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My coming of age story.
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Why I don't care:
At least the family 'Dirty Laundry' doesn't smell as bad as actual dirty laundry.

It's fun to hate: Download.com Why do they leave the programs with 'second-party' site watching software on there, when they know that they are doing it?

In the Grand Scheme of Things:
Well, polygomy really isn't all that bad, when you consider that we are all gonna be dead in the year 2000. Well, crap, we have passed the year 2000, I guess polygomy is really wrong in that respect.

So, I got off work late again today. By late I mean 8 p.m. which I know isn't really all that late, but it generally does keep me from doing a damn thing other than just going to work and then coming home. Once home, I generally get on-line and check my emails and the such. Read a page or two and the next thing I know it is damn near 10 p.m. I suppose that I should have grown used to this by now, but I still haven't.

Where I work is not really like your average job. That is, I generally know when I am supposed to show up for work, but I kind of only know 'ballpark' when I will be going home. Sometimes the shift is 9a.m-8p.m., sometimes it is 11a.m.-6p.m., and then just when I get used to it they change it. Frequently, people ask me how I have managed to work under these circumstances for so long, and I am not entirely sure if I really have an answer for that question. It is not like I make a boatload of money for working there, but, I do make significantly more than minimum wage. If I were to try to find a different job I would have to start back at the bottom again, and work my way to where I am now -where the chain of command goes Owner->Me->everyone else.- I will simply say that it pays the bills and leave it at that.

My site has a new reader! That reader is my wife, and I am quite happy about that, but I must admit that knowing that she was reading led me to re-read all of the past updates to make sure that I did not have too much profanity in them for her to be able to read them at work. The good news is that I can only find 3 instances where I used the 'F-word', I did not have to change a single past update -or I didn't whether I should have or not- because of this, but I still have not changed the page layout on the original ten or so updates that will currently not load -or load incorrectly- on many systems. Like everything else, the more I think about it, the more I think I should. And, with that particular problem I am talking about having to change 12 or so files, though I doubt that anyone will ever be clicking back that far into past updates (with the exception of the FBI and CIA when the Shadowtwinian's overthrow the government).

I mentioned above that I had read back through all of my previous updates, which I did, and I can tell you that I was quite happy with what I saw/read. I started with the first update, which was just all over the place, and ended with yesterday's update. It appears to me that I am getting a whole lot better at keeping on track, and getting a point across, than I used to be. Like everything else on this site, that is open to debate.

I hope to get better at this sort of thing with every passing day. My goal is to be able to write this thing on the fly, then read it the next day, without my eyes rolling about any statement that I made. It is getting closer, but I do not know if I will ever get it just right. I guess time will tell...(I did notice that I have a habit of saying, "suffice to say", that I found just a bit annoying, and I will try to break that habit, other than that though.)...

Child Beating

The first thing that I have to say here is that I was abused as a child, and I don't think that any child should have to go through that. The second thing that I have to say here is that punishment does not equal abuse...If your child is playing with matches, and burns down your house, do you say, "That was bad, don't do it again."? I certainly wouldn't, and I would like to think that the majority of the people in the world would agree with me on that point.

Children are literally like clay, they can be molded. If you teach them to fetch the newspaper, they will do it (even though that is a stereotypical dog's job). Whatever you teach a child will remain with the child for his/her entire life. That has a double-edge though. If you did not teach the child something, they will do whatever they feel like doing in a situation (not having your guidance).

The first four years of a child's life seem to be when all of these reflex responses are set, but they need to be modified with time. That is, when the child is four years old, you don't yet need to teach him/her not to play with matches, since they don't have the desire or the access to the matches. A few years later, however, they will have the desire and be tall enough to reach whatever cabinet the matches are in. In my experience, verbal scolding works from birth to about 5 years old, then skips a lot of years until it becomes active again in the mid-twenties -in the form of guilt-.

Sometime within that time-frame there must be spanking. If your child is seven, and has just burned down his second office building, it is time to try a tactic other than the, "I am disappointed in you" approach. The problem therein is that someone will try to say that you are abusing your child if you slap them on the ass.

Well my case study (that is, I have been watching lots of people with children whe happen into the store where I work) shows that the parents who give their children a hearty slap on the ass when they are doing wrong end up with far better behaved children. I am not talking about for the duration of the shopping that day either, I mean that I have seen them go from 5 years old to fifteen and they are well behaved.

Similarly, I have seen the parents who just say, "no, childname", and have to do it over and over again over the course of the ten or twelve minutes that they are in the store. Is spanking better than 'verbal enforcement'? YES. Does that necessarily equate to the child growing up to be the next GACY? Probably not, but it does equate to better behaved children, and the world is in lack of decently behaved children today.

I believe that you should slap the child on the ass on occasion, that will help the child to learn right from wrong. I can personally remember damn near every instance in my life where I got a spanking, but for the life of me I can't remember the pain from it. I think that is the goal, to teach the lesson, and if I can remember what happened when I was 5 because of an ass-slap then I say, "Do it".

I did open this whole thing up saying that I thought that punishment did not equal abuse. I will elaborate just a bit here. I do believe that it is okay to spank a child on the ass to teach the child a lesson. I do not believe that it is okay to bring a closed fist in contact with a child for any reason and that did happen -not to me, but one of my brothers- that is certainly abuse. Though the fist never touched me, I still feel that it happened to us all, in the form of fear. If that was what led my mother to leave my father for the sake of us I still don't really know, but it was certainly the best thing that ever happened for Mom and us kids.

Why can't I just have a damn happy story from my youth? First I am a thief, second I am from an abusive family. I definitely have to do research before I try to do another anecdote here.