House of Eratosthenes

The tests suggested that if we didn’t buy the four-thousand-dollar PVC yarmulke, my son was going to look like Rocky from Mask. So after a plaster mold was made of his head, which was about as easy as stuffing a raccoon into a garbage disposal, four to six weeks later we received the final product. The instructions were to wear the helmet twenty-three hours out of he day, every day, for three months. He lasted less than forty-five seconds. He pitched such a fit and was so miserable that we had to pry the helmet off almost immediately…And today my son is four with a head prettier than Yul Brynner’s.

Please indulge me for moment on the off chance that the “expert” who prescribed the helmet is reading this.

Dear fuckwad:

Obviously you don’t know shit about your field. You said if my son didn’t wear the helmet that his sunglasses wouldn’t sit right on his head. Well, your four-thousand-dollar helmet became a four-thousand-dollar doorstop, and three years later my son’s head is perfect. Which means you’re either A) horrible at what you do or B) a liar preying on the guilt of moms who drive expensive SUVs. Perhaps it’s a combination of incompetence and greed. Either way, you should focus full-time on your true calling — gay porn.

Thank you.

That’s a bit insensitive to gay porn stars, and I wish he’d managed to intermix that splendid description he’d whipped up back on p. 15: “I blame us because we caved to the hypochondriac, Readbook-reading, Oprah-watching, crystal-rubbing, Whole Foods-shopping survivor-of-incest moms and their pussy-whipped attorney husbands.” Emphasis on hypochondriac. Hypochondriac moms, doing their hypochondriac worrying vicariously through their kids.

The rant about peanuts is splendid. At no point does he question that the severe peanut allergies are, in fact, real. And a lot of them are. But the question still remains, and the lack of curiosity about it is really rather befuddling: How come it is that if you’re around my age (class of ’84), you can barely, maybe, possibly remember one kid out of the whole school who had an allergy like this. Now we’re looking at one in twenty-five.

The logic is bad. Don’t take my word for it, try this simple test: Someone insists her precious has an allergy, or learning disability, or needs medication in order to concentrate, or is autistic, just…doubt it. Doubt it in the case of that one kid…and…sure as the sun rises in the East the next day, you are going to find yourself embroiled in a huge knock-down drag-out about whether the problem exists. So. You doubt the one case is a positive, and you are blitzed with this “overwhelming evidence” that the malady itself is a real one.

They can’t even keep their minds on the conversation at hand. But we’re supposed to uncritically believe them when they say their kids are special cases and need medicine or therapy or cartoonishly overprotective cafeteria policies about peanut butter.

The small-m moms are feeling guilty.

And it’s cultural. We place all this importance on being able to say “I’m smarter than the next guy” or “I’m more noble than the next guy” or “I really know what I’m talking about and that other guy doesn’t”…but, paradoxically, there is no value whatsoever being attached to saying “I am a better pick for the job than that guy, because I can achieve it without any special accommodations at all and he can’t.”

Attaching a sense of importance to that, I guess, would be like picking on handicapped kids or something. So now we all get to be handicapped.

Well, we all have a right to be special, you know. It’s in the Constitution somewhere. And if you can’t be special by virtue of being talented or funny or a nice guy or whatever, you can always develop an allergy to something. Or be “lactose intolerant.” Or whatever that thing is with “gluten” (whatever that is).

So long as nobody can invite you to a party without going to some extra length, you’re good.

This is where competitive virtue has led us. Perversely, being a pain in the ass to invite anywhere actually guarantees you more invitations, since in SWPL world you get bonus points for forcing all your guests to eat only lactose-free tofu. “We would’ve had a meat-and-cheese tray, you know, but Sarah’s a vegan and Louis has a gluten allergy….”
- Severian | 03/04/2013 @ 08:54
I know people with honest-to-goodness allergies, and they’re nothing to screw around with. So I have no patience at all with people’s subtle, can’t-be-detected-by-modern-science pseudo-allergies. They’re using the word “allergies” to mean “stuff I’d like to make everyone around me miserable about because I’m a control freak.”
- Texan99 | 03/05/2013 @ 09:05

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Adam Carolla’s Son’s HelmetSunday, March 3rd, 2013

Adam Carolla’s Son’s Helmet
Sunday, March 3rd, 2013