I'm still not sure about all the comma rules, so probably shouldn't be lecturing about punctuation.

Saturday night I had the pleasure of seeing at least 15 minutes of The Fiancee's nephew in a high school stage production of "Oklahoma." I would've seen more, but The Lady Gray decided that she wanted to voice her opinion about the production, so I excused myself to allow her to rant all she wanted... in the car.

While pacing in the vestibule, waiting for the rest of our group to exit the auditorium, I happened to notice the signs for one of the bathrooms:

Girl's

Bathroom

(some [probably poorly punctuated] Braille)

Really! This is in a HIGH SCHOOL, y'all! Supposedly a place of learning -- even if not of the higher variety. How in the Hades could this have gone unnoticed? What one lucky girl gets to use this bathroom? Do they have a vote each day? Does the prom queen get to use this bathroom or does she need to find the one that is properly punctuated?

Apostrophe abuse makes me itchy in a big way.

But I probably shouldn't have expected anything less from a school that has intentional textese graffiti all over the entrance. 

Textese makes me break out in hives. Really is it SO difficult to put in the extra letters? We're not paying by the character anymore, People! You can spell the whole word!

This is what scares me about the world I'm leaving to my children. I remember when "ain't" wasn't actually a word. Now it's in the dictionary! We're deliberately dumbing down rather than holding our offspring to a higher standard. Instead of making our kids work their asses off for a trophy, we're handing them out like so much candy to soothe their little wounded egos. 

What. The. Fuck. Is. WRONG with us?!

Look. It's our job as parents to wound our children. No, seriously. It is. (Side note: my mother can now die happy that I admitted that). Because it's our job to teach our kids that the world is a tough motherfucker and she takes no prisoners. I would love nothing more than to save my kids from every heartbreak and hardship they'll encounter, but I would be doing them a disservice. Just like I'd be doing The Monkey a disservice for telling him that his crap-tastic, half-assed paper about the 1936 Olympics was good enough to hand in rather than making him re-write it (I let him off the hook when it would warrant a C. But only because I was tired of arguing with him about it). Or if I let The Nugget hand in his math homework with every answer wrong because "Mrs. Kling will go over it tomorrow in class". 

NO! It's my job to torture my kids and make them sit at the table 'til the job is done. It's my job to yell at them. It's my job to paint a bleak picture of the kind of future they can expect if they continue to accept mediocrity as the standard.

But I'm wicked hard-pressed to enforce these lessons when the schools around here allow apostrophe abuse to go unchecked and humor textese, because my kids will know I'm full of shit. They'll know that the world at large accepts half-assery and they will be able to out-argue me. And I won't have the safety net of the world giving them their comeuppance because the world is all, "Meh. I'm too busy watching Breaking Amish. Catch me at the commercial."