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Listen to Your Parents
I asked my friend’s ten-year-old son what I should do for a better life. When he gave this answer, listen to your parents, I turned around and looked at her. We laughed nervously. Was he still young enough to tell the truth? Or old enough to start walking the Jesuit path?
Listen to your parents and learn a new language.
In the best-case scenario, parents have different nationalities, and children will indeed learn two languages. In the usual case scenario, parents will try to speak in broken-[insert language here], so that children don’t understand their sexual plans for the evening. [Believe me, they don’t want to understand.]
Listen to your parents and become a code-breaker.
Once children are old enough to learn the aforementioned language in school, parents will switch to a secret language of their own. Thinking they are so clever and original, they will use the word broccoli instead of sex. Nobody’s fooled, but everybody can pretend not to understand.
Listen to your parents and become everything they always wanted to be
Jim Morrison said:
“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
