Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
|
M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Friday, December 17, 2010 Poked Trash and I try to support M. Edium's interests, often going so far as to share them. This isn't always hard. For instance, it isn't actually that much of a challenge for me to pretend I like putting Star Wars spaceships together out of Legos, and Trash has given him so much backup in his karate career that she has literally earned her own gold belt. This goes back to his infancy, as we supported and heavily subsidized his habits with regard to Transformers, Bakugan, NASA, Spongebob, all things Pixar, Captain Underpants, and everything else that came down the pike. Then at some point Trash and I, without any prior discussion, suddenly hit the wall on the next thing he wanted to get into. We explained to him that he couldn't be a huge fan of everything; life was short, and if he tried to become an expert on everything he risked becoming a dilettante -- an expert on nothing, one whose knowledge went broad but not deep. And anyway, he didn't have to get into stuff just because his friends were into it. We felt this was an important lesson for him. And I'm sure our shared, blind, longstanding, unreasoning hatred of Pokemon had nothing to do with it. This was months ago, of course, and he pretty much let it drop. To the point where we had forgotten all about it. And, for this story to have the proper effect, you probably should too. So now he's in kindergarten, which means he's more or less steeped in Pokemon culture. Which is a problem, because over the summer we discovered that he's a worse negotiator than Barack Obama. For instance, he owns a four-foot-long toy robot arm that he can use to pick up things that are as far away from him as four feet! And he traded it with a neighbor girl for a single Silly Band. Similarly, we just recently found out that he's agreed to swap some of his Lego mini-figures with a kindergarten classmate for Pokemon cards. Lego mini-figures, in case you're not familiar, are the little Lego guys that come with certain kits. You can also buy some of them separately for about five bucks each, but not the ones that only come in the kits. M. Edium is the proud owner of a big chunk of the Star Wars cast in one-inch-high Lego form, including a small army of stormtroopers and clone troopers (you can tell them apart because the former don't have faces under their helmets). And he's been talking about swapping them one-to-one. A five-dollar mini-figure for a single card that comes in a 50-cent package of them. We tried to tell M. Edium what a bad deal this is for him. He didn't seem to care. "It's the only way I can get Pokemon cards," he said sadly. Trash and I said, "Don't trade your Lego guys for them. We can buy you Pokemon cards." M. Edium said, "Yes! It worked!" So maybe he's a better negotiator than we thought. posted by M. Giant 6:38 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Damn, that kid is good.
By Thank you for reminding me of how to spell dilettante. I have tried several times in vain to spell it in scrabble games and have failed miserably.
By 
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
