An Explanation

This blog really requires an explanation if I'm going to leave it public -- and the story's too good not to share anyway, so here it is:

Over the summer of 2008, my wife and daughter decided to color their hair with henna -- no big deal, but you have to understand our parenting philosophy: Since we live in a society where everyone will wind up in therapy one day anyway, we want to make sure our kids get their money's worth.

So on the way into the bathroom to start the coloring process, my wife whispers to me, "When we come out, tell her you looked it up on the Internet and henna has something disgusting in it, like dog crap."

Now, my daughter was thirteen at the time and had lived with me since I met her mother 7 years prior ... as such, she knows me pretty well and has the good sense not to believe anything I tell her without verifying it through independent sources. So I know she's not going to believe me if I just say henna has dog crap in it.

But this is the Information Age and technology has a solution to every problem, including tools to help us torment our children. Enter Blogspot.

While they're in the bathroom with henna on their heads for half-an-hour, I right-quick get on Blogger and create this blog. I throw a few blank posts up to make sure there's numbers and dates in the archive, and then I write this: http://bizzarebeauty.blogspot.com/2007/02/henna.html

The girl-child comes out with her hair all colored and I point her to that link -- nothing more. She buys it hook-line-and-sinker. It's a beautiful thing to watch her walking around for two weeks thinking she'd colored her hair with dog crap.

There are also, of course, the added bonuses of being able to call her "shit head" and watching the sheer delight with which her little brother tells everyone.

Possibly the most amusing aspect is that she has a friend who does henna temporary tattoos -- my daughter, of course, has to ask this friend if she knows henna has dog crap in it and the friend replies:

"Oh, yeah, I knew that."

Oh, to be a teenager and have to appear cool all the time again.