Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes by Dave Barry Read Free Book Online Page A

Concerned Parent, meaning a potentially humongous pain in the ass. You should demand to see the curriculum, so as to make sure that, at each grade level, your child will receive instruction in the subjects appropriate for a standard American education, namely:
GRADE    
SUBJECTS LEARNED
K-2
Not to cross the street; not to take drugs; not to get in strange cars; not to talk to people; not to trust anybody; the Pledge of Allegiance
3-7
How to make science fair projects proving that ice is actually frozen water; the state capitals; designer jeans
8-12
Sex
    Of course you need not worry too much about your child’s progress, because the school will keep you posted by means of report cards, which in most schools are now completely computerized to guard against the danger that anybody might be able to understand them. Our son’s report card looks like this:
AmStudSocBio
67 87 1123.43 54.45%
PhysLangMath
1223.44343 4-4 ******
SocMathStudAm-BioPhys
2948-09849238409
Cincinnati
001 020 004
East
Pass
    →NOTE: Your Mileage May Vary←
    When we get our son’s report card, we make a big show of examining it with concerned frowns identical to the ones we use when our mechanic shows us broken pieces of our car, but the truth is we have no idea how well our son is doing.
ENROLLING YOUR CHILDREN IN SEVERAL DOZEN AFTER-SCHOOL ACTIVITIES
    Believe it or not, there was once a time when parents did not enroll their children in after-school activities. In those primitive times, when children came home from school, they’d just go outside, completely on their own, and engage in what professional child psychologists call “nonstructured” behavior, also known as “playing,” which is when you
run around shrieking and getting dirt in your hair
hold elaborate funerals for stuffed animals
lie on your back next to a friend and makeburping noises until one of you laughs so hard that he pees in his pants
pretend you are fighting evil aliens from the Planet Kawoomba, who can be defeated only by spit
    And so on. Of course, today we realize that children need to have a great deal of structure in the form of leagues and uniforms and referees and team photographs and trophies and dozens of parents standing on the sidelines shrieking like mental patients. So unless you are some kind of low-life child-abusing vermin, one of the first things you’ll do when you move to your new home is enroll your children in Little League, soccer, and midget football, as well as a scouting program, not to mention gymnastics, ballet, violin, karate, computer, tennis, and helicopter-piloting lessons. You want your child’s life to become so structured that he or she is incapable of fooling around in his or her own yard without detailed instructions from a coach. (“OK, Jason! Burp! NO, dammit! Not that way!”)
    Not that we have time to worry about our child’s education or after-school activities.No, we are busy working and striving, in hopes that someday we will be able to afford something that most Americans dream of but very few ever achieve: nice furniture. We’ll cover this depressing topic in a later chapter. But first we need to look, in the next chapter, at the basic condition of our house, and see if we can’t, by means of various costly projects, make it worse.

6
It’s Noon: Do You Know
Where Your Contractor Is?
    You may have noticed that nowhere in this book do I ever talk about how to Do It Yourself. This is because I have done a great many things myself over the years, and in every case I have ultimately come to realize that I would have been better off if I had just walked around my house firing random shotgun blasts. No matter how hard I tried,my homeowner projects always produced highly comical results, such as the enormous concrete lump in the yard of the house we owned in Pennsylvania.
    I am not making this lump up. We acquired it as a result of the project when I erected a basketball post, which I needed because, as a professional writer, I