DADWAGON

Continuing our discussion of small boys with long hair: My opinion is clear but bifurcated. I believe that those Texan folks are nuts for trying to prohibit any hairstyle–and I say this as a man who grew up in New Jersey in the eighties, amid the world’s greatest concentration of mullets and, briefly, something called the rattail. (If anything should be banned by law, it’s that one. I tried it for about six hours once, and then had the thing clipped off, because even as a teen, I knew it was flat-out stupid.) No, shoulder-length hair is not a sign of hippie Commie  pinko ‘Murica-hating subversive radical leanings, and it hasn’t been for at least a generation.

It is, however, a major aesthetic offense. Babies are adorable partly because their looks are so pure. Tender new skin and perfect little cheeks and tiny fingernails are beautiful. Setting those beauties off with the simplest possible hair is the way to go. Gum it up with styling cues, or out-and-out fashion, and you may as well tag some graffiti on that perfect little face.  Less is more.

I should also add here that long hair is unlikely to work in our household; both my wife and I have dense curls, and when I grow my hair to any substantial length, it heads not to my shoulders but upward. As I get older and grayer, my long-hair options grow ever closer to the Albert Einstein/mid-period Bob Dylan idiom, and I wish that on no child of mine.

In other words, I don’t believe in banning any particular haircut from school. I believe in creating an environment where parents who choose stupid haircuts are so ashamed that they change their minds. An exercise of soft power, as they say in the State Department.

Wasn’t Obama going to kill all the irony? Well, wasn’t he? We were going to enter an age in which partisanship would end, the elite would inherit the earth, tofu would taste fucking awesome, and no one would ever dare make oblique, self-referential sport of well-known and much-beloved kiddie songs.

Yet, unlike that whole public option thingamhoochie, irony has yet to go the way of the dodo bird.

Thus, from the hipster scum over at McSeeney’s I can give you a short work of fiction satirizing a mother (or a child) who may be taking the classic children’s songs a wee bit too seriously:

No, you can’t put a person in a pumpkin shell. Really, I’m starting to worry about you.

Is the old man snoring? Or is he in a coma? Because if he bumped his head and can’t get up we need to call someone. And it’s going to be tricky since it’s raining. And it’s pouring.

Well nobody asked you to carry a banjo all the way from Alabama.

I don’t care how many of them there are, get the monkeys out of the bedroom!”

So am I perhaps enjoying a quick read at the expense of my son, one in which, in this case, the irony is directed at a poor, defenseless, tot?

Forfend, I would never.

No, what I had in mind was my son JP, this very evening, correcting me as I meandered my way through the lyrics of “Twinkle, Twinkle” as I put him to bed. (bath, book, song, lights out. Is there any other way?). You mean it isn’t “Like a siren in the blight”? or “Like a tyrant on the right”? Really?

I mean, come on, isn’t he missing the point?

(This is the third in our new series, “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Read about TV trauma here and ratting out your kid here, and Nathan’s post against long hair for preschool boys here.)

Maybe this is just evidence of how distanced we New Yorkers are from the culture of the rest of the country, but I can’t even believe we’re throwing a Tantrum over whether boys should be allowed to have long hair.

I mean, have you even seen photos of the kid who was suspended from school in Texas? His hair’s not even long—it’s bushy. And his parents want him to grow his hair long so he can eventually cut it and donate it to charity. So, to quote Christopher Hitchens: WTF?

As the father of a girl (and as the proud wearer of pink underwear), I don’t imagine I’ll ever have to deal with precisely this question, and at this point I’m just happy that Sasha has hair at all. It took a while for it to come in, and it’s still pretty thin, but at least it mostly covers her head. It’s not quite the raven locks that inspired her middle name, but whatever. It’s there, and I can’t imagine anyone would have a problem with it, even if, in later years, she decides to keep it short and, I guess, boyish. Whatevs, as the kids like to say.

But this whole incident does remind me of what it was like to be a kid and to be in school. You have no control over your life—adults do. And in a totalitarian system like a public school, innocuous things like long hair or a silly T-shirt—which often go unnoticed by students—suddenly become “classroom distractions” only when all-powerful teachers decide they’re classroom distractions. There’s an inherent unfairness in kiddie life, and it still pisses me off, even now.

With any luck, we’ll send Sasha to school in Taiwan, where she’ll be too busy cleaning toilets and washing chalkboards to care about the length of her hair.

A nifty little rundown of child intransigence at Why Is Daddy Crying got me thinking about why I enjoy hearing about how stubborn other people’s kids are.

Of course, I like it because it absolves me of a certain amount of responsibility for my kids’ ill-behavior. Dalia can be a world-class obstructionist, but if other kids are just as bad, then it’s not my fault.

But there’s something else going on, something that may explain why I dig the DadBlog concept–reading them, writing them, whatever. To put it simply: misery loves company.

That’s a frickin’ cliche, you say. Yes, I know. But the science behind it is pretty interesting. Especially the science coming from Sonja Lyubomirsky, a UC Riverside professor of psychology who researches happiness. Actually, everything about her seems pretty damn happy: she’s happily married; her pictures show her looking all pretty and pleased; and her name even means, if I’m not mistaken, something like “loves the world” in Russian. You get the picture.

So what does she have to say about happiness? Is it in your DNA? Can you buy it?

Not really. Much of her work seems to point to social comparison as a key to happiness. That is, you’re happiest when you know that others are going through the same crap (or preferably something worse) as you. As she puts in on her home page:

Social comparison [has] hedonic implications – that is, positive or negative consequences for happiness and self-regard – and thus [is] relevant to elucidating individual differences in enduring well-being.

In less academic terms, she wrote a piece for the New York Times a year ago about why people were still mostly happy in the middle of an economic downturn. The secret: everyone was doing worse, so everyone felt OK:

For example, Andrew Clark, an economist in France, has recently shown that being laid off hurts less if you live in a community with a high unemployment rate. What’s more, if you are unemployed, you will, on average, be happier if your spouse is unemployed, too.

There you have the naked truth. The world of dad-blogging is animated by a sort of Dadenfreude: your misery will make me happy.

That’s messed up.