On Coincidence and Conscience
Sometimes I feel like I'm living my life on a pop-culture tape delay. This started early in life with my parents' restrictions on what was available for consumption. For nebulous reasons that both they and I can laugh about now, I was not allowed to watch (and to this day have never seen an episode of) The Smurfs among others. I knew what Smurfs were; I could even identify a few of them by sight (Father Smurf, Smurfette , Gargamel ), but I was struck to ashamed silence whenever a discussion of Smurfs or The Dukes of Hazard (Daisy was deemed too overtly sexual for my young eyes) came up among my early grade school classmates. Of course, everyone has this experience as a kid. There was always something that each child's parents forbade which others of their peers were allowed. Often, the selection of the forbidden seems arbitrary. Consequently, I plan to forbid my own potential future child from reading the funny pages from whatever analog of newspapers exists in the futur...