You Need To Teach Them To Read

Probably your single most vital undertaking as a parent is to instill a love of words, a desire to read in your child.  Awakening a love of words, a desire to hear stories, to learn and to know, is a critical necessity for the support and progress of civilization. You can convey a limited amount of information with pictures, but without words, even a simple movie loses most of it information and meaning.

Human knowledge is coded in words, and their brother, mathematics, and any who can’t attain a minimal fluency in them is doomed to an illiterate, third class status. You are denied the accumulated store of human experience and discovery, and will play no meaningful role in the march of progress.

Words convey society’s highest moral accomplishments, our values and dreams. Your own family history is lost without words, as is your nation’s and its people’s. Your task is not to pass on the entire store of human knowledge, but to give your child the skills necessary to access it. And the will to wish to do so. You do that by sitting and reading Winnie-The -Pooh to your child, not War And Peace. It doesn’t have to be a chore, it just has to be done!

Jack

Choosing The Right Degree

How many parents do you imagine send their kids off to college, telling them to find themselves? I’d bet money a whole lot do basically that, not wanting to discourage their young one from pursuing their dreams.  That’s pretty sweet, but also pretty bad parenting, especially now with college costing what it does. I suppose if a parent has money to burn, and won’t mind having junior living at home for the next thirty years, that’s okay. Otherwise it’s pretty dumb!

Now I’m a college dropout, and I’ve managed seven businesses over the last thirty five years. Four of them were custom millwork or cabinet companies, and I had some incredible college grads working for me! I’ve had a guy with a batchelors degree in archeology, two history grads, a half dozen with art degrees, an art history grad, three political science grads, an English lit major, and at least one romance language grad. Oh, and a Spanish major.

Now the Spanish guy was the most helpful, since we let him talk to the Mexican cabinet makers, and we sent him out for tacos! These were all great, bright and highly motivated people, (at least four of them now own their own businesses), but they took a beating because neither their parents nor the college they attended bothered to tell them what the prospects of finding a job with their degree would be like! Most of their stuff requires a PhD to have a prayer of getting a position, but the competition is brutal! As is the cost!

I hate peeing on anyone’s love or dreams, but sometimes you just have to. I told all my kids what the prospects were, and most of them actually listened. One will be out of debt in another year or two, and will be able to go back for a marketable degree! You need to have the talk about higher ed just as much as you do about sex. Unless you want your offspring to get bent over and screwed by some shifty college!

Jack.

bessie-isms:

*A scoundrel’s funeral is quite satisfying, and the longerone must wait, anticipating it, the more delightful it is!

*If someone declares themselves to be a slave to God, laugh at  them on the spot. God despises slavery in all forms, and will only accept you as a free and unfettered soul. He wants those who give their heart and love freely, being confidants and friends at the deepest level. You can be a slave to everything else, but not to God!Quotable:

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my ax.

Abraham Lincoln

Reconsider Your Dating Strategy

How many of you are dating? Maybe you have children who are? Are you or they clinging to someone, dating endlessly, but never moving forward, towards something more permanent? Is there fear at the root of this lack of progress? Hoping someone better will appear, allowing the current loser to be tossed, in favor of the better one?

You know that the current one is being used, right? Someone’s hoping a prince or princess will appear, and save you from the current, flawed or less than thrilling one! No one wants to be looked down on as such a pathetic loser that they haven’t got a boy or girl friend! And who wants to be alone? Even lousy sex is better than no sex, isn’t it?

If you expect me to tell you that’s not wise, good for you! Using others is always a bad idea, but there’s a more sinister side to this, that you’ve missed! While you’re bogged down with the current less than thrilling partner, you’re passing up any chance of finding a better one! The stellar person you think you want wouldn’t look twice at you, since you’re taken!

Now do you get it? The chance of you being passed up because you look like a desperate loser, being alone, is not nearly as likely as you being passed up while looking like a cheater, being on the prowl while attached to another. If your offspring are making this mistake, it’s probably because you didn’t tell them, probably because you haven’t learned it either! Time to readjust? And then go explain it to them!

Jack

Reconsider The Overly Critical Person

A person who goes around pointing out everyones flaws and mistakes, who never seems to pass up the chance to put another human down is not  ncessarily doing so from spite or malice. Often what you’re seeing is a person so crippled, so lacking in self worth, self confidence, that they go around trying to cut others down to their own preceived size. They are desperate to level the playing field, so they won’t feel so inadequate or lowly.

Hating them is a waste of your time, and drags you down to their level. Laugh at them instead, or rather at their effort to belittle your efforts. Even better, love them, and work to improve their own self image. They are desperate to be complimented, but have given up hope of anyone treating them well. Their wicked put-downs only make getting any love and positive input even less likely.

Face it, you understand more of how they feel than you’d like to admit! No one gets enough love, enough good words of encouragement or reward. You’ve many times felt unappreciated and belittled, when you hoped for a kind word or a bit of encouragement! How’d that make you feel? It isn’t much fun, is it? Imagine getting loads of such abuse? You’d likely be a bitter one too, in short order.

Oh, sure, its easy to dismiss them. After all, you manage to rise above your suffering and still be a sweet and lovable human; why shouldn’t everyone? Care to take a vote on how wonderful you are all the time? You’d likely not be thrilled if you got an honest evaluation, and deep down, you know it! We all fall horribly short of virtue at times, saying the first nasty thing that comes to us when we’re mad. No one ranks as a total saint most days.

So why not look a bit more kindly on the worst offenders? And maybe try to give them a bit of a reason to be less bitter and wicked? You know you should. Your soul needs you to make a better effort. It matters, more than you want to admit.

Jack

Don’t Admire The Young Starlets

Lots of people, especially women, seem fascinated by the Hollywood crowd, especially the sexy young stars. We have a multi-billion dollar gossip industry supported on their backs. Many of you sigh and feel neglected, sad that no one follows you around, taking your picture or stands in line for a glimpse. You think that would be so glamorous, don’t you?

Perhaps you’d be wise to reconsider that? How would you like to see fifty photographers snapping pictures of your crotch, as you enter or exit a car? I bet your parents would be quite proud to see that, wouldn’t they? Or maybe you’d like to have every last detail of your trip to the potty written about, in graphic detail? Pictures of you half naked, drunk and compromised? Not something you’d want in the family album?

Personally, I pity these young people, especially the females. Many of them seem so insecure and overwhelmed, eager for the fame, and with it the illusion of approval and acceptance that it gives them. But like an addiction, they have to keep finding new ways to be outrageous or slutty, to keep people interested. Few have all that much real talent; they are more a sex doll, a prop used to attract an audience.

Worse, only a tiny handful do have the talent and staying power to last long term. Things sag, even with cosmetic surgery, and youth fades, escaping and leaving them as attractive as old leftovers. You see it in their eyes at moments, the understanding of what they have. They are Cindrella, at the ball, and the clock is ticking. Any moment, their limo will become a pumpkin, and their butt will gain thirty pounds and sag. The party will be over, along with their status as a star. That’s not the sort of fate anyone should dream of having.

Oh, what about Prince Charming? He’s gone, chasing a younger tart of a starlet, hotter, cuter. Sad isn’t it? Maybe you should be more happy being who you are?

Jack

Why do You Choose Such Losers To Love?

Have you ever wondered why you decide to “love” the people you do? Or worse, why you reject the ones you turn away? You’re a black box, aren’t you? Just one obscure mystery. Would you be shocked to know that you pass over lots of amazingly wonderful people, ones who’d love you almost as much as God does, who’d set your sheets on fire with their sexy willingness? Guess why? Because you don’t like their hair, their clothes, how they laugh!

You reject people for the shallowest reasons, never giving them a second glance. You never bother to take five minutes, to see what they think, what sort of soul they have. Yes, you’re that shallow! Worse than who you pass over is the flip side of your flawed selection process; you’d go out with Jack the Ripper, if they dressed nice, and drove a neat car! If you understood what you’ve passed up so far in life, you’d be on the floor in tears!

How many wicked losers have you been with so far? Not a pretty sight, is it? Oh, sure, I’ve got my own roster of bad choices, including an ex that makes Lucifer look like an angel! But guess what? I learned from my foolishness, and started looking a lot closer at who I related with. I can assure you of this; the best people I’ve met all had flaws. Chubby thighs, terrible fashion sense, annoying nervous laughter. But they more than made up for it with a soul that was AAA and an ability to love that was amazing! The classiest woman I ever was associated with was my ex, and she was a spawn of the Dark Lord! Go figure!

Maybe you’d be wise to think more deeply about who you hang with? And learn to give people a better chance to “impress” you. Dating and marrying soulless toads isn’t likely to get you to a happy place, no matter how cute and sharp they look. You should know that by now. Do you, or do you have more work to do? Get busy.

Jack