for four days before being released Tuesday. Police said doctors had to insert a tube down his throat to remove all of the blood from his stomach.

A tube remained in his right nostril as blood continued to seep out of his head, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, and his left eye is heavily blackened.

Police said the teens admitted that Mahaney had done nothing to provoke being kicked and punched repeatedly in the face while he lay helpless on the ground. One of the boys allegedly told police they only stopped assaulting Mahaney when a neighbor began yelling at them and said he was calling police.

The strange thing about the NBC article, though, is that it deletes information about the race of the kids, which is in the Enquirer article:

“It was a heinous crime but it was not a hate crime,” said North College Hill Police Chief Gary Foust of the teens, who are all black.

He said several residents have called police inquiring if Mahaney was specifically targeted because he is white. He was not, the chief stressed.

Two questions:

1. If the boys were white and the victim black, would NBC have deleted that information?
2. Do the boys look like President Obama’s son would look if he had one?

My boy is playing NBA 2K12 and points out that my Where’s Waldo shirt looks like the Washington Wizards (nee Bullets) throwback uniforms.

“Where’s John Wall-do?” he says.

Ha ha. I get my comeback opportunity a few minutes later when his game player passes to a teammate, who scores, but his player doesn’t get credit for an ssist.

“HOW CAN THAT BE ANYTHING BUT AN ASSIST FOR ME?!” he shouts in disbelief. “That’s bad programming.”

“Oh I doubt that,” I say. “The people who program video games are a lot smarter than the people who play them.”

I picked up a red striped T-shirt on sale at Old Navy. My son saw it and it seemed to me that he chuckled a little bit.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Where’s Waldo?” he said.

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Modesto police are investigating if there’s a criminal case against a former high school teacher who resigned his job to move into an apartment with an 18-year-old girl he met while teaching.

James Hooker, 41, was placed on administrative leave Feb. 3 by Modesto City Schools and resigned less than three weeks later, according to a report at the Modesto Bee.

The newspaper reports that the man, who had taught business and computer classes, left his wife and children, to move in with Jordan Powers, an Enochs High School senior whom he met when she was a freshman at the school. One of Hooker’s children also attends the same high school.

“In making our choice, we’ve hurt a lot of people,” Hooker told the Bee. “We keep asking ourselves, ‘Do we make everyone else happy or do we follow our hearts?’”

— Calif. teacher resigns after leaving family for student

Follow your heart, you magnificent selfish bastard!

Follow it right out the front door of the family home and into a Modesto apartment with a high school girl whose poor single mom, from the looks of the photo, couldn’t afford to buy her a set of braces.

DON’T LOOK BACK!

And make yourselves available for interviews and photo ops. YES! YES! YES!

(Let me add parenthetically that, despite what you may have heard, being raised by a single parent does not screw kids up in the head and more people should be doing it.)

One of your own kids goes to the same high school as your new live-in girlfriend?! Oh, the collateral damage is going to be prodigious!

Wait — I’m now being informed that the two of you appeared on Good Morning America this morning?!

Brilliant move, Romeo! A sane person would have said, “No, I think I’ve done enough damage already,” let things play out as just a local scandal in the backwater of Modesto, and missed out on the opportunity to traumatize everyone involved at a national level.

If this doesn’t result in at least one suicide, then my name is not Satan.

See you in Hell, professor.

Satan

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

— A child out of wedlock is the new normal – The New York Times (via msnbc.com)

HA HA HA! And it’s only going to get worse!

These poor illiterate bastards will be stabbing each other for food in a few years!

Unwed mothers are my meal ticket. Keep up the good work, my little darlings!

See you all in Hell . . .

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.

Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

— Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Indonesian students crossing a collapsed bridge to get to school

The conventional wisdom in America is that you have to be rich to get a good primary education.

The real problem is that American kids will not cross a collapsed suspension bridge to get to their school on the other side of the river, like Indonesian kids will . . .

I keep hearing that there aren’t enough women in technology, like this is a problem. The most obvious explanation is that women don’t want to work in technology. If they want to work in other fields, fine. If they want to raise their kids, even better.

I did some tutoring for a girl taking AP Computer Science. She’s a junior in high school and wants to be a veterinarian. Afterwards, she told her dad, “If I decide not to be a veterinarian, maybe I’ll be a programmer.”

Don’t let it be said that I’m not doing my part to address the shortage of women in technology, even though I think it’s baloney . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.