Author: Francisco

Holiday Stress

Relationships1 Comment

As a kid, The Holidays rocked. It was a time to kick back and stay home from school. As an adult The Holidays became a stressful time when you find yourself doing things you literally hate doing. All of a sudden you find yourself in stores you never go into, waiting in line to buy something you would never buy yourself, and the routine schedule that you keep to, is totally off track as you try to fit in family parties, shopping, gift wrapping, and through it all you start stressing out over your weight, your relatives getting along, and then it finally hits you: The Holidays suck! About the only real joyful moment I had last holiday season was watching my youngest son gorge himself in presents. He was so excited, I thought he’d pass out from sheer joy. This year, I’m really thinking The Grinch might have the right idea after all. The Holidays really are for kids.

I was looking through some of my old writings, when I stumbled upon this little rant, that I wrote back in 2004:

Relationships Suck During the Holidays

Men often have the luxury of not thinking about lots of stuff. We worry about ourselves most of the time, and that is just great, but around the holidays we lose this luxury. For some unknown reason the holidays bring out this idea that peace and goodwill are a good thing and that we should be polite and forgiving of others. Now this is all nice and dandy, when you are talking about say dueling nations or strangers you don’t really know all that well, but for your significant other to suggest this about your family is just ludicrous. It is prone to failure each and every year. This is why the holidays are so stressful, it is not that there is something magical about this time of year, nope, it’s that your girlfriend or most likely your wife decides for you that you must forgive everything about your relatives and just pretend that everything is civil and that they are perfectly normal people and that you are totally fine with everything. In other words, suppress, suppress, suppress everything and drink your eggnog.

And sure it works, this plan of women to make the world peaceful for just the holidays, that is until you just can’t take it anymore and you curse out your brother, your sister-in-law, your father, or whoever it is you just can’t get along with at the dinner table. Five minutes after you’ve stormed out or made someone cry, or worse spill their eggnog, you realize just what a dumb ass you are and that you didn’t solve anything by screaming your feelings out like that. But it is too late, you’ve ruined another holiday reunion and everyone knew you had to do it too. Suddenly you are the reason why everyone tries to be polite and all peace-loving around the holidays, you just realized that you are the problem, and not your uncle who cheats on his wife, or your crazy mother-in-law who is secretly plotting to take revenge since you married her daughter. That’s right, it’s all YOU!

But wait, you can still blame your girlfriend/wife. If she had not screamed at you to be all civil and happy-smiling during the holidays, maybe, just maybe you would not have exploded. Maybe she was plotting against you all along, to make you be the fallguy this year, so she would not be the one to be the problem one! But all of this is too late you have ruined the holidays and the eggnog is now smelling kind of funny.

There is always next year, when you’ll try to remember to be yourself for the holidays instead of trying to be all merry and polite. Maybe just maybe next year you won’t ruin the holidays and you won’t have to drink this bad eggnog.

Turning Thirty-four

Editorials1 Comment

This morning I checked my email and saw that my brother emailed me, asking me how I felt about being in my mid-thirties? I honestly did not think of it until he said that, partly because I’ve been telling everyone I’m 29 for the last three years. However, I am now officially thirty-four and thinking, well it is not too bad. I enjoy things more, and I’ve learned to have more patience in general. Although I’d like to think it is because I’ve matured and learned the ways of The Force, but sometimes it is that the reflexes have slowed down over the years. It is not that my rebellious instincts have at all subsided, it is that mentally you no longer welcome the consequences. I guess when you are young and oblivious to such things as consequences your bravado will push you further than you really wanted to go, but with age comes the wisdom of knowing that when you engage yourself in a fight, most likely you will not come out unscathed. Nowadays I know to pick my battles wisely, as I know most wars can never be won. And even more importantly I understand how there are people that love to instigate wars that they never fight themselves. Life is about choices and experiences. Most often it comes to a crossroads between the arduous moral choice and the easier way out. Everyone likes to say how they always choose the right way, but in reality, most often we pick the easy way out because choosing the moral path is just too hard. Then there are times, when you have learned from past experience that the moral path does not exactly end with cheering applause, more often than not, people resent you even for making the right choices. Undeniably age does become a factor, but it isn’t so much that you can’t react like you use to, it is that you have learned from your past experiences.

Children Are Not Citizens

Legal2 Comments

Other than enemy combatants, there is one other group of people who have absolutely little if any rights under US Law: namely children. Every year it seems there is a new group of adults that are championing to protect children, much in the same way Kyle’s mom on South Park spends all her time trying to protect Kyle from everything she feels is wrong. It is these initiatives that have brought us child seat belt laws, drunk driving laws, and of course the ever popular sex laws that are meant to prosecute child sex offenders. Except that no one ever thinks about how these laws can backfire and hurt the very children that they are aimed to protect. A good example is the 13 year old Utah girl who under the law is both victim and violator.

The Ogden, Utah, girl was put in this odd position because she was found guilty of violating a state law that prohibits sex with someone under age 14. She also was the victim in the case against her boyfriend, who was found guilty of the same violation by engaging in sexual activity with her.

In this case the law is intended to protect children regardless of whether the child agrees to press charges. While the Utah girl does not see herself as a victim, she has no say in the matter, because to the law her opinions or intentions do not matter, all that matters are the interests of the State. The child in fact belongs to the state, and so the state decides for her. Ultimately she has no recognized rights in the matter.

Here in Iowa, a law that forced known sex offenders from living within close proximity of schools and daycares was suppose to make it safer for children, but instead it ended up making it easier for sex offenders to disappear. Police and other authorities are now having a hard time trying to find them. In worse cases, as the offenders went off the grid, they ended up finding secluded residences that made it that much easier for them to commit the very crimes the law is meant to prevent against!

The main point of child laws though is to help children, but until we actually give children some actual rights under the law, we will end up making laws that harm the very children we aim to protect. Consider the irony that people who commit crimes against children and who are prosecuted, still end up having more rights than their victims.