My friend here has a little girl of about five years old, and she could be a poster cause she’s so darn cute. Of course, like all cute things, when they say “Camera! CLICK!” (because they just learned the word) about a trillion times as they’re crawling all over you when you’re trying to watch a football match and enjoy a beer, it gets a bit annoying, but 95% of the time, the kid is just the cutest little thing. I gave her an English name (Katie) and she loves it. She looks just like a little Katie. Everyone (including the teacher that I was supposed to be set up with) calls her Katie now. She loves me. We play monster at her house and go around scaring people with our teeth clenched, arms outstretched, and our fingers curled up like claws (it kind of looks like Phoebe’s hand placement for the chord “Old Woman”). You’d love her, she’s adorable.

Kids are usually so cute and fun to be around; so carefree and playful . . .but every once in a while, absolute jackass kids com along and mess up any thought I might have had about ever attempting to bring one into the world. You may assuage your parenting fears by saying to yourself “MY kid won’t be like that.” You’ll raise her better than whoever fucked that one up. Maybe you think that perhaps she has one of those disorders that are en vogue these days, or maybe you wonder if there “is something wrong with her brain” (which is the term that my Chinese students use for any and all forms of mental deficiency). The bottom line is; when it comes down to having a kid, all you do know is that you will try (and it’s not going to be your best, and it’s probably not going to be as hard as you can) to bring the child up right, and in the end, you can still be glad that she isn’t that little shit you had to deal with the time you set your mind on being a good parent.