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”?

I get an email from the UCI-Gifted-Students mailing list. Shortly thereafter, a parent clicks Reply All to send out this response:

Please remove my name from your mailing list.

Wait, there’s more. A second parent then responds to the first parent, also via Reply All:

I'm one of receipents [sic] of the UCI-Gifted-Students emails, therefore not responsible and able to remove you. I wish I knew who to direct you to.

Good luck.

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.

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.”

Card stunt

We’re in Berkeley for Parents Weekend, watching Cal and UCLA battle it out on the gridiron.

One of the halftime highlights at Cal football games is card stunts. I know, welcome to the 1920s, right?

Everyone held up their cards, which were either blue or gold. The cards on the opposite side of the stadium from us spelled out “Memorial Stadium” but we couldn’t see what our own cards spelled.

“I hope they say ‘UCLA Sucks,’” I said to my wife standing next to me, but unfortunately loud enough for a nearby husband-and-wife team of Bruin fans to hear me.

“Did you really just say that?” the woman asked. “We’re helping.” Meaning that they were holding up their cards to support the card stunt and didn’t deserve to be insulted.

When you venture into enemy territory, you have to expect some derision.

We’re up here in Berkeley for Parents Weekend. I was saying since we arrived that this looks like a winnable game for Cal and couldn’t find one person — student or parent — to agree with me. Cal was 1-4, UCLA was 4-1.

Cal fans are conditioned for disappointment. I’m a USC guy and USC fans were the same way in the pre-Pete Carroll era. Fans showed up for games not to cheer on the team but to bemoan another disappointing performance.

This is a nice wakeup call for the Bruins. Despite their record and ranking coming into the game, they’re not very good.

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 . . .

Highlights

You see, the essence of America, what really unites us, is not nationality or ethnicity or religion. It is an idea. And what an idea it is. That you can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things, that it does not matter where you came from, it matters where you are going.

My fellow Americans, ours has never been a narrative of grievance and entitlement. We have never believed that I am doing poorly because you are doing well. We have never been jealous of one another and never envious of each others’ successes.

And on a personal note, a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham. The segregated city of the south where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the president of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the secretary of state.

Modern copy of Myron’s Discobolus in University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden, Denmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Deadspin has an excellent “as told to” story on former Olympic discus thrower Mac Wilkins (What The Discus Can Teach You About Life: Lessons From One Of America’s Greatest Throwers)

Wilkins made four straight U.S. Olympic teams, winning a gold medal in 1976, a silver in 1984, and finishing fifth in 1988. He was also the first man to throw the discus more than 70 meters, and he held the world record for over two years, bettering his own mark three times between April 1976 and August 1978.

Some excerpts:

So one day I go out to train and I say, Oh, what the heck. Let’s just give it a little extra effort today. And I did, and I got better and it went farther. And I thought that was kind of fun. What if I could that again tomorrow? And so pretty soon, I’m hooked on, Can I do it better today? And it was fun. I knew I could get better and I enjoyed it.

It was all about, There are no limits. There are no limits. I have no restrictions. I have no inhibitions. And you can achieve anything that you set your mind to. There are no limits.

I thought that the [1980 Olympic] boycott was a stupid thing to do. We continued to sell wheat to Russia. We continued to sell Pepsi to Russia. We bought vodka from Russia. It was business as usual except for the Olympic Games. And, of course, we only boycotted after we won the ice hockey game in Lake Placid that year. So I thought it was very naïve, and I was very disappointed because I really liked Jimmy Carter. And there’s still a war in Afghanistan, even to this day. So it didn’t do anything.

Is there a moral to the story? Well, probably.

I have so many, so many times when I would fall down or fail. Being a teacher/coach, I have to be … well, it’s exactly like being a parent. You have to be a better person than you really are.

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 . . .