Category: psychology

It Wouldn’t be Easy Being Lime Green, but I Would’ve Enjoyed the Ride

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I would’ve loved to live in a lime green world back when it was just me, living single and in apartments, but I didn’t have the guts to pull it off. I know that sounds strange, but completely normal friends of mine have stated that they wished they had the courage to commit suicide. “I really wish I could commit suicide, but we Stanleys have never had the guts to follow through.” I don’t think my flirtation with changing the color of my apartment, even to exotic, lime green tops that, but it’s all relative. 

I never followed through with this formidable flirtation, but I was offered a window into this part of my soul when I pulled up next to an idling, bright and shiny yellow Jeep. I stared too long at that driver, thinking about the courage it took for him to be bright, flashy, and yellow. It was so appealing to me, especially with it’s beautiful black borders contrasting the yellow.

After that intoxication subsides, we realize that the idea that we could be him and pull off such a ride through town is intoxicating, but only in short bursts. Impulsively driving that Jeep off the car lot on a Monday would be just as intoxicating. Somebody else would start giving you the look you’re giving that guy, and you love imaging that. When Thursday rolls around, the reality that you’re a guy who just purchased a bright, yellow Jeep hits, and you realize there’s no turning back. Living in a lime green world was the dream, but like every other dream, they’re only great in short bursts. 

I would’ve loved the process of mixing and matching to try to find the perfect contrast, in short bursts, and I think the sight of the color porpoise grey would’ve ended my search. I would’ve loved the reactions of my friends and family to what they considered a huge mistake.  

“What happened?” they might’ve asked, looking around my apartment with wide eyes.

“What do you mean, I chose this color. I told the apartment complex’s office that I would be painting, but,” and here I might speak in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, as if this was our little secret now. “I didn’t tell them what color.”

What would my guest think of me? Would I have start having some trouble in the dating world? Would decades-old friends begin questioning what they thought they knew about me? Would I still be single, if my future wife saw that I was living in a lime green world?

“I’m sorry,” she would say as I knelt before her with a ring. “You’re a nice guy and all that, but I just can’t get past the whole lime green  thang. And before you say it, I know you can just change the color, but it worries me that you chose that color in the first place.”

Would decades-old friends begin questioning what they thought they knew about me? “We’ve been friends for a long time now, but this …” they would say, looking around. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

“So, the friendship is over?”

“No, I’m not saying that, but if you’re going to party here, and you want me to invite my friends, you’re going to have to repaint.”

My apartment could’ve been my own little, personal psychological testing lab, a petri dish that I could use to compile a delicious list of reactions now that I could report to you now.

“There goes Stanley, seems like a nice guy and all, but I hear he lives in a lime green apartment that he painted that way.”

Some psychologists state that lime green might be a mood booster, as it recalls nature and budding love, and it might not have narrowed my world as much as I think.

They also suggest that lime green helps us relax, and it’s useful for people with depression. Most of their conclusions are guesses, of course, as color affects us all in wildly divergent ways, and if there is any effect it is largely subconscious. My best guess is that if color has any effect, it’s negligible. Perhaps the only effect would occur within the four-walled world of the office where people talk. A single man with lime green walls would become the topic of the many conversations otherwise bored people have trying to establish their bona fides through comparative analysis. “He does seem like a nice guy, but did you know that he painted all of his walls lime green? I’m thinking he probably spends too much time alone, thinking strange thoughts. Kind of creepy, right?” That’s probably the reason none of us have the guts to paint our walls such colors.

“Hey, you’re Stanley Roper right?” someone might say, stopping me in the hall. “Is it true you have a lime green apartment?”

“Yeah, the complex told me they were going to paint,” I’d lie, “but I had no idea they were going to go with lime green.”

“Why don’t you move?”

“I still have eight months on my lease.”

Over time, the peer pressure probably would’ve grown so intense that my resolve would wilt. I enjoy it when others perceive that I might be a little weird, but I enjoy proving them wrong too. I enjoy jumping back and forth over that line, in a manner some call the clown nose on, clown nose off effect. I do whatever I can to achieve the clown nose on effect, because I enjoy defying expectations and categorizations, but I do enjoy the luxury of taking that clown nose off when I want others to feel so comfortable around me that they enjoy my company. I’m sure some dagger, like “he probably spends too much time alone, and thinks too much” would lead me to believe that following my irrational but impassioned impulses were a mistake.  

I do love, and I mean love spotting a bright orange truck roll down the highway. That feller’s got a pair on him, I think. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks. I so wish I could be that guy. I think about how liberating it would be to drive down a primary thoroughfare in a bright orange truck with black highlights. Six months to a year in, however, that glory rubs off. I did it in grade school. I wore a shocking pair of bright, baby blue tennis shoes, and I loved the instantaneous reactions I achieved. I was a fella who shocked his world in a pair of bright blue tennis shoes, but I went from being a guy with such shoes  to the guy who wore a shockingly bright blue pair of tennis shoes, and I didn’t enjoy that characterization over the long haul. I tried other things. I tried a shocking, new hairdo. I received all the reactions I wanted and then some. I found that there were days when I wanted to shock my world and others when I didn’t, but once you start shocking your world it doesn’t matter what you want them to think of you tomorrow. You realize that you don’t have the light switch control of the clown nose on, clown nose off effect you thought you did. Their impressions become the impression they have of you. 

***

Most of the websites that discuss the psychological elements of color devote most of their space to the positive, pleasing reactions we have to them. Their reads on the effects of color remind me of descriptions of personality types under the zodiac: mostly positive with a few nuggets of negative information thrown in to make it interesting without offending anyone. I understand that no one wants to promote negative stereotypes of any variety, but some of us are pretty awful, and I think we would all give astrologists a lot more credence if they allowed for that.

“All astrological signs are uniquely wonderful in their own unique ways, except for the Taurus. We’re not going to say all Tauruses are awful, as we’re sure a few of them do some nice things for people, some of the times, but an overwhelming majority of them enjoy watching other people get hurt, and they are prone to lie, cheat and steal if they think that will give them an advantage in life. Most Tauruses are complete pieces of dung.” If a reputable and respected astrological publication put out such a reading, its audience would probably bombard them with letters calling for a retraction. “My aunt Mary Louise is a Taurus, and she is the nicest, sweetest human being on the planet. How dare you suggest that she’s a piece of dung.”

“First of all, sir,” I would reply, as the astrologist of note in our publication, “that’s our reading, and our reading is gospel. Your aunt is probably a piece of dung, and either you’re not willing to admit it, or you don’t know it yet. She’s probably old and done with life now, but when she dies, you’ll probably hear all the piece of dung things she did in her prime. You should also know that there’s no evidence behind anything we write. We just make dung up as we go along, and your suggestion that we rewrite our reading suggests that you know that. We’re just writing dung for dung consumers who believe in such dung. It has no bearing on personalities. If you believe us when we write that you, as an Aries, are a trailblazer with boundless energy then you’re dumber than you look. Furthermore, if our Taurus reading actually offends you, you’re probably not ready for primetime. Thank you for your letter.”

If we’re going to analyze a group of people in anyway, I would suspect that we would arrive at at least a few negatives. Thus, if we are going to create a relatively specious way of analyzing human nature through astrology, their favorite color, or their favorite football team, we should have to create some negatives just to counter-balance all of the positives. Doing so might lend greater credibility to the reading, and establish some level of science to it. It might seem an impossible chore, but I think we would all appreciate the effort.

Some websites do provide some negative attributes, but they’re usually in the bullet points beneath the primary paragraph, and they usually attribute negatives to extremes. There’s nothing wrong with the color orange, they write, but be careful to avoid intense colors of orange, as they can lead to aggression.

“What is going on with the world? Every time I invite someone into my orange living room, they try strangle me. Last week, the meter reader started pointing his meter-reading gun at me, making gun sounds, like a little kid with a toy gun. I thought he was trying to be cute-funny, but he had this menacing look on his face that suggested he meant to cause me real harm. I led him into my mauve kitchen to give him a glass of water, and he calmed saying, “I don’t know what came over me.””  

“Wow,” they say, “and the color of your living room is orange? I thought orange reflected emotion and warmth.”

“Well, I didn’t go with a soft, friendly shade of orange,” I replied. “I went with an intense orange.”

“That’s on you then. Intense colors of orange can lead to acts of aggression.”

If I had the guts to paint my apartment an intense orange or a lime green, thus creating my own little petri dish of an apartment, I might see how profound the affect color can be. I might not see acts of aggression, but how would such colors affect the otherwise mundane conversations I start with them in the foyer? Would their emotions alter in any way based on the color of our ever-changing settings? I’ve witnessed the effect music can have, as I switched from one extreme to another with the volume level at the exact same level. There were at least two occasions when the otherwise banal conversations switched to such an extreme that it was almost comical.

What would be the long-term effect of a bright, loud orange? Would my friends avoid me if they learned about my lime green world? What would my co-workers say if they found out that I decorated my home with nothing but periwinkle home furnishings? Would they eat the food if I served them from a maroon kitchen, and the kitchenware on which it was served was a uniform canary yellow?

“You’re not talking to Stanley anymore, because he served you veal cutlets on a canary yellow plate?”

“You don’t understand, the silverware was canary yellow too,” they would reply. “You didn’t see his feldgrau cabinets, or his cerulean coffee table. Who paints a coffee table cerulean? You don’t know unsettling it all was. You weren’t there.”

I know it sounds odd, and a weird way to waste money, but I would’ve loved to do all this and hire an independent body to interview my apartment guests before and after their brief stay in my apartment. I would love to have intricate and intimate details of how their perceptions of me changed. The final, and perhaps most interesting, interview might be the one the independent interviewer conducted with me.

“Did you achieve everything you wanted to by painting your apartment lime green and purchasing an intensely orange truck?”

“I did,” I would say. “Some people won’t talk to me and others can’t stop talking about me. Now that it’s all over, though, I must admit I regret it, because now I have to live in a lime green house and drive an intense orange car to work. I wanted to be that guy, but I now realize I didn’t want to become that guy, not long term, if that makes sense.”

We might be a rare, endangered species, but some of us enjoy the “clown nose on, clown nose off” world so much that we find it intoxicating. We love to entering a room clown nose on, just to get a reaction. Every other element of our entrance is normal and pedantic, except for the clown nose, and we don’t frame it with an explanation. What would people do? What would they say? How does it affect our relationships with them going forward? Am I so uncomfortable in a normal world that I need to do, say, or be something different to shake up their world to prove their normal world is not so stable anymore? Or, do I relish my ability to take that clown nose off and prove to the world that I am actually quite stable, relatively normal, and thus worthy of entrance into their world? Some of us love the luxury of a clown nose on, clown nose off, because we’re not locked in, or sentenced, to that world of weird. If we were, we would strive to be normal, but we know normal so well that it bores us, and we wish we had the guts to test the boundaries every once in a while to test what’s considered socially acceptable. Someone, somewhere might call us weird, until, clown nose off, they find out how normal we are. That’s a reaction, and it’s interesting, hilarious, and all that, but we don’t test those boundaries, because we want to have friends, girlfriends, a wife, and a normal life. After we achieve that, we appreciate it for what it is, but we still would’ve loved just a little taste of what we could’ve achieved with some lime green walls, if we had the guts to follow through with it.  

Naughty Appeal vs. Been There, Done That

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The cycle goes something like this “I don’t get it, but I’m going to laugh so people think I do,” to “I kind of get it, but I don’t get the full breadth of why it’s funny” to the final reward “I get it. I finally get it” and all the laughter and joy that follows. The reward for finally getting the joke, any joke, but particularly mature, adult humor is a rite of passage that some of us enjoy throughout their lives. “We get it now. We’re in the club.” We get just about every dirty, naughty joke we hear now, but the rewards are not endless for all of us. Some of us clawed our way through the mental maze, swinging from vine to vine therein, to try to understand the naughty jokes people tell. Then we reached a point of saturation where we get almost every dirty joke we hear now, but we don’t understand their universal and evergreen appeal. 

The “I get it” reward is strong among the young. Especially the “You don’t get it? I do!” reward. This reward probably dates back to young cave dwellers trying to find something awful in cave paintings. The “I get it” smile is broad and wide, and we try to hide it from the adults around us when we’re young. The reward for getting naughty humor is especially precious when their peers “Don’t get it”. How long does this sometimes subtle, sometimes overt reward last? Is it universal and evergreen?

We all have biological functions, and the need to explore others’ bodily functions on a perpetual basis, and some of them are quite funny when creatively framed, but how many body function jokes do we have to hear before they no longer stimulate our naughty neurons? I concede that I’ve probably watched so many movies that my naughty stimulators are all dried up, but I’ve “been there, done that” for so long that it takes a pretty ingenious presentation for me to laugh at naughty humor now.    

Yet, anytime I introduce comedic material to a friend of mine, he asks, “Is it safe humor?” I originally thought he was referring to the politically correct dividing line. He wasn’t, and he clarified his position. He’s forty something, and he still wants/needs innuendo and the worst swear words we can imagine for the comedic material to achieve some sort of mental stimulation. He won’t watch material he deems “too safe”. He alludes to the idea that “safe” material is condescending. He prefers the risqué, the provocative, and he defines those adjectives in swear words and innuendo.

“Why is that still so important to you?” I asked him. “I honestly don’t get it.” To clarify my position in this discussion, he and I passed middle age some years ago, and he and I have watched many of the same comedy shows, standup comedians, and movies. Whereas my well is dry, his is still seeking greater fertilization of his arena. He has no idea why, but he still wants a whole lot of naughty.

I cherished the naughty, back when it was a limited resource. I, like all my relatively sheltered grade school era friends, worshipped at the altar of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Cheech and Chong. Some of us could quote large chunks of dialog from the movie Porky’s verbatim. Porky’s was the ultimate taboo movie for those of a certain age, because it had naughty dialog, exposed female breasts, and a risqué scene with a wolf-howling woman. We talked about the unedited scene in Grease where Danny gets racked, and we talked about the unedited swear words in the song Greased Lightning the next day. If you didn’t “get it”, you were consigned to an inescapable outsider status among the cool kids.

The cool kids could tell anyone interested how many swear words a movie contained, and how many exposed female breasts there were. The coolest kid had a mental spreadsheet count on (‘F’) words, (‘S’) words, and exposed female breasts in whatever movie you mentioned. You name the actress, and he could tell you the movie(s) that contained her revelations. I met another who could do that in high school. He compiled a VHS tape of moments when famous females exposed their breast. He was so obsessed with compiling the tape that he could tell you the moment of exposure down to the second of the movie. He knew them so well, because he would watch the movie once on HBO, and he would then memorize the time of the exposure down to the second. There were times when his memory would fail him, however, so he began writing them down, but he said that writing them down helped crystallize the moment in his memory so well that he rarely had to consult his log when the movie repeated, usually hours later on HBO. He would watch the movie again with his thumb on the record button, as that scene neared. He did this so often that we could rarely stump him on such scenes. “[That actress] exposes her breasts at the 32:22 mark of [that movie],” he said listing the specifics.

If you were one of the few unfortunates who only saw the made for television version of Stripes and Airplane, you knew the FOMO (fear of missing out) acronym at a very young age, before anyone coined it. “You missed the best parts,” our friends would tell us, or, “You have to see the unedited version, it has seven (‘F’) words, two (‘S’) words, and it actually has an ‘MF’ in it. Seriously, it occurs after the barista in the movie says, (“Fill in the blank”) and before the scene where they show the topless astronaut hanging her laundry.”

I didn’t remember how focused we were on that mental clicker of swear words in our youth, until my nephew began this accounting process in his younger years. You name the movie, and my nephew can recite for you how many (‘F’s) and (‘S’s) the movie contains. When Dr. Johnny Fever, on WKRP in Cincinnati, mocked a priest for attempting to censor his playlist, as a disk jockey, we thought that was so cool. “Uh, oh! There’s a naughty word!” Fever said, mocking the priest. When George Carlin was asked why he swears so much in his otherwise intelligent, observational humor, he said, “It’s excellent punctuation.” Comedians suggest they’ve tried it out on the road. They say they tried the same joke with and without any swear words, at different locations, and they determined that Carlin was correct. A punchline just doesn’t land the same without the proper punctuation a swear word provides. Carlin’s statement asks the rhetorical question is it his fault or ours for the necessity of swear word punctuation in comedic presentations?

My Uncle Clark’s good friend Jim introduced us to this world without borders when we were pre-teens. Our parents had no idea we were watching naughty movies at Jim’s house, and that made it extra naughty. Naughty is an ever changing and relative term, of course, as what we deemed naughty in our era is relatively tame now, but some of the movies we watched at his house were the peak of naughty for us. “I don’t see anything wrong with the kids hearing swear words,” Jim said. “They’re going to hear them anyway. They’re eventually going to see a woman’s breasts. They’ll see people smoke pot, and everything else in these movies. I don’t see the harm.” He would swear around us so often that we learned how to swear. We learned how to inflect, how to time swear words, and how to properly punctuate a joke with a strategically placed swear word from him. He taught us how to avoid sounding like a little kid, when learning how to cuss for the first time. He also taught us how to talk about carnal relations with women. He wasn’t afraid to provide explicit detail. This guy was so cool and so funny, and not just adult funny. This guy was genuinely (‘F’)ing hilarious to us. He treated us like adults, and we worshiped him for it. He wasn’t a stick in the mud, like my dad.

I am that stick in the mud now. I am that dad. I’ve stopped cussing, and I require that my friends and family watch their language when they’re around my child. I do these things, because one of my other friends said that the (‘F’) word was one of his kid’s first five words. He wasn’t proud or ashamed of this. He treated this as an unfortunate fact of life, but he also found it “(‘F’)ing hilarious”. I wouldn’t enjoy that, and on one plane, it is about morality, but it also has something to do with class. “If your child is dropping swear words, like a horse dropping road apples in a parade, that’s kind of on you,” I say.

“You cussed a lot in your teens and 20’s,” my friends say. “In Europe, kids drink and swear like a sailor, and it doesn’t affect them in the least. In fact, I’d say most of them are more sophisticated and worldly than most puritanical American children.”

“I don’t care if I’m a hypocrite,” I say in response, “and, unless I can use their example and advice, I’m not particularly concerned with how other parents raise their children, as I’m no authority on the matter, but what you sway doesn’t sway me one iota.”

My “been there, done that” reactions are so strong that even after the kid goes to bed, I don’t enjoy the excessive need for swear word punctuation, and I often see it as just that in others’ attempts to be humorous. It has nothing to do with morality for me, personally, once the kid goes to bed. It’s more a “been there, done that” reaction I have to it now. I no longer have the clicker that counts those words. I hear (‘F’) words now, and they go in one ear and out the other. This cycle started soon after I was able to rent any movie I wanted. I was on my own, and I able to choose every naughty, dirty movie I could find. Back then, I avoided humor that was too safe, but the supply eventually reached my demand, until I saturated the market and I “been there done that”. I demanded naughty, risqué material, and it was in short supply for much of my life. Then it wasn’t, and it wasn’t for my forty-something friend either. If I put this supply vs. demand qualifier to our discussion, I’m sure he would concede that the supply met his demand a long time ago, yet he still needs material he deems relatively “unsafe”.

In this long-since passed era, the supply was so low that we met our demand by standing close enough to a drive-in theater to see, but not hear, the scene everyone was talking about. That era has passed for many of us, as we now have more than enough supply at the tips of our fingers, yet the demand for such demand obviously remains strong among my peers?

Can a joke be funny without the pre-pubescent and pubescent need for punctuation? Yes, if it’s creative. Yet, even incredibly ingenious jokes need punctuation. To my mind, the most ingenious learn how to punctuate without vulgar, or blue, punctuation, and that’s not about morality. It’s about ingenuity and creativity. Music has the same “been there done that” quality for me. I’m not going to join the pack and slam the heavy metal era for its lack of soul, and for all of its hedonistic plays for fame, but it had its place in my life. Some of those bands produced some quality music, but that time has passed for me. When I’m feeling nostalgic, I might click on an old heavy metal song here and there, but I’ve “been there done that”. I can’t make it all the way through any of those songs now. The need for nostalgia is not that great for me, as that music provides little-to-no value to me anymore. The elements in swearing, innuendo, and nudity in humor provide little-to-no value to comedy anymore to me either.

At the Check Out with Child

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“Oh shoot!” I said in a checkout aisle at a store. 

“What’s the matter?” my son asked.

“I just realized, I don’t have enough money to pay for these items,” I lied. I double-check my wallet, and I added a theatrical check of my pockets. Three customers stood between the Promised Land and us. I write Promised Land to characterize how much my son hates going to stores of any kind. Most people accept the fact of life that when we need goods, we need to enter a store. My son is not there yet. Entering stores is the great inconvenience of his life. When we mention that we must go to the store, he throws a fit that lasts until we enter the store. He indulges us, while in the store by behaving, but throughout our brief stay, he is looking for anything and everything that might cut short our stay and take him to his personal vision of the Promised Land, the store’s exit.

Back before debit cards, and back before we went and got all growed up, we had incidents like this one,“You still need twenty-seven cents,” a checker told me in the most dismissive manner imaginable. I remember that transaction every time I pass this convenience store. I remember standing there with insufficient funds thinking that I wasn’t ready for the rigors involved in completing adult transactions. I was in no position to question this sentry at the gate of maturity, but this transaction occurred before we all went digital. We could question analog, or manual, cash registers back then, because they required manual entries that could fall prey to human error. I told the cashier that I carefully added the total, and that I couldn’t see how I could be wrong. I showed the cashier my addition. “You forgot the sales tax kid,” the guy said. He was right. I heard about sales tax, but I didn’t know how to add it to a total yet. I was so humiliated and embarrassed that I walked away with my tail between my legs, vowing that this would never happen to me again. Remnants of that anxiety remain with me to this day. I over prepare in the aisles of the store. I check and double-check the price of my items, I project a total, and I allow abundant room for any errors in my calculations. Some of the times, I put much-wanted items back just in case I added the percentage of sales tax incorrectly. It’s still such a deep seeded anxiety that I would rather not have some items than risk the prospect of that embarrassment and humiliation I experienced as a young kid. As a result of that transaction, I became so hyper-vigilant that I made the mistake of believing that everyone knows about it on some level.  

I turned to my seven-year-old son at the checkout stand, “Do you have any money?” He had money in his pockets one time at a store, when we took him there to spend his birthday money. So, I thought this was such a ludicrous question that we might share a laugh. What I didn’t realize was that by insinuating that it was ludicrous that he should have any money, I was calling him ludicrous to his mind. He didn’t think it was ludicrous that he should have money. He had money, in fact, and he told me so.

“Yes,” he said. “I do have money.” Through some back and forth, we realized that he meant he had money in his piggy bank in his bedroom.

“No, I’m asking you if have any money on you right now,” I said, “I need you to help me pay for all this?”

“I don’t have any,”my son said. He was a little disappointed, but it dawned on me that he wasn’t disappointed in himself, or his role in this, because why should he be? Plus, he was rarely disappointed in himself, as he rarely cared about such situations. Thus, whenever he exhibits any disappointment in himself, it’s based on the idea that I might be disappointed in him.

If I ask him, “Did you score any goals in your last soccer match?” and he has to say no, he does so in a way that suggests to me that he never thought about it, until I asked. “Did you get 100% on your last spelling test?” He knows when he didn’t, of course, but he forgot about it soon after he received his test back. He doesn’t care about any of these things in the manner I do, just like he didn’t care that we didn’t have enough money to help pay for all the items we have in our shopping cart, but he doesn’t want to disappoint me by saying so. He’s no more ambivalent to such matters than any other normal seven-year-old boy, and just like every other normal boy his age, he knows that his happiness is based on the parameters that his authority figures set for him. He cares what I care about, in other words, and he knows that I’m trying to teach him to care. He also doesn’t want to disappoint me by revealing the truth of the matter that both of us know.

Do our kids worry about scoring goals in soccer matches? Do they even think about it? Do they care about winning? Parents on the sideline do, and we show it by building ourselves into a lather as the game progresses. We hoot, holler, and scream anytime they make a halfway decent move on their field. Kids enjoy hearing that, and they want more of it. Yet, nine times out of ten when an opposing player has the ball, our kids watch them dribble the ball along with the rest of us, until a parent or coach yells their name out, “There you go Freidrich. That’s yours.” We parents now say such things, because we’ve learned from our parents. We remember the pain and humiliation our parents induced when they screamed, “Wake the hell up and go get the ball!” in front of everyone. We use better, less inoffensive ways to encourage our children to wake the hell up now. When we now yell these inoffensive things, we awake them out of whatever momentary stupor they’re in, and they try to take the ball away from the other kid.

“Why didn’t you take the ball away from the kid before I said something?” we want to ask them.

“I don’t know,” they say. If they were more reflective and analytical, they might say, “The thought didn’t even cross my mind. I thought it was that feller’s ball at the time, and I thought he was doing just fine with it.” They might not be able to express themselves at the time, but we can see it on their face, as they watch the other kid dribbling. When they watch the opponent, along with the rest of the spectators, some of them even smile. We don’t know if they’re daydreaming in the moment, or if they’re appreciating the other kid’s ability, imagining what their parents might think of them if they were that skilled. When we instruct them to take the ball away, their expression flips, as if by a switch, from the daydreaming smile to one of determination, as they attempt to take the ball away from the opponent.

“You don’t just let the opponent dribble the ball in front of you,” we say with some exasperation after the game is over. We think they should understand that fundamental element of sports by now. “When the opponent has the ball, you need to steal it from him. That’s the key to most sports.”

If he was able to articulate the complex inconsistencies in the worldview I try to pass to him, he might say, “Well, doesn’t that fly in the face of everything you, and all my teachers, have taught me about sharing?”    

Other than “I don’t know” my son didn’t say any of these things, because he knows it would disappoint me that he hasn’t learned all of these complex concepts at age seven. He also isn’t able to articulate my inconsistencies on matters of large and small. Even though we enter our children into various sports, they’re brains are still so young that it’s tough for them to make quick connections. Even though we’ve logged hundreds of hours playing sports with them in the backyard, coaching them up with our philosophy on sports, they’re still so young that they have a tough time grasping difficult concepts. Their whole world is about having fun, laughing, and not caring about things. How many of us wish we spent our early, elementary years being more serious? They focus their mind on the simple, enjoyable aspects of life, and they know that the key to living that good life is to do everything they can to avoid disappointing the authority figures in their life.

After spending some time in theatrical deliberation, in the checkout line at the store, I looked at my son, “I think we might have to put some of these items back.” I affected this with grave disappointment that I hoped might transfer to him. He didn’t appear to be the least bit moved by it. He looked at the items, and he looked back at me.

“Well what are we doing standing around here then?” he said. “Let’s put these things back and get the heck out of here.”

His response suggested a certain level of ambivalence that threw me a little, but the full scope of his ambivalence didn’t dawn on me, until I said, “I’m just kidding. I have the money.” I don’t know how I expected him to respond, but I thought it might come somewhere close to relief. What I received instead was:

“Well what are we doing standing around here then? Let’s pay for these things and get the heck out of here.”

The prospect of the embarrassment and humiliation involved in putting things back obviously didn’t hit him yet. The embarrassment derives from not having enough money, not being able to add correctly, and being called out in front of a group of people. He hasn’t yet grasped the concept of money, and how others could view one with insufficient funds as not earning enough to buy something at a convenience store. He thinks we just go to the ATM to get the money necessary the complete a transaction. He doesn’t understand that we put money in there for later withdrawal. He’s seven years old, he doesn’t understand the complex emotions of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation on the level we do. 

If we spend enough time with our child, we will overestimate them as often as we underestimate them. We will also assign our complex emotions and values to them, and even though we teach them they’re young, unformed brains cannot grasp them yet. 

Even though I knew that my son had no experience with such situations, I incorrectly assumed that most people came equipped with that inherent sense of doing everything they could to avoid them. He, of course, didn’t know enough to know he should be embarrassed. We think we know them, but more often than not our experiences in life are not theirs, and they don’t understand how experiences, good and bad, shape the life we lead in various instances. If we spend enough time with them, however, we think they should naturally do what we want them to do, even without us telling them one way or another.