You Had Me at "All Rivers Are Dangerous"

As much as it might irritate my daughter (more than) occasionally, our conversations often end up the basis of thought for my writing. Not just blog postings, but also articles I've written where carelessly spoken sarcasm shoots an idea bubble into my brain. Probably the only instance where being shot in the brain is a good thing.

Well, today my daughter was working on her adaptation of Red Riding Hood, which will most likely turn out to be a twisted tale of psychotic violence and weird sex or something. She is my daughter, after all, and her brain veers along many a dangerous path, as does mine.

While she was writing (hogging my laptop, no less, seeing as hers died a few months ago), she turned to me to ask a question. By the time time I yanked the Def Leppard out of my deaf ears, she was already irritated by the delay - she's cranky like that. I'm so proud. Oddly that was not sarcasm.

Her question was, "Are there rivers that are dangerous to drink out of?" So is the general state of the education system, apparently, that they don't teach any sort of ecology in school. My first response was, "All rivers can be dangerous to drink from." I meandered from there to babbling about the way nature filters water, the difference between stagnant waters and fast-running rivers, and then veered into +Les Stroud who's from the area I was raised in, and does that really cool TV show Survivorman. He mentioned water purification tablets being a useful thing to carry, and I've seen other survivalist talking about them, too.

Needless to say, I bored her and she stopped listening. When I stopped rambling, I looked at her knowingly. All she said was, "You had me at, 'All rivers are dangerous' and after that I stopped listening." Well, at least she's honest about it.

My daughter has a short attention span. She's ADD, same as me, but doesn't have the same fascination with learning that I have. Still, I keep trying.

Her sex education was interesting to say the least. A very frightened seven-year old girl looking at my sketches of human anatomy that explained exactly what happened during the mating process to create another human being. Poor kid. Even with the inducement of horror, she still zoned out somewhere amongst the scads of information on sexually transmitted diseases. At least she's never caught anything or gotten pregnant.

I still believe in over-educating, and hope one day it takes hold with her. Maybe she'll remember some of it sub-consciously, sort of like subliminal messages.

The funny thing is, even thought she knows she's going to be inundated with information, she still asks me rather than using Google or Wikipedia to get an answer. So, I guess my time isn't really wasted. She seems to think I know everything, and whether she listens to everything I tell her or not, it's nice to know she thinks so. Or maybe I'm just kidding myself and she's only asking me because she's too lazy to read.