Ask an Empty Nester

Dear Empty Nester,

I’m about to send my youngest off to college, and the way she’s talking, I doubt I’ll even see her over the summers. It seems she’s gone for good, which I guess is the whole idea. My question is: what should be done with her bedroom? I don’t want to make it into a shrine or anything, but to eliminate all trace of her seems a bit callous. Any suggestions?

Jeannie E, Seattle, WA

Dear Jeannie,

To some degree, this is a matter of real estate: how large is your home? If you lived in a land of giant houses, like, say, Houston, any modification to that room might not be worth the bother. But if your home is typical of Seattle, sounds like you could really use a proper guest room. So you’ll want to make that room attractive to your friends and relatives, which means pulling down the BTS or Monsta X poster, ditching the stuffed animals, upgrading the battered old bumper-sticker-plastered dresser, and if necessary (e.g., if the walls are red or black), repainting.

That being said, if you want to preserve something of your daughter’s essence, in an aesthetically pleasing way, leave her bookshelf exactly as is. Perhaps you have fond memories of seeing her behind this or that book, and after all you probably bought her some of them, especially if your daughter was wise enough to insist you hold on to her favorite children’s picture books. (Note that if your kid doesn’t have a bookshelf full of books to leave behind, you’re a shitty parent and all bets are off.) (Kidding!) (Sort of!) (No seriously, I’m kidding!)

Dear Empty Nester,

My son’s grand European tour dovetailed right into his departure for college, so my husband and I got an early start on our empty nester experience. The main thing I’ve noticed so far is that we’re kind of snippy with each other, especially about—of all things—the perennially low gas gauge in our car. We used to blame our kid for this (and frankly he earned that), but with him gone it’s still going on. My husband swears he doesn’t run out the tank, and while he’s not known to be delusional, I’m sure I’m not the culprit either. Are we losing our minds?

Emily K, Portland, OR

Dear Emily,

This could just be a phase as you adjust to life without your son around. Perhaps both you and your husband are flakier than you think when it comes to filling the tank, having long scapegoated your kid, and now the size of this problem is being exaggerated. You might also reasonably chalk some of this up to sky-high gas prices; maybe you’re getting just a few gallons at a time because you keep finding yourself almost out of gas without a reasonably cheap gas station nearby.

There’s a silver lining here, by the way: at least your son learned to drive! As described in this Wall Street Journal article, a growing number of Gen-Z kids aren’t bothering to learn; in 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds got their driver licenses, whereas in 2014 that had fallen to 24.5%. Don’t get me wrong, cars suck and we should all be biking instead, but knowing how to drive is an inarguably useful skill.

Dear Empty Nester,

It’s been almost a year since we dropped our child (er, adult, I guess) off at college, and when he didn’t even come home for summer break, my wife and I relapsed right into the empty nester funk we’d suffered originally. It might even be worse this time. It’s so bad, my wife is talking about getting a dog. This initially struck me as a really weird, hail-Mary type of notion, but I’m starting to think I’m just crazy enough to try it. What do you think?

Malcolm R, Oakland, CA

Dear Malcolm,

First of all, I am not a dog person, so I am fundamentally unqualified to answer this question, but I’ll give it my best shot anyway.

If you have never had a dog, this seems like a strange time to get one; or, to put it another way, if you’ve lived this long without a dog, do you actually fancy yourself suddenly becoming a dog person? Meanwhile, there are practical things to consider: as an empty nester you now have the opportunity to travel more, but a dog can seriously cramp your style. You should probably interview your dog-owning friends see what you’re getting into.

It also strikes me that a dog would be a questionable replacement for a typical teenaged human, with their moodiness, their tendency to hole up in their room, and their inevitable lack of greeting when you arrive home. In short, it’s likely your departed teen behaved more like a cat. Wouldn’t that be a more realistic surrogate?

Dear Empty Nester,

Why are we called empty nesters, anyway? It’s not like the nest is gone; we parents are still in it, thank you very much!

John S, Ashburn, VA

Dear John,

I wondered the same thing, before learning more about the avian behavior underlying the metaphor. For one thing, as described by Audubon, a bird’s nest exists purely for the eggs and hatchlings, and is then abandoned. If we want to be pedantic about it, the empty nest metaphor isn’t very apt unless the parents sell their home and move.

But it actually gets even more complicated than that. The real power of this metaphor derives from its allusion to brood parasitism, the practice of a bird laying its egg in another bird’s nest, manipulating the creator of that nest (the “host”) into raising its young. Isn’t this how all parents feel, before their nest empties out—as in, “Who are these evil teenagers and where did my sweet little children go?!” (This is related to the concept of “soiling the nest,” wherein—perhaps by biological design—your teenager becomes more and more annoying over time, to make his her departure a relief rather than cause for lament.)

The metaphor of brood parasitism is also a means to understand the guilt you are feeling now: just to get this kid out of your hair, you’ve planted her in a college dorm, making her her RA’s and roommates’ problem. They can try to get her to turn her stereo down, stop slamming doors at night, and not leave piles of laundry all over the floor. Offloading your chick to someone else’s nest feels  downright irresponsible, doesn’t it? Yeah … she learned from the best.

Dear Empty Nester,

This is really weird: although I think I’m coping pretty well with the empty nest (it’s only been a week), I startled myself the other day by calling my husband by our son’s name! Even more surprising, my husband says this was the second time I’ve done it. Am I losing it, or is this a known phenomenon?

Tracy A, Castle Rock, CO

Dear Tracy,

I have not only heard of this, but I did it myself! I wouldn’t read too much into it … just a brain glitch I think, based on your departed kid being on your mind. Perhaps it’s like that game where you tell somebody to say “stop” fifty times in a row, and then you ask him, real quick, “What do you do when you see a green light?” and he answers, “Stop!”

If, on the other hand, you start calling your husband by your ex-boyfriend’s name, then you might have bigger issues, like you’re reverting too far back to your previous life…

Dear Empty Nester,

I am having a disagreement with my wife about how much contact we should have with our son during his first couple weeks at college. She thinks he might be shy about reaching out to us for assistance, but I’m guessing he’ll love the independent feeling and would prefer to be left alone. When it comes to phoning, emailing, or texting a recently fledged kid, how much is too much? Please reply soon … we’re sending him off next week!

Rob S, Council Bluffs, IA

Dear Rob,

This will certainly vary from kid to kid, and based on where yours falls on the spectrum from already independent to totally coddled. I guess I would err on the side of less contact, since there are so many resources available to kids these days, with their parents likely being be a last resort. Remember, when our generation started college there was no Internet; most students lacked cell phones; and there was no Amazon … and yet, we somehow survived.

My younger daughter, a freshly minted college freshman, mentioned recently during an (albeit brief) phone call home that her alarm clock had broken and she had no idea how she’d wake up in time for her first class on Monday. So I suggested she use her (non-smart) cell phone, which surely has an alarm clock feature. She seemed to shrug off this idea, and dropped the subject. Well, the next day I downloaded the owner’s manual and sent her the instructions via email. Shortly after that, I sent her an unrelated email about some college lecture notes from thirty years ago I’d just stumbled across, relating to Nikolai Gogol, a writer we both enjoy.

Well, guess which email my daughter responded to first? Correct: the random one with no practical purpose, about how Gogol was a disgusting little kid, etc. To be fair, my daughter did reply to the alarm clock one too, but only to say she’d figured it out on her own. I have to say, I felt much better about the Gogol email. Her response to it told me she was alive and well and on top of her correspondence, and I didn’t feel like a mother hen. (Frankly, I’m more of a father rooster at heart.)

Dear Empty Nester,

I’m going to be an empty nester soon, along with a few of my friends and neighbors, and at some point someone was talking about silver linings and said something about free stuff. Is there some way to get free stuff out of this deal? I hope it’s not just bumper stickers or ball caps from the university…

Peter L, Albany, CA

Dear Peter,

You’re in luck! It just so happens there’s plenty of free stuff in our community, thanks to parents cleaning out their kids’ rooms. I’m seeing all kinds of perfectly good things dragged out to the curb: desks, chairs, old lamps, a clock radio, a boom box … you get the picture. My wife set out the six or seven stuffed animals our kids didn’t insist on keeping, and they were all taken … even the home-sewn turtle whose head was starting to come off. If you hurry, you might still nab this stereo cabinet (if that’s what it is) though I already scored the little alarm clock:

Dear Empty Nester,

My son, who starts his freshman year in a couple weeks, shocked me the other day by casually mentioning he’d be coming home once a month or so to do his laundry. (His college is only a couple hours away.) Is this a standard behavior? Should I allow it?

Lisa N, Sacramento, CA

Dear Lisa,

Look, this kid has a lot on his plate. He’s got his grades to think about, and making friends besides! I think you should drive out there twice a month, pick up his laundry, and do it for him. And bring him lots of baked goods while you’re at it (cookies, brownies, etc.). And if you really care about him succeeding socially, you should probably do his roommates’ laundry as well. And then write all their papers for them.

Have I made my point? Your son presumably has his tuition and dorm fees covered … he shouldn’t even be asking about laundry.

Dear Empty Nester,

I just have to say it: my youngest is going off to college soon and I’m already feeling pretty down. One way I try to process these kinds of feelings is through art, literature, etc. that goes into the problem I’m grappling with. That said, I don’t want to spend a lot of time wallowing in my grief by reading a 400-page novel on the topic. Any recommendations for a good empty nester movie or something?

Aaron W, Minneapolis, MN

Dear Aaron,

I know just the thing: “Bao,” an animated short film from Pixar (available on Amazon Prime Video). There’s a nice interview with the director and the producer here.

Dear Empty Nester,

That bit about brood parasitism being part of the empty nest metaphor ... you totally made that up, didn't you.

Mike R, Sheridan, WY

Dear Mike,

Yeah. I did.

Dear Empty Nester,

I’m getting ready to drive my kid cross-country to drop her off at college, and I completely grasp that this is the intended outcome of her upbringing, that things are going to plan, and that the best case scenario is that she immediately adjusts, thrives socially, and doesn’t give her family a lot of thought. At the same time, I must confess I’d feel heartbroken if she didn’t miss her father and me at least a little. Is there any way for me to tell if she does, or will, and is that even realistic to hope for?

Kaitlin C, Fairfax, CA

Dear Kaitlin,

This is a common question (fielded not so long ago by the columnist College Dad as well). The fact is, you should brace yourself for your daughter to be totally unemotional during the final sendoff (even if you’re crying your eyes out), and pretty blasé in the weeks to come as well. Bear in mind, she’s blasting off into an exciting future, and all her hormones are united in jettisoning her old life with extreme prejudice. You are correct that the best case scenario is a swift and complete detachment.

That said, if your family has a pet, your daughter will surely miss him or her. Pets are much more attractive and cuddly than parents, and never pester the kids for anything but food (which after all is easy and fun to serve up). I also wonder if longing for the family pet is a kid’s way to sublimate homesickness into a more acceptable form.

Our younger daughter’s big goodbye took place last week, and it was predictably brief and offhanded (especially for her). But during her final week at home, she was moved to write a poem about our cat Freya. The poem ponders how little we can understand our cat; how differently she perceives the world; how she likely doesn’t differentiate between dream and recollection; and how little she perceives absence. The poem concludes:

Yet when I’m gone
Perhaps the slightest lack is felt, she’ll start
At one more cold place in the house.
And so I’ve left, within her scattered mind,
A memory of warmth

An Empty Nester is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an Empty Nester,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Is It Harder to Get Into a Top College Now?

Introduction

In my last post, I presented a list of college application “frequently asked questions.” Because research is a hassle, I didn’t do any. My answers were all based on what I’ve heard from parents in my community and from my older daughter. I regurgitated these people’s collected wisdom in slightly distorted form to inject humor. My main point was to satirize the doom-and-gloom attitude of pretty much everybody around me (except my wife, who also finds the prevailing attitude pointless and annoying).

                                                                     

That being said, I assumed that my answer to the first FAQ—”Is it harder to get into college now?”—was basically correct. (My answer was, “Yes, it absolutely is. Your child is way, way smarter, more industrious, and more resourceful than you, and yet won’t be able to sail through the process and attend a top college like you did.”) I took everybody’s word for it that top colleges really are more selective nowadays, simply because this opinion was always given with such an air of authority. I took it on faith that my community was actually basing this position on facts and research. It turns out that these people are all just a bunch of ninnies, mistaking fear for reality … Chicken Littles all, spouting falsehoods irresponsibly. This post debunks all that and presents a theory on the origin of this mass hysteria.

The conventional wisdom

All the parents and high school kids around me say the same thing: “It’s way harder getting into a top college than it used to be.” This is stated as irrefutable fact and when I’ve expressed skepticism, I’ve been shot down. The evidence given (if any) is the lower rate of acceptance—i.e., the number of rejected applications. So many more students are being rejected, the logic goes, our crop of kids may well be among them.

I have instinctively doubted this, and in trying to buck up my daughter I said, “It’s probably just more pack fodder. The field is larger, but not the front of the group that actually has a chance.” I chose this bike race analogy to try to make the dialogue briefer and a bit less dull. My point was, if you have 20 good racers who are all competitive, and then a bunch of poseurs buy fancy bikes and jump in to the race, without a prayer of placing high, your race hasn’t really gotten harder. It’s just gotten bigger.

My daughter refuted this counterpoint on the grounds that a) students with really good grades and SAT/ACT scores are being turned away, and b) everybody knows it’s gotten harder—this is just established fact. Out of sheer laziness and a sense that pessimists are usually right, I never pursued the truth. Until now.

The truth

The truth is, the increased difficulty of a top student getting into a top school has been greatly exaggerated. Here is a summary of my findings:

• The number of high school seniors is shrinking
• The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown
• Students apply to far more colleges than ever before, out of fear of being rejected and because electronic application methodologies like Common App have made this so easy to do
• This application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate
• This acceptance rate number is illusory because so many applicants are not qualified
• Colleges are deliberately encouraging behaviors that shrink this acceptance rate number, to appear more elite
• Looking at the metric that matters—the percentage of top students accepted by at least one top college—paints a picture that is astonishingly rosier

I will cite evidence from six articles (all from mainstream news magazines) to support all this. My conclusion? Virtually every member of my community owes my kid and me an apology for all the unwarranted anxiety they have caused by perpetuating this myth of increased selectivity.

And now, here is my point-by-point evidence of the above, to thoroughly document and explain what is really going on.

The number of high school seniors is declining

This article in The Atlantic states, “The number of American high school seniors is shrinking, having peaked in 2011.” This is also stated by Time magazine here. (Actually, the Atlantic cites Time on this point, but presumably The Atlantic does fact-check.)

The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown

The Atlantic reports that “according to [education company] Noodle[.org]’s data, the number of seats at competitive colleges has grown faster than the total pool of qualified applicants—raising a student’s chances of getting into a ‘selective college.’” Meanwhile, US News & World Report declares, “As selective as they’d like prospective students to believe they are, colleges and universities have been watching enrollment decline for five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Last year alone, it dropped 1.4 percent, or by about 270,000 students, at institutions nationwide…. Part of that is due to the shrinking supply of 18-year-olds and to families’ concerns about the high cost, and relative value, of college.”

Students are applying to far more colleges than before

The Atlantic reports, “Many high achieving students will apply to 10 or 15 schools, so you’re looking at doubling or even tripling the number of applications from the same pool of applicants. Application inflation is linked, [the Noodle.org VP] believes, to the Common App.” The Washington Post reports, “More than 800,000 students used the Common Application last year to submit some 3.5 million applications to more than 700 colleges. Plenty of students today apply to colleges they have hardly any intention of attending.” The New York Times explains it thus: “Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have been sending out more applications…. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.”

Application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate

The Washington Post article describes the acceptance rate number in somewhat useful terms: “The top 20 national universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, for instance, enroll only about 100,000 students out of 17 million undergraduates nationwide. So the denominator is rising as the numerator stays the same in an equation that is more like the odds of playing the lottery for most students and parents.” This explanation is only somewhat useful, though, because of course colleges aren’t accepting students at random. This is the whole problem: the acceptance rate is being treated like odds in a lottery when in fact colleges have an objective basis to discard most applications.

This acceptance rate number is illusory

As reported in Time magazine, “What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions.” The New York Times makes a similar analysis: “[Admission rates] don’t represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible.”

Colleges are deliberately shrinking the acceptance rate

US News & World Report declares, “Some [colleges] have encouraged the applications boom, with its resulting effect on their ability to predict yields, by urging marginally qualified students to apply. Known as ‘recruit to deny,’ this practice makes them appear more selective and boosts their standings in some college rankings.” The Washington Post reports, “Colleges buy more than 80 million names of test takers from the College Board annually. In some cases, schools simply encouraged more students to apply as a way to improve their standings in the rankings.”

As far as I can tell, my daughter has received solicitations from every college in the country, even the ones she’s sure would never accept her. She now holds the distinction of getting more junk mail than the rest of the family combined (to say nothing of her e-mail spam, which currently stands at over 2,500 messages with 50 in the last week alone). Hell, Carleton College even sent her a Frisbee!

The metric that matters

My favorite among these articles is the one from the New York Times, which makes a valiant effort to talk us off the ledge: “For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data—in this case, institutional admission rates—can create a false sense of what’s really going on.” The article goes on to say: 

Some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one…. Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.

Needless to say, this Times article should be required reading for all parents of college-bound teenagers, and for those teenagers.

My daughter’s reaction

When I presented all this to my daughter—the one person I’m willing to bother arguing with about this, because I hope to reduce her anxiety—she was understandably skeptical. She immediately began Googling all this for herself. “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ve already compiled the relevant articles for you.” She gave me one of those looks. Acknowledging that of course she’d fact-check me later anyway, I asked for a few minutes of her attention to read her some of the passages I’ve quoted above.

My daughter didn’t actually seem relieved. Perhaps all this seems too good to be true given the atmosphere of doom she has been trapped in for the last year or so. Or maybe being optimistic just feels weird and wrong at this point. She immediately came up with some hard questions. “What do they mean ‘top school’?” she asked. I cited the article: it defines top school as “one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective.” My daughter, naturally, looked this up on the spot and read off the list. I’d heard of at last 90% of the colleges listed, and they really are elite. (My alma mater, UC Berkeley, didn’t even make the list.)

Next she questioned how the Times defined a “well-qualified” student. The answer is, it’s “combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300.” My daughter stared in blank disbelief. “That’s not high at all. That’s like 60th percentile,” she said. Then she fact-checked herself: it’s actually 90th percentile. Competitive, sure, but not insanely high. Could the Times really be right about this? Well, they based their findings on the applications of 800,000 students. And they’re the New York Times, for crying out loud.

Why the hysteria?

So the natural question is, how could every adult I’ve talked to about this be so wrong? Why this widespread panic? I have two theories.

First, it’s far more exciting and engaging to paint everything in the darkest shades possible. FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) gives a nice urgent edge to your sidebar chatter at book club. FUD also makes better headlines, which might be all most people bother to read. Consider this one , in Business Insider: “It was the hardest year on record to get into elite colleges—admissions experts explain why.” What’s remarkable about the article is that it doesn’t really support this “hardest” assertion, but rather says much the same thing as the other articles I’ve cited. For example: “The steady uptick of college applicants, especially at elite schools, is stark, driven in part by the emergence of Common App, which allows students to apply to many schools at once.” It goes on to say, “There may be reason to view this lowering acceptance rate with some skepticism.” It trails off talking about how the strong cohort of high-scoring international applicants, “while it may drive down the overall acceptance rate, likely has less impact on US applicants than is sometimes believed.”

Meanwhile, beyond being typical drama queens, I think a lot of these parents are responding to their deep-seated fear that their kid(s) will wash out. (If so, they’re likely sharing their kids’ experience.) Perhaps by portraying the college admission game as nearly unwinnable they’re assuaging, in advance, the shame of their kid’s defeat.

It’s tempting to have sympathy for these beleaguered people, but in fact I’m kind of pissed off. Their willingness to be readily duped by deliberately misleading statistics, and to heap that unfounded fear on their poor children—and mine!—has caused untold unnecessary anxiety. And that’s not the only collateral damage. By creating so much fear and angst, our communities are teaching children to be self-absorbed and monomaniacal. My teen years involved a lot of messing around, having fun, killing time, and basically being a kid. Our current crop of teens are like 16 going on 40. Practically every action they take has their college admission in mind. As a group they’re just a huge buzz-kill. You know who they remind me of? Stressed out middle-aged parents. It’s pathetic.

Will it ever end?

Alas, I’m not sure getting into a good college will actually help. By that point, worrying and hand-wringing will have become a habit that is hard to shake. I’m basing this on a couple of things.

The first is an anecdote shared with me by an acquaintance whose sister works at Duke University, and whose job includes interviewing prospective students—i.e., those who have been accepted—to determine scholarship eligibility. She was struck, my acquaintance told me, by how unexcited and often downright sullen many of these kids were. I mean, here they’d been accepted by Duke, but they seemed so downcast! So finally she asked one of them why he wasn’t more excited. “I’m still waiting to hear from Harvard,” the ungrateful, over-privileged little shit replied.

Here is my second anecdote, from spending an afternoon at UC Berkeley at an internship fair. My role there, as I was quick to explain to every Cal student I talked to, was simply to answer their questions and describe the culture at the company I work for. I made it clear that I wasn’t the one evaluating them. But almost every student treated our chat like a job interview. They all had pretty extensive résumés, even the freshmen (which made up a surprisingly high proportion of the group, given that they were only like six weeks into their college careers). They all had this air of desperation about them.

One interaction in particular illustrates what I’m talking about. This student asked me, “What classes should I take?” I replied, “Well, I didn’t major in Computer Science, so I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She pressed on, “No … I mean, what classes should I take?” She was practically winking at me. I finally grasped her meaning: she meant what classes would look good on her résumé and help her get an internship at my company. I had no idea. I told her, “What I’ve witnessed in tech is that a lot of engineering types don’t write well. I think you should take a couple of writing classes.” She seemed perplexed and asked, “Can I?” I replied, “Of course you can! You can take whatever class you want! And you should … I mean, you’re at a world class university. You should take advantage of your opportunities here!” Her expression was priceless, like a light bulb on a dimmer switch gradually coming on. She had clearly never thought about college in any other terms than advancement and career prospects. “Wow … I guess I can!” she replied, astonished.

Call to action

If you’ve been sowing doom and gloom by parroting all this received wisdom about colleges being more selective, please stop. If you have a freaked out kid, please tell him or her to relax and try not to worry. And if you don’t believe me about any of this, go click on some of the links I’ve included here and read these articles for yourself.

As for me, next time some fellow parent trots out all this malarkey about college admissions being way more competitive, I’m going to tell him flat-out that he’s wrong. No, I won’t subject him to a withering argument … I’ll go one worse. I’ll ask him to read this post. This of course will end the dialogue forever, since as you well know, nobody reads this blog … except, apparently, you (and I hereby offer my congratulations at your intellectual stamina).

Postscript

This post only scratches the surface of my disgust at prevailing attitudes toward higher education. For a more comprehensive (but lighter-weight) survey, check out my previous post.

For further reading

• The Truth About Elite College Admissions
• College Application Frequently Asked Questions
• How to Choose a Major
• The Best Advice I’ve Received
• Going Broke at College
• The Importance of Goals - Debunked!
• Parables from the Rooster Father

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Fiction - One Halloween Night

Introduction

Ideally, I’d have had the idea for this story in time for Halloween, but I just plain didn’t.

What follows isn’t a ghost story, exactly, but I hope it can give you a little chill.  All characters, situations, cultural traditions, observations, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions are fictitious, coincidental, accidental, or are used fictitiously.

One Halloween Night

Robert’s first batch of Trick-or-Treaters came at around 7:30:  a bug, a robot, and a witch.  A trio of parents hung back in the darkness beyond the span of the porch light.  A few minutes later, the second Trick-or-Treater, a very small kid dressed as a sunflower, was solo except for his mom, standing six feet back and prompting him:  “Say ‘Trick or Treat!’  Remember to say ‘Trick or Treat!’”  Robert held the candy bowl at the kid’s level and the kid finally mumbled the magic words and took a fun-size Snickers.  “Say ‘thank you!’” the mom reminded him.  The kid seemed paralyzed by the push-and-pull of free candy on the one hand, and a terribly frightening social engagement on the other.

Robert fondly remembered his own kids’ first Halloween, when he too prompted them—at every house—to say “Trick or Treat.”  He could relate to this mom:  somehow, a kid just standing there waiting for his candy was violating a social contract.  The words were important, and of course the gratitude.  Robert chuckled remembering the first time he’d prompted little Amanda to say thank you:  he’d nudged her and whispered, “What are you forgetting?”  Amanda looked back to the homeowner and said, “Oh, yeah … can I get something for my dad, too?”

The girls were older now, almost too old for Trick-or-Treating and certainly too old for a parental escort.  Robert fretted about the possible danger in this nighttime tradition.  Why did Amanda have to go as a raven?  Could she possibly have chosen a less visible costume, what with drunk drivers all over the road?  And little Sarah was so sociable, she chatted up everyone who answered the door … which was just fine in their own little neighborhood, but these days it seemed like she wouldn’t need to stray too far to encounter that over-friendly whacko who might (gasp!) invite her in.

Of course, as much as Robert worried, he also kicked himself for being so paranoid.  He’d always had an overactive imagination, and it didn’t help that he was lately consumed by a growing addiction to true crime novels.  For the last six weeks, walking Sarah to school  and back, he’d been watching the painstaking construction of a haunted house a few blocks away, which was so elaborate they practically needed a building permit.  Why go to so much trouble?  Surely he wouldn’t have been so suspicious if he hadn’t read The Lovely Bones, in which a psychopath builds an elaborate underground clubhouse and lures in an innocent teen, correctly supposing that her curiosity would overcome her parents’ admonishment about talking to strangers.

The next wave of kids were perfectly behaved:  they  remembered the Trick-or-Treat, the thank-you, and even wished him a happy Halloween.  Robert was charmed, but also slightly relieved, for he couldn’t help but evaluate Trick-or-Treaters, with his entire opinion of humanity hanging in the balance of the kids’ behavior.  One year he left his post for about ten minutes to have a drink with the neighbors, leaving the candy bowl on the porch with a sign reading, “Please take just one.”  When he got home, the entire bowl was already empty, some little lardy scofflaw obviously having dumped the whole thing into his bag.  This offended Robert inordinately, as did kids who grabbed a whole handful of candy when he held out his bowl.

The next time the doorbell rang it was a duo of pre-teens in inscrutable costumes.  Dark lords of some sort, Robert guessed.  They didn’t say anything at first and then one elbowed the other, who said, “Trick or Treat, Trick or Treat, give me something good to eat,” and then, in a barely audible mumble, “Or smell my feet.”  Robert wanted to say, “Look, if you’re going to play that card, you have to step up and do it right.  Own the insult.  Look me in the eye and say, ‘Trick or Treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.’  Don’t tack the ‘smell my feet’ part on at the end.  Now let’s try it again.”  Instead he just held out the bowl.

Of course, as a kid Robert hadn’t had the verve to say those words at all, as much as he and his brothers dared each other.  When it came down to it, they were all craven, and this manifested in unfailing politeness.  That is, until they became full teenagers.  The last year Robert had trick-or-treated, he wore this giant foam monster head his brother had made, and he could barely see out of it, which (it turned out) made him a sitting duck for a candy mugger.  The jerk had pretended to admire young Robert’s costume, and then grabbed his whole candy bag—a haul representing over two hours of hustling from house to house—and ran.  The rest of the night, Robert had been driven around at high speed in the back of his brothers’ friend’s Jeep, looking for the thief so they could avenge the crime and get Robert back his candy.  Futile as this was, it felt like turning the page from childish rituals to manly acts of courage.

“How many can we take?” the next kids asked.  Robert replied, “Just one … I’m running low.”  He was pleased that the kids were polite enough to ask.  Following this there was a lull, and Robert was able to wolf down some of his dinner before the doorbell rang again.

To his surprise, there was no kid there, but an adult starting to walk away.  Normally when Robert was slow to answer the door, the kids would leave off ringing the doorbell and start knocking on the door, sometimes two or three at once, and one time a kid accidentally tumbled into the house when Robert opened the door.  Such impatience was understandable:  for kids fixated on hitting as many houses as they could, time passed differently, with each moment of waiting seeming to stretch out toward infinity.  But here, since it was obvious someone was home—given the porch light, the lights on in the house, and no fewer than three lit jack-o-lanterns on the porch—any adult should have been more patient.  And where was this guy’s kid?

The guy smiled sheepishly.  “My daughter ran off,” he explained, before turning toward the sidewalk and calling, “Katie, come back!”  He paused for a moment and said, “Oh well, I’ll get her something.”  This seemed perfectly reasonable, until he proceeded to grab a whole handful of candy before walking off.

Robert was perplexed.  On the one hand, parents—particularly in this earnest community—were always bending over backward to do right by their children.  On the other hand, wasn’t the classic post-Trick-or-Treat dilemma all about how to get all that candy—with its sinister corn syrup, hydrogenated oil, artificial flavor, and PGPR—out of your kid’s hands?  What parent would want to add extra candy to the stash?

Robert almost shrugged it off, but then walked out onto the porch and watched the man walking away.  So far, the guy hadn’t reunited with his daughter.  And another thing:  he was carrying the candy bag.  What parent carries his kid’s candy for her?  And what kid would even allow this?  The guy was heading south and it was a long block.  Robert went inside and phoned his friend Mark, who lived ten houses down.

* * *

Mark’s doorbell was broken and he had a sign:  “Please knock loudly!”  Kids took this to heart and tended to pound the crap out of his door, especially because Mark was a bit slow getting there.  So when he thought he heard a light knock, he wasn’t sure and stayed on the couch.  The knock came again; he drained his beer and went to the door.  He’d have been surprised to see only an adult walking away, except for the call he’d had from Robert.

“Oh, there is someone home!” the guy said as he turned around.  He added sheepishly, “My daughter ran off.”  He looked toward the sidewalk and called, “Katie!  Come back!”  With a little shake of his head he said, “Oh well,” and reached for Mark’s candy bowl.

“Wait,” Mark said.  “Before I give candy to my Trick-or-Treaters I like to see their costumes.  Like, I won’t give candy to un-costumed teenagers.”  He stepped out the door and escorted his guest to the sidewalk.  “Now, which kid is your daughter?”  The guy pointed at a little girl halfway to the next house.

Mark called out, quite loudly, “Hey Katie, you forgot something!”  The girl did not turn around.  She was dressed in a darling little Totoro costume but had evidently found the fabric head stifling and had pushed it back like a hood so it dangled down her back.  “Hey Totoro, you forgot something!” Mark yelled, and now the girl looked back, confused.  “Hey, is this your dad?” Mark called out.  The girl looked stricken and ran ahead to an adult whose hand she grabbed.  Her actual dad.

The guy with the candy bag started to quickly walk away but Mark grabbed him by the wrist.  “What the hell is your problem?” Mark demanded.  “Why can’t you go buy your own damn candy?”  He looked the guy up and down.  The guy wasn’t homeless or anything.  Good shoes.  “What, are you like some kind of kleptomaniac?” Mark continued.  “You get off on abusing people’s trust?  You some kind of sicko?”  The guy just stood there, frozen, his face stuck in a half-smile.  Was he enjoying this, too?  Or was this half-smile just a manifestation of his abject awkwardness?

Now the guy grasped the full murderous menace on Mark’s face and managed to wrestle free and run for it, his candy bag slapping his leg as he went.  Mark shook his head and went back into the house.

What could he do?  Call the police?  What would be the charge?  Trick-or-Treating Without A Costume?  Trick-or-Treating While Adult?  Identity Theft?  Impersonating a Parent?  Unspecific Non-Sexual Perversity?  There was no specific crime committed, and yet his transgression was so very, very disturbing.

Mark phoned Robert.  “He’s headed back in your direction, in a full run,” he said.  “You wanna go out and at least trip him or something?”

About the Type

This blog post was set in Calibri, a typeface based on a sans-serif New Wave face used in a variety of 1980s teen-coming-of-age novels.  Calibri was cut by Lawrence Spitspoon in Taos, New Mexico, and was brought to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA by a hitchhiker on his way to a salmon-fishing job in Alaska in 2007.

Depending on your web browser, its configuration, and your computer operating system, this blog post may appear in Georgia, a typeface cut with a crude hunting knife into the trunk of a Mongolian oak (quercus mongolica) in Izborsk, Russia, in the early 1800s by Ivan Ivanovich Zakareishvili in memory of Tsar Alexandar I.   Georgia was first introduced to the web in 1997 when bundled with the Internet Explorer 4.0 supplemental font pack.

UpChuckalypse Now

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Note: This post is rated PG-13 for mature themes and mild strong language.

Introduction

Family friends invited us to attend a birthday party last Saturday for their five-year-old, held at the Chuck E. Cheese in Rohnert Park, about an hour away. This tied in nicely with other plans (buying a Christmas tree in nearby Sebastopol), but I frankly wasn’t looking forward to the party venue. In fact, I braced myself for what I imagined would be very unpleasant: dozens of video games, lots of noise, a pandemonium of kids running around everywhere. But nothing could have prepared me for the actual reality of the place. Join me, if you dare, for a virtual tour of this most grotesque of all child-oriented establishments.

First impression

As soon as we walked in the door I was stunned by the loud, chaotic, phantasmagoric environment—like Vegas without the class. Chuck E. Cheese was jam-packed, like a warehouse floor, littered with unattractive attractions: big sit-in video games; a Habitrail-like tunnel system scaled for humans but otherwise identical to what hamsters use; ride-on apparatuses like the horse rides you used to see, but featuring ATVs and such, many of them inoperative; old carnival-style games where you throw balls at stuff; tables tucked here and there adorned with glistening, plastic-looking pizzas; the food counter selling things like the “Family Saver” package (16” pizza, four 64-ounce sodas, and 100 game tokens for $50); a stage with giant uncanny animatronic rodents dressed like tasteless people; and big plasma screens playing a horrible kids’ show featuring Chucky and some little child-actor bastards.

No discrete sound could be made out over the generalized din. We had to stand in a line while some 14-year-old branded our wrists, and our kids’ too, with invisible ink to try to prevent child abduction. While in line I looked over at this very strange video game. It was like one of those sit-in car games, except that there was no means by which the player provided input into the machine. It was, in fact, an entirely passive activity: a roller coaster simulation, with a chair that vibrated to simulate a rickety old wooden track. The fat kid passively receiving this entertainment wore a strange expression, like she was receiving some vague, novel pleasure, and due to the vibration all three of her chins were jiggling.

Games

We eventually got past security, and after trying in vain to clean our hands (the hand sanitizer dispenser was empty or broken) we found our group, deposited our gift, and received a bucket of tokens. I grimly set to work running down the clock while pretending, for Alexa’s sake, to be enjoying myself. She found most of the games stressful, except for this one where you press a button that causes a boxing-gloved mechanical fist to punch at miniature ducks as they are dragged by on a conveyor belt. Based on how many ducks you punch in 20 seconds, you get some number of paper tickets that spew forth from the machine. Other activities also offered the reward of tickets, generally in inverse proportion to their enjoyability (the simplest being the functional equivalent of a slot machine).

Next I tried a car-racing game. The steering wheel was screwed up (which I knew because I was unable to successfully select my car type, car color, music, etc.—you know, the consumer-pleasure aspect of the game). Through my somewhat crash-free driving I earned extended play, which was a small pleasure (diminished by my hunch that the game was tweaked to provide this sense of ersatz achievement). Alexa also tried the car game, plowing into a lot of walls and other cars and concluding plaintively, “I’m a really bad driver.” She wouldn’t play it again, thus more duck-punching.

The party

Eventually we were summoned to our group’s table, where lunch was served to the kids while the adults stood around watching. Oddly, my normally voracious kids didn’t want seconds of pizza. They were much engrossed in the awful video on the plasma screen. When it became clear to me that the assembled kids weren’t going to finish the pizza I sneaked a slice, just to further flesh out my giant hatred of Chuck E. Cheese. Sure enough, this was strictly airport food: the kind of grim product that goes directly from the freezer to the microwave. The crust was flaccid, the cheese eerily un-cheesy, the tomato sauce corn-syrupy.

Our table was a long narrow one, set parallel to four more just like it, at each of which a birthday party was in full swing. Each table had an emcee whose job was to jar the kids out of their confused, overwhelmed stupor and galvanize them into prescribed party behavior, which included call-and-response chanting (“Chuck-EEE, Chuck-EEE!”), yelling, clapping, and table-slapping. All five tables were being marched through the same party script. It dawned on me that I was observing an honest-to-god birthday-processing factory: celebration as assembly line.

I couldn’t tell if our activity was supposed to sync up with the action on the plasma screens, or whether the parties at each table were supposed to be synched up with one another (or perhaps competing?), or whether it was just a coincidence how close they all were to being in phase. The effect was like turning on two stereos to the same song but a half-second or so out of sync, so there’s this terrible gut-churning aural dissonance. My kids, completely nonplussed, wore blank expressions.

Perhaps most disconcerting was the queer jittery energy of the emcee at the party one table over. She was about the only non-overweight person in the whole place—far from it, in fact. Her frail hands twitching like little birds, she kept nervously tugging on her belt to keep her pants from sliding down her hips. Her attempts at interaction with the kids had a desperate, too-fast quality, like a record played at the wrong speed. This jumpy, manic behavior made me wonder: did the Chuck E. Cheese job drive her into this state, or was it pre-existing and in fact what qualified her for the position? And were the kids as creeped out by it as I was?

Giant rodents

I was startled from this lugubrious reverie by the sudden stirring of the animatronic rodents on the stage. They started up a robotic sequence of minor movements, largely out of sync with the music they had started ostensibly playing (music that I was just barely able to detect, through fierce concentration). Oddly, the emcees didn’t stop their shtick when the rodent band played; they just went right on with it: “I say HAP-py, you say BIRTH-day!” over and over because the pithed kids just weren’t getting it.

Then Chucky himself appeared amid much fanfare. I think this was supposed to be a really big deal—Chucky himself! But who the hell is Chucky anyway? What did he ever do for anybody? I can understand why a child would be excited to get to meet Mickey Mouse at Disneyland; after all, Mickey is a historical figure, a character on whom actual creative minds, including Walt Disney himself, lavished some real energy. Disney characters loom large in kids’ lives through cartoons and books—but what the hell is Chucky? Just a brand, a glorified logo designed to hawk pizza franchises. Chucky’s cheap, barebones look and generic persona struck me as downright cynical on the part of his profit-focused creators.

My first impulse, given my altered state and dark brooding, was to go right over and punch Chucky in the stomach. Of course I didn’t; I wouldn’t want to scare the kids, and besides, this costume was probably worn by a very bitter and angry person, no doubt a real scrapper who could and would kick my ass. When this poorly disguised human hugged our group’s birthday boy, and gave him a quick hair-ruffle, my instinct was to intervene, though in reality Chucky had done nothing inappropriate—I was responding to my own paranoid delusion.

A cake was produced, the candles lit, we sang the birthday song (our voices lost in the generalized cacophony) and our birthday boy managed, though with some difficulty, to blow out his candles. (I imagine that, like me, he was feeling kind of breathless.) We ate some cake, and then went back to the gaming. Erin and I were doing the man-to-man defense: I stuck to Alexa like glue, and Erin shadowed Lindsay. In all the nightmarish confusion Lindsay found a vulnerability in Erin’s parenting policy and levered in there, somehow negotiating to consume both of her goody-bag lollipops, which on top of all the punch and lemonade and a cake drove her into a state of buzzing, bouncing-molecule pinball behavior (which would go on to last, amazingly, all the way until bedtime four hours later). Alexa was easy enough to manage, thankfully; as long as she was punching ducks and earning tickets she was happy.

Squalor

Inevitably, Alexa needed to use the restroom so I escorted her to the ladies’ room and waited outside. Seconds later she came back out, wide-eyed, and said, “It’s disgusting in there!” Before I could protest, she swung wide the door to show me. A large puddle was slowly emerging from beneath a stall, and long strips of toilet paper were strewn all over the floor. I quickly took Alexa into the men’s room, which was fine, and waited outside her stall. When we came out of the men’s room a supervisor was arguing with a young female employee right outside the ladies’ room. “You go in there and clean it up!” he said. “But I already told you,” she wailed, “I’m supposed to be at my table—my party’s supposed to be starting right now!” To which the supervisor boomed, “I don’t care! Get in there and clean!” Alexa and I rabbited.

Redemption

After what seemed like an eternity of duck-punching and other games, it was finally time to leave. But not so fast: no way were we getting out of there without first redeeming our kids’ tickets, which had blossomed into a giant stack that created the illusion of great wealth. Of the three ticket machines, one was broken, and the other two were being dominated by Chucky Cheese regulars, who had accumulated entire forests worth of tickets and were liable to get repetitive stress injuries from feeding the machine. Erin waited with our kids while I went back to the car-racing game to try to settle my nerves.

When I returned to the ticket line, my kids had managed to settle up and were stoked to have been rewarded with a receipt for 81 points. We took this to the merchandise counter, which was eerily similar to the cashier’s station in a Vegas casino except for its huge display of worthless prizes. Alexa exchanged her receipt—the earnings from more than two hours worth of effort—for a tiny toy microphone (just a shell, no electronics or anything) for herself and a plastic lizard about 1½ inches long for her sister. Of course my kids found these toys enchanting enough to fight over, and it’s a good thing, too, because something cool like a crayon-shaped pillow would have cost like 4,000 points.

At last we were done, and together with our millions of new germs and all their latent pestilence we headed for the exit, where our wrists were scrutinized under a special flashlight by the fourteen-year-old security director who struggled to check in an incoming party while controlling our egress. He managed to stop me in my frantic bid for the exit, but sly Lindsay slipped right past him. Security indeed.

Aftermath

But then we were out of there and I felt like kissing the ground of the parking lot. But our energy had been exhausted, so when we got to the Christmas tree farm, just after sunset, we glommed on to almost the first tree we saw, and I sawed through its trunk like a man possessed. The whole operation took less than ten minutes and we were back on our way.

I was uncharacteristically short-tempered with the kids throughout the long drive home as they fought over their toys, fought over the right to sing uninterrupted, fought over space, and generally exhibited the standard behaviors of sugar poisoning. I was so thrown off by the harrowing Chucky Cheese ordeal, I just couldn’t relax, not even when we got home. It wasn’t until half an hour into a kid-free Christmas party, when I had the host make me a strong vodka martini, that I was finally able to relax. (I’ll surely end up in Hell for leaving my sugar-frenzied kids with a sitter that night.)

The next night, after lights-out, as I lay on my back in my kids’ room trying to think up a bedtime story, Alexa said to me, “Daddy? I really liked Chucky Cheese, and I want to go back their soon, to the very one we went to yesterday. And this time I want to stay longer and get more stuff.” Dang … so they actually liked it. Does this mean, though, that I would ever hold one of my kids’ birthday parties at Chucky Cheese? Hell no. I'd rather take them on a tour of a slaughterhouse to see how sausage is made.