Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts

Friday, 1 August 2014

The Doubtful Aesthetics of Young Ponytails



Child with three ponytails - cartoon The ponytail. Add one to a little girl to make her cute, to a grown up girl to look casual and to a guy to look like a hippie.

My proudest ponytail achievement is convincing my mother to let me go to preschool with three ponytails. Yes, read that again, my dear: not one, not two, but three glorious ponytails.
But I want to talk about the dark side of ponytails. Today, I’ll tell you why the ponytail is evil. At least, that was my firm belief as a four year old youngster with a superior sense of aesthetics.

Let’s first look at untied hair: it swings, it shines, it springs waves of joy.
The ponytail? Restricted, strangled with a hair band. A complete lack of life.
Of course, us little kids jumping all around the place made those ponytails bounce up and down, But did that bouncing show us the elegance of waving hair? Did the ponytail curl around our head in the slight summer breeze? No, it didn’t.

A ponytail is just a fat body strangled at the top, slowly tapering into a handful of miserable hair strands.

It's like some dead critter dangling off your head. Bounce, bounce.

I devised a plan.


Why a ponytail is ugly and evil


Obviously the problem was the dangling dead part. That caused the strangled critter look and prevented the hair from being shiny and lively and swinging around.

The plan was simple. All I needed was a pair of scissors and some cooperation.

I'd bring remove the deady part and bring back life to your hair style. I’d make the world a better place, starting right here and now. Do you want to be saved?

Every girl in kindergarten agreed. After all, who doesn’t want to look pretty?

I left a trail of ponytails in my wake. But just as I had started the salvation of my sister, my mother walked in. And that was the end of my good work as a hair style crusader.

Cutting my sister's hair (ponytail) child

...I regret nothing.

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

CHILDHOOD STORIES: Why I Ate My Boogers

As I child, I ate my boogers. Openly. Incessantly. Proudly.
My parents must have been desperate. They couldn't make me stop in any way. My parents failed to figure out why I did this. Or why I even encouraged other children to do it. 

If they had known why, maybe they could have stopped me. It all started with a penguin.


On a family trip to the zoo, we met this guy:

Lions in Japan - Macaroni Penguin

I asked why this new penguin had yellow thingies on his head.
"That's spaghetti," my father said.
"Yes," added my mother. "When he's starving, he can eat it."


Woa. How mesmerizing, the wonders of nature! A built-in food factory? Amazing!
It didn't take me long to realize that we, humans, also had such a food factory.

Lions in Japan - noses are food factories - boogers !



Finally I understood why my nose made icky boogers all the time! I was lacking food!
So I started eating my boogers. As nature had intended.

Day in, day out, my nose continued to provide boogers, signaling my lack of sufficient nutrition. I noticed boogers in other children's noses. Eager to save them from starvation, I convinced many, many fellow toddlers to join me eating the fruits of my immune system.


Too bad they didn't taste like spaghetti.

Lions in Japan - Eating my Boogers

~Closing Note~
Yes, I did eventually realize that the penguin didn't carry spaghetti around. Moral of the story: don't listen to your parents.