Last year my friend Steve Gadlin posted a funny status update on Facebook, asking people what he should leave under his daughter's pillow to replace a baby tooth she left behind for the tooth fairy. With his permission, I posted the funniest answers on the blog and then, as I do with pretty much every blog post I write, forgot about it.
Yesterday I learned of an unexpected follow-up to the story. Steve told me that his daughter informed him, "I know you're the Tooth Fairy." She was online and decided to Google her dad (which must have been an interesting experience) and discovered the post, wherein he let it slip that he, not the Tooth Fairy, was leaving behind prizes for teeth. As Gadlin says, "Now, at seven, she knows there is no magic, only suffering."
Let this be a lesson to you curious young people out there who are inevitably reading a blog post written by a 35-year-old-woman: do not go on the Internet.
I know, all your friends are on the Internet, but I'm here to tell you that "all your friends" will only lead you to ruin and disappointment. Much the way it is more depressing than titillating to snoop and discover that your friends are saying mean things about you (trust me; it's not all it's cracked up to be, and I don't know why it's cracked up to be anything), when you start poking around online, you're bound to discover things that are only upsetting and will rob you of your childhood.
Just think: if you stayed offline, you'd avoid learning things like:
- The truth (or tooth!!) about the Tooth Fairy, Santa, the Easter Bunny and all your favorite celebrities (I.E. they're all jerks)
- What an episiotomy is
- Exactly when you will die
- The fact that you will die
- And so will everything and everybody you love
- What a tumor with teeth and hair looks like
- What it looks like when a guy's leg breaks and the bone pokes through the skin
- Super-gross sex stuff
- How commenters on Youtube express themselves
And so on. You do not want to know these things! I'm serious! And don't be an dummy and say "Well now I have to know" because inevitably you'll just end up saying "Wow, I was totally better off not-knowing."
Instead of going to the Internet for information, you should do what I did when I was a child. Ask your parents! Thanks to my mom, I learned that the definition of "oral sex" is, "When people talk about sex." That's a much better answer than the truth. And just imagine how much happier Steve Gadlin's daughter would be if she had just asked her dad about himself instead of Googling him.
As a backup, I recommend consulting an encyclopedia that was published in the 1960's. If it was good enough for me, it'll be good enough for you. The World Book will not disappoint you the way anything published in the 21st century will. It may confuse you, but at your age, confusion is better than enlightenment.
So, Izzie Gadlin, and the rest of you curious young people out there, I command you! Step away from the computer. Go do what you young people love to do these days--chase a hoop with a stick or make a doll out of hay or sit quietly while you work on your needlepoint. Or else you just might learn something else you didn't want to know (like the fact that your parents had sex once.)
See, I told you so.
Â