Useless Conversation

[rattran]

Coconut oil is fine. I made muffins with grapeseed oil this morning, they were glorious, coconut oil might have been even better.

[lamaros]

Oh it's fine in lots of stuff. Just not pasta.

[Sky]

Note to self: do not eat pasta at Rattran's place.

[Signe]

Grape seed oil is nice under your eyes.  Well, under my eyes, anyway.

[Der Helm]

Grape seed oil is nice under your eyes.  Well, under my eyes, anyway.

Were do you keep them, anyway ? The fridge ?

[Ironwood]

Elle looks exactly like Dakota, and now I'm CONFUSED.

[Morat20]

Why are teenagers so damn stupid? WHY?

Oh wait, I'm grounded? Mom and Dad changed the passwords on the PC, snagged my cell phone, my iPod touch, grabbed all the house phones because I am more than grounded, I'm as in deep shit as I can get without committing actual felonies, and what should I do?

I should find a way onto Facebook anyways, despite the fact that my iPod pings everytime I get a message and Mom and Dad can watch them scroll up. Because I am just that goddamn dumb. So dumb I don't even think "maybe I should wait a bit before, you know, ungrounding myself on my own recognizance" and also "maybe I should also do so in a way that is not ridiculously obvious".

MotherFUCK. Now I've got to deal with this shit. I'm at a total fucking loss. I'm limited in how much shittier I can make his life without actually committing felonies myself. :)

Does he not get that, you know, his half of this arrangement is he at least PRETENDS to stop doing that shit?

[Ironwood]

Have you considered a spade, a shallow grave and some quicklime ?

I'm just sayin'.

[Morat20]

Urg. No. I did send him a message via Facebook along the lines of "You can't see your girlfriend tonight. Why? BECAUSE YOU JUST READ THIS MESSAGE".

[Evildrider]

Is he old enough to be at the "get a job" phase?

[Paelos]

Why was he grounded in the first place?

My parents usually just took away my car and phone. Facebook didn't really exist at this time though.

If it gets really shitty, you can arrange to have him tossed in the clink for a night.

[Reg]

Heh, what did he do to piss you off so much?  The worst trouble I ever got into with my Dad was the time I let a friend with a learners permit drive our car and he smashed it up. 

[Paelos]

Worst trouble i got in was getting a bench warrant issued for my father because I went to college with about $300 in unpaid parking tickets. 

[Signe]

I'd suggest a "The worst trouble I ever got into" thread, but I don't think there's a lot of trouble-makers here.

One of the worst bits of trouble I ever got into was when I was loitering outside a friends house and we pushed one of those big tractor tires down a hill (not even imagining it would move) and it ended up smashing through the front bay window of someone's house taking most of the front wall and porch with it.  Oops.  To be fair, I was 15 and that's why I had no remorse.  I still giggle about it.  I'm messed up.   

[Merusk]

Teenagers literally can't think.  Hormones fuck them all to hell and back.
http://www.parade.com/news/2010/11/28-inside-the-teenage-brain.html

It's amazing.  We're actually relatively proficient and sane creatures right up until 12 or so and then turn in to bumblefucks for 5-7 years at a minimum before coming out of it again.

[Morat20]

Originally? Horny teenager shit. Thankfully I am not a soon to be grandpa yet, the horny little snots. On the 1 to 10 scale, let's call it at least an 8.5 on "Are you fucking kidding me?" level.

[Sky]

I won't even begin to list the reasons I pissed my parents off enough to basically ground me from 7th grade on until I was kicked out at 18. Of course, the grounding was a joke and didn't work, nor did putting me out. Heh. Man, did I have fun as a kid.

[Morat20]

I won't even begin to list the reasons I pissed my parents off enough to basically ground me from 7th grade on until I was kicked out at 18. Of course, the grounding was a joke and didn't work, nor did putting me out. Heh. Man, did I have fun as a kid.

He's deeply in "love" in true 16-year old fashion. It's hilarious to watch, except for the "Oh hell, they're both stupid enough not to use protection AND to keep it hidden until, basically, her water breaks...." which leads to a certain level of paranoia.

Their not so subtly hidden plans to move in together when they turn 18 just amuses me deeply, because neither of them seem to grasp how much it'll cost -- compared to the wages available a pair of kids who are still seniors. And if they manage, well, they're 18. :) Not my problem anymore. :)

[Reg]

It must be easier to punish teenagers now than it was back in my day.  You've got all these nifty and absolutely necessary gadgets to take away from them.  All my parents could do to me was make me come home right after school and take away my car privileges.

[Sky]

Take him to walmart and make him watch all the teenage parents there. When my dad caught me drinking once, he took me to a dive bar and made me sit watching everyone for an hour. Didn't stop me from drinking, but it stopped me from turning into a drunk.

[Pennilenko]

Didn't you, like turn into a drifter musician and become the bane of fathers of daughters everywhere? Or am i confusing you with somebody else?

[Sky]

Well, I'd use the term gypsy because it was a more social thing. Drifter kinda implies the lone dude. But yeah. That's what happens when you kick a kid out of the house at 18 :p

[Signe]

I did get into a lot of weird and outrageous trouble when I was 15.  We were living in New Mexico and my mom went back east for a couple of months because her estranged father was dying.  My father ran off the entire time she was gone (hound dogging, no doubt) and my sister was off doing her own thing so I was pretty much left to my own devices, which were partying and any sort of drug I could find.  And boys.  The day after my mom left was basically my last day of school that year.  No one noticed, either.  I didn't see my mom for about two months and saw my dad maybe twice.  I was totally out of control and it was so much fun.  Then my mom came home and she was so horrified that I spent years feeling guilty.  I still feel guilty! 

Don't get angry at your kids, just act sad and look miserable.  You can be secretly smug when they feel ashamed and guilty for the rest of their lives.

[Pennilenko]

Well, I'd use the term gypsy because it was a more social thing. Drifter kinda implies the lone dude. But yeah. That's what happens when you kick a kid out of the house at 18 :p

Oddly enough the first time i typed that i used the term gypsy but wasn't sure if i was going to get dog piled for cultural insensitivity.

[Morat20]

We've found endlessly lecturing him seems to be something he tries to avoid. :)

Seriously, teenagers get damn creepy stalker-level obsessions with each other. I don't even understand where they get the energy.

Edited to add: Ain't just my kid. Wife teaches 12th grade. They're all creepy little hormone addled stalkers.

[Engels]

Tell me you're not trying to prevent your 12th grader from having sex. Tell me you're not that naive.

[Morat20]

Tell me you're not trying to prevent your 12th grader from having sex. Tell me you're not that naive.

Oh god no. First, he's a tenth grader. And all I want to do is make sure he wears a damn condom. And also, just coincidentally, try to get him to understand the crazy that is sex offender laws and how they both apply to a pair of tenth graders with camera phones, but how in all defiance of logic are prosecuted and cases WON far, far too often.

Anyways, our immediate reaction to finding out he'd gotten as far as he did was snag the girlfriend's mom, tell her what we'd stumbled on (sorry. When you're dumb enough to be hanging around third base when your parents are home and your door is, by parental law, wide open -- you deserve this shit. You're too dumb to be trusted on sex), and have a very strange conversation that amounted to:

"Goddammit, I TOLD HER/HIM that if they were even CONSIDERING it that'd I'd arrange for birth control pills/condoms, no fucking questions asked. How damn stupid are they?"

And then set up a quick test to ensure that, in fact, if they had hit home base that she wasn't in the family way (nope!) and then arranged for, you know, birth control pills and condoms.

And then savagely strangled their time together, their privacy, and their lives. Not for being horny teenagers, but for being stupid horny teenagers. STUPID horny teenagers.

Frankly, they can fuck all they want -- we can't stop it. We just don't want them sending each other nudie images and getting labeled as sex offenders, or screwing without protection.

[Strazos]

Wow, that sounds frighteningly stupid. The door was open? Seriously?

Good luck.

[Signe]

I guess sex tapes are the new friendship bracelets.   

[Lantyssa]

My friends did frighteningly stupid things for sex.  I thought it was just because they had mostly-absent parents, but more and more I think teenagers are just idiots.  Zombies have more higher brain functions.

[Merusk]

Yes, as outlined in the link I posted above.  Science has found that all Teenagers are idiots because of hormone levels.  It's why they fall in creepy stalker-level love and do dumb shit when they rightly know better.

And hand down pants with the door open and parents are home? That's, low-level shit and I have stories worse than that of myself, never mind the things I know friends or my wife's friends did. (No, not teenage bragging, these were confirmed by the other parties involved, or kids got caught.)

[Morat20]

I know it's low level stuff - - and thankfully, my wife being a teacher (and thus forced by nature of her job to both observe the wild teenager in his natural, sullen habitat AND have all the book-learning about brain development) helps keep me grounded in terms of "Are you KIDDING ME?"

I can dimly recall doing such stupid stuff when I was there age, but I like to think I was smarter about it. More careful.

Of course, now that I really think back...there was an awful lot going on while "parents were asleep" or "in the other room", and there was a lovely "oh shit, is she pregnant?" moment when I was a junior that boiled down to "we were really horny and we didn't have a condom handy and hey, what are the odds and she's pretty sure she's at the wrong part of her cycle but who counts or cares...."

Goddamn, I was dumb.

The act of having a kid is what gets me to call my parents all the time and tell them I both love and appreciate all the crap they put up with from me. Because once I've lived through the other end of it, my parents become more and more saintlike. :)

[Xanthippe]

MotherFUCK. Now I've got to deal with this shit. I'm at a total fucking loss. I'm limited in how much shittier I can make his life without actually committing felonies myself. :)

No reason to not get some work out of him at the same time. Cleaning house, yardwork, painting, mowing lawn, whatever you need doing, or just want done, have him do it.

My sympathies. Teenagers can be complete utter morons. It's all part of nature's plan so when they move out, you're happy to see them go.

[Morat20]

The killer thing is? The very same day I'm flipping out because he decided to unground himself? I got a call from his grandmother, extolling -- at length -- how just generally wonderful, patience, awesome, helpful and just a flat-out godsend he was. (He was helping out at a thing involving a ton of toddlers).

He's a truly good kid. Just...holy crap, he can think about four seconds into the future and that's it.

Once, I changed his facebook password -- he was grounded, but only from facebook. He manages to get it reset, blocks me and his mom as friends, and when he was caught within 24 hours (admittedly, given how seldom we check facebook he might have managed a week before we noticed our own son was missing off our Facebook feed -- us being able to see it being a requirement for having an account) seemed truly confused when I pointed out that he would have been caught, regardless, the moment he was ungrounded.

I mean, the first thing I'd have to do is change is password back to one he knew, right? His response was "I dunno" which I happened to believe. It just didn't cross his mind.

[Ironwood]

Congratulations, it's a teenager.

You're still getting off lightly here.  Come talk to me when he's run off from home at 16 to a city in another frigging country and knocked up a 39 year old woman.