One of the things that grind my nerves is going to certain areas of the city where the streets are covered with little children, both girls and boys running around during all hours of the day or night.  One time I had to get out of a taxi with a rolled-up newspaper and threaten to smack the kids on the head because they wouldn’t get out of the way of the driver!  All they know is that it’s perfectly fine for them to use busy streets as their playgrounds because their parents don’t tell them otherwise.  I can’t hate the kids for this of course since they are just being kids.  But that doesn’t stop me from driving pins into Voodoo dolls shaped like their parents!  Where are the parents anyway?  It seems that it’s perfectly fine with them to have a “litter” of 12 girls and boys and then they just let them run crazy all over the place!  “Aw hell…if one gets hit by a car, I still have 11 more!”  And these same people are always asking me when I’m going to have some of my own.  Oh yea…I want to live in the perpetual poverty of my friends.  They have these armies at their house that they can’t feed.  Look at Russia and Asian countries like Korea.  They can’t pay their army, so their officers steal warheads and sell them to Iran.  Similarly my friends can never understand why they leave a mobile phone sitting on the kitchen table and it always seems to disappear, only for their kids to likewise disappear to the videogame center at the mall shortly afterward with a pawnshop receipt in one hand and a wad of cash in the other.

What also makes me crazy is how my friends will always tell me that I’ll be too old to enjoy my kids.  Huh?  I speak Tagalog too, but that concept didn’t quite reach the appropriate lobe in my brain.  Let’s see here…my friends sat at home on New Years while listening to their little monsters blow up firecrackers for 5 hours only to have to rush their neighbor’s kid to the ER.  Why?   Because he blew off his little finger as there were too many kids to supervise while the parents got drunk.  This is while I sat on Boracay beach drinking a mango shake enjoying my surroundings and still able to hear at the end of night.  Take it from me, having to endure those firecracker “war-zones” while growing up cured me from ever wanting to hang around it now that I work and can save enough money to fly out for the holiday.  How can I afford to sit on the beach?  I don’t have 10 screaming kids that I can’t afford!  What a concept for saving money and enjoying life!

Does that mean I don’t want kids?  Of course I do someday, but that day is not today.  I want to enjoy my youth while I have one to enjoy.  Nobody can convince me that younger parents are better parents than older people.  After all, isn’t it the grandparents who love to always have the kids around when the parents can’t take it anymore?  Dump them off on Lolo and Lola is what my friends do if they want some peace and quiet.

January 26th, 2005

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