Life in the Slow Lane

With all of the recent advancements, parenting has become a rigorous obstacle course of navigating "How you will ruin and/or neglect your kid today".  Observe: Task: Wash laundry in laundry room. Complicating Factors: One twenty pound toddler, a flight of stairs, three doors (one requiring a key), and an absolutely non babyproof laundry room. Option 1: Leave child unattended in condo while you cart baskets to the washing machines. Hope child doesn't spend entire 5 minutes screaming and banging on door. (Although, at least with this option you know exactly how your child is spending the unsupervised time, as opposed to, say, chewing cords or pulling stools down on his head.) Option 2: Place child on top of laundry basket and hope he hangs on tight enough for the trips down and up the stairs. Make sure that no one observes your awkward juggling act to keep basket steady while unlocking laundry room door. Option 3: Allow toddler to come down the stairs on

Ire. That is the best word for the feeling I felt when the book my sixth grade teacher read aloud to us ended unhappily. It couldn't have been the end, really. There had to be an epilogue that made the story resolve more to my liking. There just had to be. That is, I think, the first time I remember feeling so betrayed by an author. How dare they make me care and then treat my emotions so cavalierly? (And how could my teacher, knowing the ending, go ahead with the choice?) My mother tells me otherwise, though. She remembers how I would insist on finishing the bedtime story with Goldilocks coming back to the house of the three bears and becoming best friends with Baby Bear after her breaking and entering was forgiven. I endured quite a bit of mockery in my English and Spanish literature classes following that first instance of disappointed trust in an author. Why did Kafka have to write such awful, depressing yuck? Why did Ana Maria Matute write with the assumption that e