The Age of Dorkness

No, there isn’t a misspelling or a typo in the title of this article. This isn’t the name of a teen slasher movie with Miley Cyrus and Zac Effron in the lead parts. I’m referring to the Edge of Dorkness.

According to the Royal British Society of Psychology (R.B.S.P), the “Edge of Dorkness” refers to that threshold, or time span, that elapses from the moment your child stops seeing you as Superman or Wonderwoman, to the time when he realises you’re a total dork. There is a formula which psychologists from Oxford, along with mathematicians from Stanford University and M.I.T, have come up with and which can accurately measure this time frame.  It reads like this:

EOD = [ (AOF) / (AOC)] * [LTCPA – LTCRPA]* &^

Where

EOD: Edge of Dorkness

AOF: Age of Parent

AOC: Age of Child

LTCPA: Last time child paid attention to what you said

LTCRPA: Last time child really paid attention to what you said

&^: Constant which has been determined after 78.500 case studies over 17 years

That’s right; the team of 415 scientists that worked 24/7 on this project for seventeen years studied 78.500 single cases and found that 99.2% of the time the result of this formula, regardless where and how it is applied, is simply zero. This possibly explains why 38% of those scientists committed suicide; 49% became taxi drivers and the rest have bought fish and chip shops.

This stunning conclusion means basically that one sunny Saturday afternoon you may go to the movies with your 13 year old son to watch a kids movie, let’s say “Pulp Fiction” and then go to a McDonalds for a burger. A typical father/son outing. On Sunday morning, this very same cute teen boy, who thought every single word you ever said was directly taken from the Bible, doesn’t even say good’ day to you. What is worse, when you address him with your usual and warm “Good morning mate” he responds, without ever looking at your face, with what you believe is a grunt.

But you’re wrong. This is no ordinary, run of the mill grunt. When teens reach the Edge of Dorkness they actually start speaking in foreign tongues, namely Russian. What you thought was a grunt is actually as follows:

[1]заблудитесь вы мужлан

Many language and phonetics specialists have studied this phenomenon which has baffled parents since the Stone Age, especially because Russian wasn’t to be invented for another 30.000 years.

When Archaeologists from The Metropolitan Museum in New York uncovered ancient stone carvings and paintings inside a cave near Granada, in Spain, they found hieroglyphics depicting various aspects of the everyday life a Stone Age family. These paintings showed the father hunting for buffalos with a spear; the mother skinning and gutting the buffalo; the younger sister working the skin to fabricate clothing and, who we suppose is the family’s teenage boy, sitting in a corner tapping into a slate of stone with a chisel, suspiciously looking like the stone equivalent of an iphone. A bubble above his head read like this:

[2]заблудитесь вы мужлан

But if your teen has reached this period of his life, you shouldn’t worry. It will pass, and most of the time there are no immediate mortal consequences. Only a small 10 to 15% of teenage kids end up pulling out a Uzi machine gun and killing fellow students and teachers at their local High School. Yours might not be one of them.

When you go past the Russian-speaking and gun-wielding phase, the next thing you need to worry about is obviously sex, especially because these days kids are openly exposed to sex everywhere they turn.

I clearly remember the first one I saw a female breast in a movie. I was fourteen and had cheated my way into a rundown theatre where they were screening a police movie with Clint Eastwood. This was rated R-18. At some point in the movie a skinny blond took out her shirt and flashed her boobs at Clint Eastwood, who didn’t even flinch in his typical tough guy attitude. I felt I was about to explode, but thank God I didn’t, at least inside the theatre.

Today’s kids can access not only boobs but any other parts of the female anatomy they like from their i-phones whenever they want to. Most of the time for free. And sex on TV is for everyone to see. I find this really unfair. You don’t know how much I had to go through when I was a teenager to get hold of a Playboy magazine or a porn movie in Betamax format. The worst part is, today’s teenagers are not grateful about this unfair advantage over their parents.

All this new age exposure to sex forces us parents to be alert at very subtle changes in your kid’s attitudes that may depict there’s some sexual activity going on. For example, if your 16 year old daughter leaves the house in heavy make up; completely clad in red PVC ; high heels and a whip at 1AM everyday, you should start thinking “This is a good time for a sex talk” But this is only me, maybe you find this normal. If your 17 year old son keeps buying wigs, makeup and dresses on e-bay, you are probably overdue for a father-son talk. Then again, it’s only me, maybe I’m just overreacting. What I mean is, keep an eye on your kids activities and act sooner than later once you find something unusual. One piece of advise I once received from an uncle said “The two most important tasks as a teenager parent are to keep the girls off the pole and the boys off a dress”

I hope the above information is useful for those parents with kids about to reach The Age of Dorkness. No, you don’t need to poison your kids cereals, just follow the advise above and hopefully you’ll manage to survive this era along with your favourite family members.

If you happen to come across a parent who tells you the above is false and that their 16 year old boy is as sweet and loving as when he was 7, I’ll give you the number of a man called Tony Sollozzo who operates from the back of a restaurant in Lygon Street. He’ll take care of your friend for you.

But, as a proud parent of two teenage kids, a girl and a boy, I've had a very good experience so far. My Russian has improved greatly and this means they can now abuse me, and ask for money, in two different languages. Lucky for me, the strong Aussie dollar buys very cheap Rubles.

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[1] Get lost you dork

[2] Get lost you dork

MIDDLE AGE BLUES

I’ll be turning 50 in exactly six months. This means I’ll officially become a middle aged man.

Now, that’s not quite true, is it? If you reach middle age when you turn 50, this must mean you are expected to live to be at least a hundred, and unless you’re a fisherman living off salmon and tuna on the North coast of Japan, the chances of this happening are about 1 in 100.000.000, or, in layman terms, roughly the same chances that World War III will start as a consequence of French troops invading Germany.

This means that not only I’m already a middle aged man, but that I have been one for quite a while.

This is difficult for me to accept. I still love rock ’n roll and own every record and DVD ever released by Led Zeppelin. Now, that doesn’t help my case, does it? Jimmy Page is 69 and Robert Plant looks like a mummy from the British Museum, but with the bandages off. That throws my argument out the window.

You realise how old you are when you notice that there are now wars in countries that didn’t even exist when you were a kid. Instead of Yugoslavia you now have Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia (are there any more?). The same goes for the ancient Czechoslovakia, and don’t get me started with the former USSR. When I was young, I remember reading somewhere there were 120 countries in the world, and as of last count, there are at least 200 now. Yes, the world has regurgitated at least 80 countries in my life span.

Putting my new-countries-in-my-lifetime counter and my grandfather-rock ’n roll-bands aside, the worst part of being middle aged is the physical aspect. The wisest piece of advise my dad ever gave read something like this: “Son, after 40, when you wake up in the morning and nothing hurts, you’re dead” This is completely true. There’s hardly a part of my body that doesn’t hurt or hasn’t been affected in any way. I think I’m close to proving wrong those scientist that claim the human body contains only 206 bones. Hell, I have at least 300 joints in my body and they all hurt!!!

After I established I was officially middle aged, I went to the doctor in order to have a check up. Besides the stethoscope thing and the annoying little hammer to the knee, he ordered a list of tests which involved mostly poking through all my body cavities with fingers or kilometres of plastic tubes and little cameras.

After much procrastinating and excuses of every sort, I ended up booking these tests. Some of them requiring serious preparation, including drinking stuff that helped me cleanse my intestines by turning my body into a rocket in launching mode. I had my prostate, urinary tract, colon and several other internal organs I never even knew existed fondled, pinched, molested, photographed and videotaped, and they all fared very well. I’m very proud of my internal organs.

Besides the tests, the doctor gave me a list of all the things I shouldn’t eat, which comprised largely of everything with flavour in it.

It seems that when you reach middle age your metabolism slows down to the equivalent of, and this is in strict medical terms, a slug affected by sciatica, therefore your body takes much longer to process food. The doctor told me there was a good chance my body was still trying to digest meat pies I ate during the AFL Grand Final last year. From now on, my diet will consist mainly of grapefruit and lettuce.

The worst part of it all, is that I’ll have to go through most of this again in the next couple of years. I just need time to build up some courage and give the bad news to my organs.

But now I need to run. It appears there’s a war and Bosnia and Herzegovina are now parting ways.

I need to update my counter.