So, what's a girl like me doing reading Lileks? He's Mr. Flat Tax, and I want the government to take more of my money. Get me a candidate who promises to raise my taxes, damn it. He'll win for sure.
I read Lileks, because his life so closely parallels mine. He goes to Target. I go to Target. He muses about mid-century furniture at Crate and Barrel. I spent some quality time with the new CB2 catalog today. He scans old matchbook covers into his computer and writes commentary about them, and I... well, no...
He writes about his life before the kids:
We should all see each other more often, of course, but most of us are now busy attending the offspring, and the opportunities for just dropping in and sitting around drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, scoffing at MTV, and rising from the sofa six hours later to go home and have a frozen pizza are remarkably few. (Every man misses his single days in principle, but rarely in specifics.)
And Steve and I talk about life pre-kids. Actually we went to that bad place last night -- we wondered if we had more fun before we had kids. When this topic comes up, you are supposed to say, "having kids is a different kind of fun." Well, last night I wanted the kind of fun that involves staying up all night, smoking a pack of cigarettes without guilt, and doing body shots in a Mexican restaurant on West 3rd Street.
Yeah, yeah. You can't maintain your party-hardy, couch slacking ways for long. I mean nobody wants to see a forty year old woman licking salt off a guy's neck and coughing up big phlegm balls from the smokes.
Even the slacker thing becomes old, too. Steve always brings up his old roommate, Tiny, as the poster boy for the aging slacker. Tiny is still in the four bedroom apartment on 146th Street with the rotating cast of crazy roommates found in the Village Voice. He's still blowing his money on video games and pot. He is a professional slacker. Of course, he hasn't had a girlfriend since the first Bush administration and is getting fat from all that Chinese take-out.
Last week, we briefly talked about why people, especially Europeans, aren't making babies like they used to. I've got a new theory. Childless people are having too much fun. They are congregating in urban areas and when they outgrow body shots and apple core bongs, they move on to nice restaurants, museums, and last minute trips to Anguila. The breeders get stuck going on the DisneyLand cruise and posing for pictures with Goofy. And why are the Europeans having even less kids than the US? Ibiza.
Kids really are fantastic, but you don't really know it until you have one of your own. When you take the love for your kids out of the equation, all you have is a comparison between fun and no fun. And without the social pressure to procreate, many people choose no kids.
Having children shouldn't mean such a vast change in lifestyle from complete freedom to chained to the boring house in the suburbs. It shouldn't mean poverty and a mandatory second income. It shouldn't mean the end of parties and interesting vacations. It shouldn't mean being too busy with work and activities to sit around with the kids and slack with them.
I've got to train little Ian to get me a beer from the basement fridge and pop it open for me.