Out of the mouth of babes
Granddaughter is now a teenager [just].
She who was once Puppychild is now all growd up.
She sent me a thing on Farcebook yesterday which has left me with a bit of a problem. Obviously she has been indoctrinated in school on the terrible evils of smoking, as she has on a couple of occasions chastised Herself for enjoying a cigarette. It didn’t have any effect but she learned some interesting new words. Interestingly she has never challenged me [she knows how futile that would be] and has apparently adopted the passive/aggressive approach.
I have given this some thought and there are quite a few possible responses.
- Tell her she’s too young to be on Farcebook?
- Tell her not to believe everything she sees on the Interweb?
- Tell her not to believe everything teacher tells her?
- Buy her a pack of cigarettes?
- Tell her we’re lucky our lungs aren’t made of cold glass and cotton wool?
- Tell her to mind her own business?
- Stick my tongue out at her and ask her why it isn’t brown?
- Tell her to get a life?
- Tell her she can’t talk about smoking until she’s eighteen?
- Tell her to have some respect her elders and betters?
- Ignore it altogether and pretend I didn’t see it?
I’m sure my readers will come up with some erudite and [in]appropriate answer?
12. First they came for the children.
Find something she does that isn’t on the approved list and then go from there.
Welcome Your Lordship. I like your way of thinking. I’ll have to put the thinking cap on….
All of the above apart from 11
Fuckit! Just send her a link to this?
Yeah, but wait for all the comments to come in first….
1, 2, 3, 6 & 10. Not necessarily in that order.
Although I have a degree of sympathy with grandsprog because when I was 13/14 (back in the dawn of time) I knew it all and understood everything with a degree of clarity greatly exceeding that of my poor ignorant parents. Fortunately, upon leaving school I established contact with reality.
I had forgotten that, and of course you’re right. Though 3 should cover that?
Yes, I remember the days when I knew it all. Then I left school and had to start again from scratch.
I remember the days I knew it all too, until the Wife told me I was wrong.
If the wife tells you you’re always wrong, and you reply “Yes, Dear – you’re quite right”, how does that leave things?
I like the last bit. It’s a little below the belt, but you have to be cruel to be kind? There is more than a grain of truth in it too….
Not really cruel, if she hasn’t figured out by now that her mum and dad are….*cough* “difficult”… then there is no way she should be on fecesbook with so little ‘nouse’, she’ll get eaten alive. Sometime I must ask my own kids when they first realised that their beloved Mama was a basket case and that other children had mothers on the same planet as themselves.
I remember reading somewhere once that grandparents and grandchildren have a special bond because they have a common enemy.
Don’t go there! If I – like a few others here – remember right the “I know it all” stage of being a teenager, the answer to that one will be something in the gist of “well, look at the parents of my parents, and you’ll know why they’re such fuckups …”
As I said: Don’t go there, please.
Make it a challenge for her: If she can find proof of smoking or SHS being a proven cause of whatever, you promise to stop smoking. 😉 Be prepared to analyse a lot of junk science for her – nice life lesson, no? 😉
I have to think about this one.
I’ll be back…
Nope, can’t come up with a thing (even with your list of choices to guide me). Then again, I never had kids. Took care of a lot of them but I could always send them back home so their parents could deal with situations like this instead of me.
Dear Grandad
13 eh? You mean she’s missed out on 8 years of legal smoking (at least by UK rules, assuming it is the same age for drinking – i.e. 5).
I collected the fag ends of unfiltered cigarettes after a parental party and tried to smoke the accumulated baccy in one of those plastic bubble pipes with the red bowl and white tube. Needless to say it melted and the smoke tasted of plastic. I tried a ‘cigar’ of dry leaves from the kungu tree and singed my tongue.
My Dad took pity one me (and older brother) and gave us each a cigarette when I was around 9 or 10. After I had puffed mine down to nothing (I didn’t inhale) and did the same for my brother’s, Dad made a deal that if we didn’t smoke until we were 21, he’d give us £5. Each.
Money talks. We both collected.
DP
PS Today is National Smoking Day, so I had a ciggie – one of my 2 to 6 per year.
National smoking day?
I don’t smoke ciggies so lit a fire of paper, cardboard, plastic wrappers etc just to get in the spirit of it. Clouds of smoke rose gracefully from t’chimney t’was a delight.
Just blame the Russians.
Very impressive little “experiment”. Can someone with a farcebook account be so kind as to tell that oh so smart guy that lung tissue is not made of absorbant cotton balls and throats are not made of plastic tubes and don’t need cleaning out with a pristine white cloth? Maybe also give a little hint that human lung tissue has an amazing ability to clean itself, otherwise his own lung would certainly not look any better than his cute little cotton balls – or does he live on top of a very, very high mountain where no air pollutants can possibly reach him? If so, how did he get his little experiment on Farcebook? By spooky action on a distance? If he decides in a panic to move to a mountain top preferably in the Himalayas, give him advice to take his little cotton balls with him so he can see if he’s really safe from air pollutants. Poor man, he must suffer so …
Hah! The one massive flaw in his experiment! I mentioned it in 5, as it was the first thing I actually thought.
Yeah, that kind of “experiment” always looks so very impressive … you could also tell granddaughter to ask a pathologist if he’s able to tell a smoker’s lung from a non-smoker’s. They can’t. And you could tell her that smokers’ lungs are used for transplants without a second’s hesitation …