Teenage behavior: What could possibly go wrong?

This piece isn't solely intended to make my fellow parents of teenagers feel a little better.

But it may.

It also isn't meant to encourage society at large to feel a little more comfortable about our future.

But it might.

I'm currently experiencing a lot of "back to the future" moments, since I'm simultaneously being dad to a fifteen-year-old sophomore and working up a flyer for my class of 1981, thirty year high school reunion. That's us up there—the mighty Auburn High School senior class of thirty years previous.

Can you spot me? I'm the white kid with the feathered hair, parted in the center.

We looked so happy-go-lucky, so innocent and so...thin. Perish the thought that this wholesome crew would be perilously at risk for sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancy and alcohol-related death.

But we were, and apparently a lot more at risk than today's teenagers. In a feature entitled "The kids truly are all right," written for cnn.com by Laura Sessions Stepp, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist specializing in adolescent issues, she states that nearly every high-risk teen behavior has witnessed declines since 1990.

Smoking, drinking, pregnancies and suicides have all dropped substantially. So have fighting and firearm-related deaths. The only problem which has worsened is that more teens are getting fatter.

If forced to pick my teen risk poison, I'll take fat any day.

We parents complain about our teenager constantly clutching her cell phone, monitoring her texts with the vigor of a marine guarding the American embassy in Tripoli. That phone, however, is more of a parent's ally than our kids can imagine.

It's our property, and it's not their birthright, but a privilege which we parents administer.

Sure, our kid has instant access to which socks her BFF has decided to wear and how long it took to find them next to the cat box. But for every hundred messages which comprise the Ocean of Teen Text Minutiae, one buoy of alarm may prove a lifeline toward keeping our child and her friends safe. GPS devices can be activated on most cell phones, which implies an inherent mistrust. But I don't care.

I really love being the cool dad, but I can't be cool to a daughter who no longer exists.

Teen prefrontal lobes experience a perfect storm of rebelliousness and an inability to comprehend consequences. These aren't bad kids; they're just kids, so our job is to educate them, to prepare them and to give them a safety net, even if we're jackbooted Nazis in their eyes.

When we were teenagers, our parents either trusted our word or locked us down. They often sat on a Friday or Saturday night, wondering and hoping about our whereabouts and our condition. It no longer has to be that way, and technology offers the perfect excuse for our children to remove themselves from a dicey situation.

After having read the article, I'm encouraged, yet still apprehensive.

I'm so glad to hear that more of them will be around to change my diaper one day.

Now, if they'd just listen to some better music.

Obama has no chance in 2012. You heard me.

Like a bunch of third graders jutting their arms in the air and shouting for the teacher's favor and attention, the Republicans are already lining up. Even though many have no idea what the answer is to  the teacher's question, that's really not important; they merely want the bright lights to be turned toward their freshly pancaked pores.

Right now, there are so many of them, from also-rans to never-rans, from Tea Party to debutante party. These people are jockeying for position in a race which may not decide its winner for another seventeen months.

The great state of Iowa typically kicks off the electoral runoff, starting with a straw poll which can render some candidates prematurely irrelevant, like a basketball player who fouls out before even leaving the locker room. Many have invested time and personal fortunes toward securing a foothold in Iowa, but that's merely a thread of silk toward peeling the entire cob.

Ahead of them are exploratory committees and endless fundraisers, followed by town hall meetings, debates, caucuses, primaries and conventions. More palms will be pumped than a barracks during boot camp, week twenty.

But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if no more "I approved this" messages were allowed? What if America wasn't given the choice of electing her President based upon thirty-second television propaganda McNuggets?

What if each candidate, after having passed high-school-sophomore-level, multiple choice quizzes in math, science, current events and geography, were allowed a one-paragraph statement from an empty studio...and then America voted.

I'm not confident that one or any of the Republican front runners could pass the screening test, but for the sake of continuing this exercise, let's assume they do, and we'll begin with a statement by Candidate Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich: Look, America, I realize I simultaneously led the effort to impeach a President based on an affair while dipping the wicker myself, but come on, trust me. I'm a man of principles as of three weeks ago, when I personally petitioned the Lord for forgiveness. Plus, my wife works really close to me now.

I also realize that I criticized President Obama for not taking action against Libya and then flipped a one-eighty and criticized him for attacking Libya. So I won't do stuff like that anymore. I stopped yesterday.

Donald Trump: America, do you understand that I've got more loose change in this raccoon's nest on my head than you do in your entire 401K? Come on, what's it gonna cost me to secure your vote? How about I comp your room at one of my casinos and include a nice bottle of Asti Spumante, eh?

And a shrimp platter, with cocktail sauce. Cocktail sauce, America!

Mitt Romney: Hello, my fellow Americans. It's me again, Mitt. Hey, guess what? I'm Lutheran now!

Michele Bachmann: Ladies and gentlemen, look closely at my face. See? I can droop my eyelids a little bit and not look as much like the bat shit crazy, desperate housewife of Minneapolis whom so many of you seem to believe I am.

Plus, I'm rather attractive, which should make up for that wrong answer on the sophomore test. I'm now fully aware that milk comes from cows, and then the store.

Mike Huckabee: My fellow Americans, I've got such a great sense of humor, you won't even notice that I'm not joking about putting a huge plexiglass bubble around our country and teaching creationism to every student except the brown ones who are squeegeeing the huge plexiglass bubble.

Sarah Palin: Hi, guys and gals, it's me again! Log on to Facebook to check out the new word I just made up about our little dust-up with Libya: "squirmish." Isn't it cute? Todd and I have squirmishes all the time and then I tie him up and we reconcile.

Anyway, you all know me already, so remember, by golly...a vote for Sarah is a vote for patrioticness!

I hope you agree, this is an effective, efficient solution to picking the G.O.P. presidential candidate and a technique to make us realize what a daunting roster it truly is.

I'm a nerd! That felt good.

Are you a nerd?

Are you a geek, a dweeb or a dork?

Are you a sci-fi-watching, fantasy-novel-reading, comic-book-hoarding techie?

I am. I know that's hard to believe, that beneath this hardened veneer of macho coolness lies a twit wearing a pocket protector and clutching a Dark Knight graphic novel.

But it's true.

Saturday, one of my idols, Leonard Nimoy, turned eighty years old. I'm not sure how many Vulcan years that is, but the guy is still going strong. Logical.

I had to throw in a Spockism, there. His full name is S'Chn T'Gai Spock, which sounds like a sneeze and a cough. He was born to a human mother and Vulcan father, and he's an intergalactic Dirty Harry, with ice water coursing through his veins, and in S'Chn's case, the water is green.

I've referenced Star Trek a couple of times in my blog, most notably when we we played it during second grade recess. We chose characters like we would for a pickup soccer game, but the two captains were Spock and Kirk. Usually it went something like, "Since you've got Scotty and Chekov, and I've got McCoy and Sulu, I'll give you the rest of the first graders (who are still standing, waiting to be chosen), since they'll be killed off early like they are on the show."

Game on.

It was all about a show which only ran three seasons and was in syndication by the time we were old enough to emulate its stars. One of my favorite elementary school era jokes involved Star Trek, and is told as follows:

What do the Starship Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?
They each circle Uranus and wipe out Klingons (insert nasally laughter).

To this day, I love that joke, that show and all of the movies involving that original cast. The nerd in me has persevered and apparently, I'm not alone in the wilderness of Dork National Forest.

I'd like to thank my friend, Scott, for calling my attention to this piece in The Guardian about the unprecedented popularity of the rock group, Rush. This power trio from Toronto has been rocking since 1974, but never really achieved popular acclaim, due to their "nerdy" lyrical themes of fantasy and science fiction.

The band  is now experiencing a renaissance due to a massive, international group of fans, mostly male, between the ages of thirty and fifty, who've decided to proclaim loudly and proudly, "We love Rush, we're not ashamed to admit it and we'll shout it from here to Narnia." Arenas have been selling out worldwide for these guys, during an otherwise lean era for most other musical acts.

Rush has stayed true to its base, and after thirty-seven years, is finally reaping what it's sown. Sure, we dork dudes can always stoop to the shallow musings of Van Halen or KISS, but nothing yanks our chains like "invisible airwaves crackling with life" (as referenced in my favorite Rush tune, The Spirit of Radio).

So here's to Leonard Nimoy, Rush, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, D.C. Comics and their legions of loyal followers.

May we all live long and prosper.

Bored? I'll give you something to be bored about!

What bores you?

What makes your eyes glaze over and slows time down to the velocity of finger nail growth? What drives you to such distraction that, when you're in a room filled with people, you visualize how each person looks naked? Of course, I don't do this, especially at family gatherings.

And definitely not at work.

The reason I ask is that this is the time of year when nearly everyone with clinical brain activity fills out a March Madness bracket. It's fun, even if we know nothing about the teams, and just want to pick based on mascot name or school colors. We join office pools, internet contests or just pick the winners for our own entertainment, and for three weeks in early Spring, everyone follows his and her brackets with rapt attention.

And the funny thing is, no one cares who you picked. No one. I listened this morning to sports radio, as three of talk jocks reviewed their results thus far, what they'd done right or wrong, whom they had going to the Elite Eight and the Final Four. They interrupted each other constantly, trying to wittily share their prowess at prognostication and creating a wall of unintelligible sports banter.

I stopped paying attention immediately, because, in my humble opinion, other people's NCAA tournament selections are the epitome of melancholy. How else can I say it? Meaningless, stupid, inconsequential...boring.

So, this is an open call. I'd love to know what you consider the capital city of Dullsville, what ritual or activity to you attend and request a table for "bored, party of one."

For my wife, it's reality television and anything to do with my illustrious athletic career thirty years ago.

For my ten-year-old daughter, it's shopping for socks and underwear and anything to do with my illustrious athletic career thirty years ago.

My teenage daughter tells me that most things are boring, especially if they're done indoors while sitting, and anything to do with my illustrious...you know.

Please reply in the comments section. I want to hear about what makes your head explode.

As long as it's, you know, not my blog.

You'll have to slip me a Benjamin to clean that up.

Please forgive me for being so headline-obsessed lately, but I've found another one that I couldn't ignore, from Tuesday's Seattle Post Intelligencer:

"State senator at odds with ferry workers over vomit pay"

My first question was...what the hell is vomit pay? Is it some form of compensation for getting seasick while performing ferry duties? Are these people required to show proof of regurgitation along with an initialed time sheet?

It turns out I wasn't too far off. Washington State ferry workers are paid double their hourly rate for swabbing up previously digested food from the floors of the ferries. Aha, so that's what "poop deck" means.

State Senator Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, has taken issue with this policy, and is pushing to re-align ferry employee pay with that of other state government workers. Her contention is that other occupations, such as prison guards, aren't equally compensated for performing similarly unpleasant tasks.

I must agree. And naturally, many jobs exist, both paid and unpaid, where people are reminded on a daily basis that the human body is ninety percent water. Anyone in the health care profession knows this, as does any human being who has ever performed parental duties.

As a dad of young children, I often wasn't even aware that I wore hazardous waste until I looked in the mirror at work, or a fellow employee told me I was wearing pasty Cheerio bits on the left kidney region of my V-neck sweater.

But what about the other jobs, the lines of work where people are hardly compensated to encounter and deal with a lot of nastiness? The prison guard again comes to mind, not because he or she occasionally must clean up a nasty mess, but also because they're often expected to break up "temporary marriages" as they're being consummated. Sound fun?

How about school teachers? My mom, a former first grade teacher, was thrown up on by a kid who'd eaten hot dogs for breakfast...on her head! That was always good for a chuckle or two around the dinner table.

Or what about bus drivers? Are they entitled to "Sociopath Pacification Pay", "Spicy Cheeto Dust in the Eye Pay" or "Ten Drug Deals Witnessed Before Ten AM Pay"? I don't think so.

Maybe actors also deserve remuneration for putting themselves in harm's way. How many times has Tom Cruise risked the inhalation of previously embedded bodily particulates expelled into his immediate atmosphere as the result of spontaneous couch bouncing? He gets nothing for it.

Listen, ferry workers. I'm not saying your jobs are easy. I've seen you people place yourself directly in the path of large trucks, waving them closer to you for that precious additional space. You station yourselves on the bows of your vessels, Puget Sound's worst tempests pounding at your mustaches and ponytails.

You are entitled to be paid decently and fairly by us, the Washington state taxpayers.

But until I see my mom's hot-dog-barf-to-the-face settlement check, put on an extra pair of  latex gloves and stop complaining.

When God Divorced.

Did God have a wife?

How irresistible a headline is that? That question reeled me in faster than Scarlett Johansson wrapped in nothing but the sports section, and that question was posed on MSNBC.com the other day.

According to Oxford scholar, Francesca Stavrakopoulous (she'd have to be a scholar to pronounce that), an early version of the Book of Kings mentions a deity named Asherah—God's wife. Asherah and her husband, Yahweh, were worshipped alongside each other in the ancient temples of the great Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Over hundreds of years, as these texts were edited by greater numbers of males, Asherah was gradually phased out, effectively divorcing the couple and transforming God into Yahweh, single dad with custody of child, large and in charge.

Upon learning this, I felt compelled to acknowledge the elephant in the sanctuary, the question whose answer would have altered the history of world events like no other:

What if Mr. and Mrs. God had stayed married?

First of all, she would have told her husband to stop changing the outcomes of sporting events when players pointed up to him after touchdowns and dunks. On Sundays, he would have spent less time in front of the television and devoted more time to telling people they're welcome.

She would have prohibited him from speaking directly to George W. Bush and Pat Robertson, unless he agreed to let her correspond with Oprah and Barbara Walters.

Asherah would have insisted that he tone down the Book of Revelation, since he was a little obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons at the time.

She even may have told Yahweh to march down the street to Satan's house (he used to call him Stan) with a six-pack under his arm, knock on the door and apologize for breaking his weed eater, because that's how the whole thing started. Then invite Jezebel and the kids over for a little potluck and Sangria.

Finally, she would've mandated that next time he creates a human and he's holding that crescent wrench, he reads the manual more carefully, so he can avoid that issue he had with Rush Limbaugh where his nuts broke off, tragic victim of too much wrist torque.

"Me Damnit!" God barked. "I already broke off Nugent's nuts and released him into the wild."

"Remember, Hon—you can't twist so hard. Lefty loosey, righty tighty."

"You know what? I married way over my head. I don't deserve you." Kisses her forehead.

"You aren't so bad yourself. Remember when we met? You seemed so full of yourself with the whole 'I'm God' thing. And when I said "no way are you King of Kings.' You, always the Mr. Witty Guy, said, 'Yaweh.'

"Oh, I need to turn on the game. I think today, the teams that point up here the least will be the winners. I like to keep these guys on their toes."

She rested her head on his chest, his downy grizzle tickling the spot where her hair came out. "You're terrible," she said, drinking in the familiar aromas of wood smoke and Speedstick.

Trying on schools: One size doesn't fit all.

Every so often, we all get firmly spanked with the splintered paddle of mortality. And from my steadily graying perspective, the Grim Reaper's croquet mallet seems to whack me with ever greater frequency.

As I discussed in this post, my ten-year-old daughter and I have been visiting local middle schools recently. It's not like it used to be back in the day, when your elementary, junior high and high schools lay before you with greater certainty than the roof of your mouth being scraped to shreds from that second bowl of Cap'n Crunch.

We now have choices, which, I suppose, is good. My daughter already has a spot reserved in our neighborhood middle school, but we decided to perform this exercise as a backup plan, kind of like bringing two lighters with you on your way to the woods with a pack of smokes stolen from your mom's purse.

She and I had already checked out a small, private school, which we both liked a lot, but naturally would entail a sizable financial outlay.

We also had paid a visit to an alternative educational facility. Teachers and administrators were addressed on a first-name basis, the classes were quite informal and we were told that students embark on scores of camping trips and other excursions into nature. I can think of tons of kids who would love this type of program, but my little urban diva would not be one of them.

After watching a class discussion, with questions answered by children whose names were "Karma" and "Justice," we concluded that, although the building was great and the staff friendly and dedicated, it just wasn't our cup of herbal tea.

Our last school visit occurred on Wednesday, at the place she's slated to attend in the fall. After perusing the sixth grade section of the building, with stops at band, language arts and science classes, parents and students gathered in the cafeteria for a final pitch from our tour guide.

The counselor stood, surrounded by a semi-circle of visitors and listed the plethora of after-school clubs and activities available to students, including bus service afterward.

This is where the sale was closed.

"We've got so many great things for kids to do after school." He scanned the crowd to maintain eye contact. "There's steel drum band, chess club, math club, hip hop dance, hair styling..."

I felt a sharp poke to the side of my rib cage. My head reflexively jerked to the right to address the source of the irritation. She hoisted herself onto her tip toes and leaned into my ear. "Dad, I'm going to this school. I am so doing hair club," she whispered forcefully.

This wasn't a question, a suggestion or a request. "Okay," I mumbled back.

I visualized her, sometime in October, returning home around 4:30 and sporting Bo Derek corn rows or possibly a Ziggy Stardust orange mullet. Neither of us listened very intently from that point forward, since destiny had been acknowledged. We bid farewell to our host and walked silently to the minivan.

I had a moment.

Ten years ago, this girl I was walking alongside was a cackling toddler, able to insert a fistful of Cheerios, including fist, into her mouth. She was so dependent and fragile.

Ten years from now, this girl whose shoulders I placed my arm around, will be a young woman, possessing all of the rights and privileges of the full adulthood opening up before her. She'll be setting sail, and I'll be on the shore waving.

Sure, we've got some adventures ahead of us, but she'll never be a baby again.

She'll always be my baby, though.