I heard on the radio this morning that kids starting college this week were born in 1985. I can’t even begin make sense of that. It seems like just yesterday that it was 1985 and I was a junior in high school, listening to Tears for Fears and watching The Breakfast Club. It strikes me as odd that the kids moving into dorms today may have been conceived of during that time period, even perhaps at the back of a theater showing the Breakfast Club.
On a related note, I was thinking this morning that it might be an ideal time for Linette and me to start a family You see, theres a giant asteroid headed toward earth and they think that itll probably hit in 2014, ending all life. I, the eternal optimist, heard that and saw the bright side – we could have kids without ever having teenagers. That sounded pretty good… I think Id be a great dad to small kids, but the thought of having a son who could beat me up or a daughter who wanted to wear hot pants and a thong, or for that matter a daughter who could beat me up and a son with a love for thongs and hot pants, just makes me feel ill.
As for the asteroid, they say not to worry. The odds of life being wiped out, they say, is like 900,000 to one. Of course the PowerBall odds are like 17 times worse than that and millions of people still wager their grocery money thinking that they have a shot at winning.
I think that an asteroid would be a good thing for earth right now. We need an external challenge, something to bring us together. I like the idea of that being an asteroid more than an invading army bloodthirsty alien storm-troopers. If we were sane people, AIDS would have been enough. That should have gotten our attention, but it didnt. Global warming? Yeah, that too. If we were logical people wed say, Look, this really bad thing is happening. This is no time to fight. Lets pull together and fix this. So, I vote for the giant chunk of space rock. I look at it like a test. If we cant all work together and make some kind of laser to blow it up in the next eleven years, then we dont deserve to live.
