Jess Banks schools you.

The main job of parenting is to introduce your kids to the world outside your home in a way that best helps them make sense of it and learn to survive in it. You take them places, and show them things, then stand aside and anxiously watch them discover the joys and pitfalls for themselves. You clap and cheer, and dry tears and kiss scrapes. And it’s worth noting that this job isn’t only done by parents–any adult who deals with children experiences these things, and bears the honor and responsibility for those children’s formation.

The point of divergence among parents is when to expand the fence we build around our kids, to include new information and experiences. Obviously, this is a hot-button issue, laced with words like “censorship” and “age-appropriate” and “psychological trauma” that fuel an entire industry of researchers and trade paperback sales. Morals and memories of our own formative years have a powerful impact on our choices, as do our unique tastes. Sometimes, this veers in the absolute opposite direction from how we were raised. We resolve to raise our children with or without those influences: religion, politics, bad food, naughty words, even our extended family.

And sometimes, we lean into the curve of our own years, and urge our children into the shape of the things we’ve grown to love. The phrase “Where has this been all my life?!” is a strong predictor of parental behavior; the favorite shouted phrase of teenagers throughout time and space, “When I’m a parent, I’m never going to make my kid go there/eat that/do this!!” rarely factors in parenting decisions later in life. My husband and I are geeks who are making our living from an industry based on social experiences of play–it was a foregone conclusion that we would mold our little creations to share some of our offbeat enthusiasms. I showed Connor Star Wars when he was two, the same age at which I’d seen it (when it was first released in 1977), and Griffin was about the same age when I introduced him to Godzilla and all the other Japanese atomic monsters. And sure enough, they’re evolving nicely on the quick-witted, culturally referent, and wide-ranging track we set them.

But, inevitably, there are hitches in the unrolling of the tapestry of the world we lay at our children’s feet. Some, we never see coming. When Connor was born in the long, hot summer of 2002, we started watching “The Sopranos” on DVD to while away the humid evenings. He would actually stop nursing and look at the TV in recognition when the theme song came on. In large quantities, this show can have a deleterious effect on one’s language; I suddenly found myself saying, in the voice of Paulie Walnuts, “This f—ing guy!” whenever Connor would poop in a brand-new diaper. At the same time as we were awash in a stew of New Jerseyan profanity, I discovered that I no longer felt comfortable leaving live news on TV around my newborn son, a feeling that intensified as he grew to toddlerhood. I must admit, I am a news junkie; have been since high school. I mean, slap a vein and stick in a global 24-hour mainline–I want it all. So this discomfort came as a distinct shock to me as a new mother, a radical and instantaneous re-prioritization that told me I was no longer the same person I had always been, the first of many.

Other problems, we see coming and face with deep ambivalence. For instance: I swear. A lot. Not as badly as I did when I lived in France, but I’m somewhere between dockhand and a Naval officer on his ninth month at sea. I’ve tried to rein it in, but I just can’t force it entirely from my vocabulary, which will doubtless earn me the scorn of parents with more willpower. I’ve always believed in the concept that there are no bad words, only the wrong situations for them; calling them bad gives them more power, as most ably demonstrated by the Harry Potter novels. So I’m raising my kids to know that swear words are not appropriate for children, and are a reflection of strong emotions, and so far they get it. Connor, in particular, is still pained by my profanity, and regularly implores me to “be appropriate” around him, but I’m convinced he does this for the sheer joy of turning the tables on me. I’m also grappling with my awareness of the deeply bizarre American relationship with sex and violence. I’m determined not to be casual about violent themes and images, and to be less neurotic about anything to do with sex and gender, but the whole thing is fraught with conflict and difficulty. For now, I take it as a victory that my sons are some of the only young boys I know who don’t freak out at kissing or when I streak from bathroom to bedroom on the days I forget my robe.

We had a big turning point within the last week or so, with both boys. Griffin got himself suspended for a day by mooning his female classmates. When asked what on earth could’ve possessed him to do such a boneheaded thing, a thought occurred to me. Connor’s a huge fan of The Simpsons, and this was straight out of Bart’s playbook. I asked him, “Did you do it because you saw it on TV?” He nodded tearily, and mourned, “I did it so they would laugh.” So I’m having to re-evaluate the influences of tween tastes on the kindergarten set. Meanwhile, Cam has started playing Skyrim, and Connor is riveted by, of all things, the crafting. (I’m told WoW and FarmVille players will totally get the appeal.) He’s pleaded with us for permission to play on his own, so he can make leather and explore, but Cam firmly asserted that there was just too much violence and sexual content for a kid his age. I was more ambivalent, and argued that he wouldn’t necessarily even do some of the things we would be uncomfortable with, but I’m bowing to Cam’s vastly greater knowledge of video games.

It’s a comfort, though it seems wrong to put it like that, to say that some of the things that scared me the most as a child could never have been predicted, so sheltering my kids from everything isn’t going to inoculate them from every nightmare. The movie Gremlins scared the living crap out of me, and that was marketed directly at children, with tie-in toys and everything. And I was much more scared of nuclear war, as a Reaganbaby, than I was of anything I ever read–The Day After shook me so hard that it was incredibly hard to watch again as a grad student.

Similarly, one of Connor’s triggers couldn’t have been foreseen, or even insulated against. It took us a few years, until he could sufficiently articulate it, but extreme closeups of faces, especially not-completely-human faces, really freak him out. He went to see Spiderman 3–which is a horror in other ways, but I won’t get into that–at the movie theater, and none of the action or “adventure peril” bothered him at all. Instead, it was this one shot of Venom’s open mouth as he lunges at the camera that gave him fits. Likewise, there’s a scene in Fantastic 4 when Ben Grimm reveals his rocky deformation by turning his face out of shadow and lifting the brim of his hat. He leaves the room when that part of the movie is coming up, and that’s fine with me.

I console myself with the fact that we do so much with our children, and that guiding our kids through new experiences makes them less likely to be seeds of neurosis later in life. Sure, I’ve read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark to them at Halloween–I even showed them the spooky-fantastic pictures by Stephen Gammell, which are apparently too scary to include in the latest republication. But I didn’t just give them the book and tell them to read it to themselves before bed. I was right there beside them, shivering at the gory parts and validating their fears by sharing my own. I think this prepares them for life much better than pure censorship can, and gives me the opportunity to shape their responses to their own feelings and impressions, by building a sense of empathy and honesty that I hope will serve us later when their lives get immeasurably more complex.

And if it doesn’t work, hey, I’m doing my part to support the psychoanalysts of the future.

Reverb Broads 2011, December 13: What are three things you are better at than most people? (courtesy of Catie at http://catiecake.wordpress.com/)

I sure wish any of these three things were people skills. I wish these abilities could be leveraged to make the world a better place. But they’re really not. They don’t even make me particularly likable in many circles.

My first superpower is proofreading. I come by this skill genetically; my mom is the Supreme Goddess of All Secretaries. I’ve been proofreading for her since I was eleven years old. I’m also a grammar nazi, the kind of person Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots, and Leaves) calls “a stickler.” And I’ve had a lot of fantastic English and journalism teachers who did unusual things, like make me memorize all the articles* in fifth grade.

I see spelling and punctuation errors like Haley Joel Osment sees dead people: They’re everywhere. Moreover, I usually see these mistakes within about three seconds, even on a full page of text.  Local TV ads, signs in grocery stores, and small-town papers (even large-town papers, more and more) make me flinch instinctively. There have been books (usually paperbacks are worse than hardcovers, for some reason) that I have been unable to finish without a marking pen in hand; my mom and I have both offered to various romance publishers to proofread for free, just to keep ourselves in trashy novels. And every time I let a publication go out that I haven’t given a pass, I inevitably find a dumb error, which really doesn’t help my general control freak-ness.

But if you ever need to hire an editor for something important, even just a résumé or wedding invitation? I’m your girl, and I work cheap.

My second superpower is quiz shows. I’ve written before about my weird feats of memory; in short, I’ve got a mind like a steel trap for trivia, and a sieve for useful things. And I’ve got a knack for abstract thinking — the more oblique the clue, the better. This combination allows me to be good enough at Jeopardy! that I was regularly kicked out of the lounge in my college dorm when it was on, but to graduate a few hundredths of a grade point shy of wearing honor cords. I can solve Wheel of Fortune puzzles without any letters. I’ve been told by more people than I can count on two hands that I would be their lifeline on Millionaire. I deserve Carl Kasell’s voice on my answering machine. I do, in fact, know Jack.

Finally, my third superpower is reading aloud. Frankly, I rock at this. I’ve got some mutant skills in this area: I can read text I’ve never seen before upside-down at full speed, which would make me the Most Popular Children’s Librarian In The World, if I wanted to be. And when I read aloud, I make it a full-on dramatic event. With me, you get different voices, accents, and a panoply of emotions. If it says, “She screamed,” I can make it sound throat-shredding without even getting that loud. If the character has a head cold, ids goig do sound lig id. Glaswegians sound like Glaswegians; goats sound like goats.

I don’t only do this for my kids and their classes at school. I’ve probably read a dozen books (including every word of Harry Potter) and a thousand articles aloud to my husband. Sometimes, as in the case with the Master Li and Number Ten Ox stories, reading them aloud in their entirety is just more coherent than reading out context-less passages every time I laugh aloud (which is almost every page). And sometimes, it’s because I want to fully convey my shock and outrage. He’s very patient with me, and I’d like to think it’s a value-added service.

In short, I’m a pedantic, overly dramatic know-it-all. But I’m the best one you know.

*a, all, an, any, both, each, every, few, many, more, most, no, several, some, that, the, these, this, those, which, and all number words like one, two.

One of my favorite unfortunate Amazon "Look Inside" arrows

Reverb Broads 2011, December 12: Name and explain the one guilty pleasure you can’t live without. ie: that cupcake shop you visit weekly, a book you repeatedly read to find solace in, etc). Then explore the idea of how you would feel if you gave that thing up for a year. (courtesy of Neha at http://whereyouarehere.blogspot.com/)

I’m never reading fewer than two books at any given time. That’s because I read in bed before I go to sleep, to turn my brain down from “day speed.” But I can’t fall asleep if I’m reading something that makes me think. So the book at my bedside is always a trashy romance.

I don’t need even two brain cells to follow and enjoy a good romance novel. But please don’t misunderstand: This isn’t intended as an insult to the genre, or any of its authors. Romance novels are Teh Awesome.

From a creative standpoint, romance authors have a unique challenge. What other genre dictates the exact same outcome for every book, but requires authors to reach that destination in infinitely varied ways? Not to mention the fact that they also have to construct at least two emotionally complex main characters, and chart a major, plausible path of evolution and growth, within that reliable framework.

And yet, they do, with style, humor, and attention to detail, over and over again. Romance authors deeply care for their characters, and their care makes us care. If you think about it, they’re performing an act of faith every time they set a couple on their path. It’s faith that we can be more than the sum of our parts, when we find the right person. It’s faith in the gracious, healing power of healthy partnership and reciprocated love. It’s a profoundly, sometimes inspiring work of optimism, bravely presented in a world that gives us reasons to be wary and disbelieve every single day.

The sexytimes are icing. Delicious, tingly icing. I have already waxed poetic on the joy of uncomplicated smut.

If I gave up romance novels for a year, I’d still read before bedtime, and I probably wouldn’t have to work too hard to find equally facile material that lets my busy brain key down after a long day. But I would really miss the anticipation of starting down that familiar road, time after time, knowing where I’m going but not how I’m getting there.

I’ve been married for 15 years now, and I’m constantly aware and grateful to be living such an epic romance. I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t say I miss the feeling of falling into brand-new, swoony, stupid, crazy love — there’s nothing quite like it. But starting a new romance is pretty darn close.

On my pilgrimage to the Seuss Landing at Universal Islands of Adventure

Reverb Broads 2011, December 9: What was your favorite children’s book? (courtesy of Niki at http://nikirudolph.com)

Pick a single favorite children’s book? What, are you people trying to kill me? No, I see it all now: you want me to do your holiday shopping for you…

I’m bad at the favorites game, no matter the medium. That whole “Ten CDs/Books/Movies/Games/Wombats On A Desert Island” meme is completely beyond me; in fact, the only thing I can do every time I say that, as soon as I post the list, I’m going to think of at least three I would have to change. So this is going to be more of a whirlwind tour than a deep reminiscence.

I literally can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read; I had maybe a hundred sight words by the time I was two. When they tested me for kindergarten, I was at a fourth-grade level. Pretty much anything I ever wanted to read, I just picked up and gobbled down. This doesn’t mean I didn’t love children’s literature. I did — I do.

So I’ll start in the place everyone who knows me would expect me to start: Doctor Seuss.

Yes, I spelled that correctly; please absorb that bit of knowledge and carry it forth into the world. And I know, I know you love him too. Who doesn’t? His stuff never gets old. But much like the Muppets, I just never let Dr. Seuss go as I aged. I memorized and did a dramatic recitation of Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose for Forensics in high school; I went to State on that story. And when I got to college, the first club I joined was the KU Dr. Seuss Club. I was its president my sophomore and junior years. We used to go into Lawrence’s elementary schools and read to kids, to validate our weekly meetings and impressive membership. I was even featured in a story about the club that hit the Knight-Ridder newswire (FYI: my maiden name was Perinchief).

But when I was the age when most kids are enamored of Dr. Seuss and other picture books, I was all about the nonfiction, too. I had several phonebook-sized collections of weird facts that I recited to anyone and everyone (this particular sin is being revisited upon me even as we speak). And there was a biography of Dolley Madison that I checked out almost every time I was at the library, and must have read a hundred times. My grandparents took me to the Wisconsin State Capitol when I was four, and I argued with the tour guide that Madison was obviously named for Dolley, because she saved the White House and what had her runty little lump of a husband ever done. This was not the first, nor the last, time in my life I’ve been stared at like a freakshow.

As I got older, my tastes evolved pretty quickly — I was a rabid Sherlock Holmes fan by the time I was in sixth grade — but some children’s lit still stands out in my memory. I adored The Westing Game, and I’m so happy to still see it on regular middle school reading lists. And The Phantom Tollbooth is as fresh today as it was 25 years ago; I’ve been loving all the anniversary celebrations this year. I still read A Little Princess from time to time, just to relive the delight and wonder of that story, and the movie is a little-known gem. Sure, I read my share of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Babysitters Club, and Sweet Valley High, too. I was truly ravenous, and I could chew through one of those “age-appropriate” books in under two hours. But my parents never restricted me to the short-shelved section of the library, for which I remain grateful.

And now I have new favorites, but they’re my favorites from reading to my own kids. Books like Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs and Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton, the Charlie and Lola books by Lauren Child, and the Skippyjon Jones series by Judy Schachner are a riot and a joy to read aloud. In fact, there’s a thing called the E. B. White Read-Aloud Awards that’s been going for just a few years now that makes a great place to start finding those books you’ll never get tired of reciting at bedtime. And achingly sweet books like I Love You, Little One by Nancy Tafuri, God Bless the Gargoyles by Dav Pilkey (this one is NOTHING like Captain Underpants, trust me), and Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson still get me choked up, especially when my sweet boys fall asleep while I’m still reading quietly at their bedsides.

I read in my kids’ classrooms every few weeks, so I’m having to expand my repertoire to find short, funny stories that fourth-graders like. The Wayside School stories by Louis Sachar have been very well-received, but I’m always looking for new suggestions.

I figure, by the time I’m done reading aloud to my kids, their kids should be just old enough for some Doctor Seuss. And they’ll know right where to find Grandma’s copies.

Reverb Broads 2011, December 7: Who or what makes you laugh so hard that milk shoots out of your nose and why? Slapstick, dry witty comedy, your kids, Monty Python? (courtesy of Kassie of http://bravelyobey.blogspot.com)

Me laughing. It ain't pretty, but it's really common.

It might actually be easier to write a list of things that don’t make me laugh. But I’ll give it a stab, if only so I can share some of my favorite funny things. In general, I’ll just say that I’m a complex person, so don’t judge me. 🙂

I am surrounded by hilarious people every day, even on the days when I don’t fully appreciate the humor of the situations they instigate. I’m married to one of the funniest people in the world, and I know many people agree with me. Part of this is because he’s so smart and creative — that kind of people are always the funniest. I often say that he’s got a direct line into the Primal Well of Story, which is what makes him a phenomenal storyteller, game designer, and GM. But he also has access to the same Random Closet of Weird as Eddie Izzard, and frequently delivers bizarre misinformation with the same deadpan style as John Hodgman. We have so many inside jokes, running gags, and one-liners that no one else understands. I’m sure it’s completely obnoxious, and some of them would prefer blatant displays of affection to our stupid giggly shorthand.

My three hilarious boys

I wish I could say it's only the crazy hair. But that's just Griffin.

And I know every parent thinks their kids are hysterically funny, but anyone who’s met them would probably be inclined to agree that mine are like cartoon characters; I swear they’re drawn by Tex Avery. They’ve got it all: killer comic timing, the Seinfeldesque capacity to observe the weirdness of their surroundings, a natural affinity for performance, and super-quick wits to come up with mad, clever responses. I’d like to think that they inherited their skills from us both, and that our efforts to raise them with lots of humor and quality entertainment are taking root, but let’s just face it — they’ve got it in spades, and they’re a mystery to me.

I’m an intellectual, and a geek, so I can have a pretty high-falutin’ taste in humor. Of course, I adore the Brits, new and old: Monty Python, The Goons, Douglas Adams, Little Britain, French & Saunders, and so many others. I like web comics like xkcd and Penny Arcade — the nerdier, the better. I love sight gags and cultural references and grammar jokes. Even math humor makes me laugh, because I know more about math than actual math. Musical humor, like P.D.Q. Bach and Flight of the Conchords, absolutely slays me. I listen religiously to NPR stuff like This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me…, and A Prairie Home Companion (especially the joke show). I love parodies, the more cutting or absurd, the better — I’ve been reading The Onion since it was just a local Madison paper, I used to assign a reading to my World Religions students from the LOLCatz Bible, and Drop Dead Gorgeous is one of my favorite movies. And I’m completely wild about political comedy (probably because I’m wild about politics), so Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert are must-sees. My eldest even had a Jon Stewart 3rd birthday party (all his idea; he used to put on a clip-on tie and do his impression of Jon Stewart in the bathroom mirror. When he was two.)

All this being said, lots of completely low-brow stuff makes me giggle and snort uncontrollably. Ever see that SpikeTV show back in the ’00s called MXC? It was a Japanese game show called Takeshi’s Castle, overdubbed in America by two ESPN-like “announcers” and a cast of others who ascribed the most bizarre dialogue and commentary to an already-bizarre spectacle. I used to regularly laugh until I cried, and I still miss it. Luckily, America’s Funniest Home Videos still does the job for me on a regular basis. And you can’t live in a house of boys without being a connoisseur of scatological humor.

I could go on and on with this one, but I need to wrap up, so I’ll just share two other gifts that were apparently bestowed upon me by the Comedy Fairy at birth. The first is that I see hilarious things that no one else around me sees. This isn’t like a Sixth Sense thing. It’s just that, if I’m standing in a crowd of people, and someone across the street falls down, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’m the only one who’ll see it. Which always means I’m the idiot who busts out laughing for no apparent reason. Yeah, I’m that person.

The second is that, for no good reason that I can intuit, people feel the need to tell me their acid trip stories. I’m not sure what it is in my aura that compels this. I don’t do and never have done illegal drugs of any kind. I didn’t even have my first drink of alcohol until my wedding night, ten months past my 21st birthday, which I celebrated in Europe for gods’ sakes. But I’m a non-judgmental listener, and I’ve got quite a collection of other people’s weird LSD-induced memories. One in particular has served as genesis for a stable of characters who regularly appear in our household brand of humor. A college friend told me how he once drove a tripping friend around town while the friend had an intense three-way conversation with Seth (his left hand) and The Magic Vacuum (his right hand). I’ve got a long-standing comedy love affair with puppets, so it was natural that they’d just become part of my lexicon. And once you know about them? You see them EVERYWHERE.

Seth (left), Cam (middle), and The Magic Vacuum (right)

Our house looks like a bomb went off. A small truck bomb, packed with multiplication flash cards, Star Wars guys, broken crayons, clothes, and empty cups.

And let’s not forget the printed material. There could’ve been a simultaneous CIA leafleting-from-the-skies campaign over every inch of our house, dropping readable matter like Minnesota snow. Fantasy books, romance books, picture books, chapter books, RPG books, video game guides, coloring books, workbooks, catalogs, newspapers, magazines, comics, junk mail, recipes, assembly instructions, maps, notes, drafts, calendars, phone messages, receipts, grocery lists, homework. Wobbly stacks, sliding drifts, impenetrable walls of paper.

Maddening as it is — like, “I’d like to drop a match in it before my mom visits for Thanksgiving” maddening — this is more or less how I grew up, always with something to read no further than my elbow. And if it’s there, I can’t not read it, if you know what I mean. The words go in as fast as I see them, so as I gaze around, I’m constantly bombarded by info; I’m not conscious of the time it takes to scan text. The inability to glance past things without absorbing them might be overstimulating for some people. Hell, it might be overstimulating for me, I don’t know; I’ve always been like this, so I don’t know any differently.

In fact, I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. I was spelling and mastering simple sight words at 18 months, and I tested at a fourth-grade reading level when they tried to figure out what to do with me in kindergarten testing. I was lucky to have parents and grandparents who were pretty relaxed about letting me chow through reading material far beyond my age level, and I satisfied my voracious appetite for it by simply keeping as many books going at once as I could. Even now, I’m rarely reading fewer than three or four separate titles at once.

Now I’m going to ask you to do something. Take all of what I’ve just described — in my home, in my youth — and erase it. Just use that little Photoshop tool and scrub every last piece of reading material out of the picture, like a neutron text bomb. Imagine a house messy with toys and clothes and dishes, but no books or magazines or newspapers or homework. Imagine a young child, hungry to learn, curious about the world, stuck gazing out a window or watching TV or sitting on a stoop. Try, just try, to imagine a setting with absolutely nothing to read.

To me, this is the purest science fiction. It’s the Twilight Zone. I can wrap my head around time travel, and quantum physics, and non-humanoid aliens, and a billion other things, but I literally can’t conjure the image of a home without books. I shudder to imagine growing up in one, and it is pure horror to imagine raising my kids in one.

I’ve been trying to imagine this all week, since I heard a statistic from a 2006 study publicized by the United Way. The study found that, in middle-income homes, the ratio of books per child is 13 books for each child, which is itself a ludicrously low number compared with the bounty to which I am accustomed. That won’t even fill a single shelf — they’ll keep falling over.

But in low-income neighborhoods, that number flips and sinks like the Poseidon. The ratio becomes only one book for every THREE HUNDRED CHILDREN. Let me rephrase: one poor child gets one book, and 299 poor children get none. No books. Zero. Inconceivable.

My kids’ school has about 450 children. If this statistic extended into that setting, the school in that low-income neighborhood would have two books. But at least in a school, those two books would get passed around. Households don’t usually do that, so that one book doesn’t make its way around among the 300 kids. The other 299 just do without.

My first impulse, of course, is to go directly into the boys’ bedroom with a trash bag and sweep up every single book they haven’t read in the last two weeks, and drive down to the poor neighborhoods and just start handing out books. I know that’s not practical, and I know there are groups designed to put books into exactly the hands that need them most. You can bet your backside I’ve been doing research into exactly which groups can use exactly which books, and how to make those donations — if I find anything beyond United Way that’s available on a national level, I’ll post it in comments.

Ever seen that episode of The Twilight Zone with Burgess Meredith as the harried bank teller who just wants time to read his book without his boss or his wife interrupting him? That episode’s what I named this post after. Eventually, he gets the time and the books, along with a cruel, ironic twist. But imagine if you had the time, and the desire to read, but no books. That episode’s playing all day, every day.

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NB — Another point worth making: lack of access to books means lack of access to ideas that empower people to change their circumstances. Often, the ideas that motivate people to change their lives are found in banned books, which are even harder to access if you depend on schools and libraries, rather than your own purchasing power.

The Uprise Books Project aims to change that by putting free copies of banned books in the hands of impoverished and at-risk youth, exposing them to radical, perspective-shifting ideas. You can learn more and support the project here: http://www.uprisebooks.org/about/.

I read a lot. Probably several people’s worth of reading, both in terms of volume and taste. I’m one of those readers with several books going at any given moment, juggling them based on location, time of day, and mood. And one of those books is always a romance novel.

This is not going to be a full-throated defense of romance. That, dear readers, will come another day. What I want to say today is that, when I read a romance, I want to read some high-quality smut.

That’s right — bring on the sexytimes. It’s certainly not the only, or even the main, thing I’m in that book for, but I expect those characters to get it on, for several pages, several times, in interesting and athletic ways, well before the last quarter of the book. Character development is all well and good, and pacing and plot make the world go round, but if I don’t hear about some rampant man-staffs and perfect pink pleasure parts, I’m out of here.

I don’t need to venture into any seedy truck stop bookstore to find what I’m looking for. I know all the tricks for finding this stuff, and I’ve known them for years. If you fan a well-read paperback open slowly, it’ll open to the naughty bits because previous readers’ hot little hands have put more stress on the binding at those points. Trade paperback romances tend to have more graphic sex scenes than mass markets for some reason, except for those “inspirational” romances, but those always have the same cover art: some gormless twit, standing in a field of grass, in clothes that make a burqa look burlesque.

And it’s not all pen names and bodice-ripping covers. The list of NYT Bestselling authors that meet my criteria is as long as my arm, and I can buy their books in Target or Barnes & Noble without the slightest bit of embarrassment. All those books with women in flowing gowns or bare-chested men in kilts you see at the grocery checkout? Full of lusty virgins and urgent thrusting. You have NO idea what’s going on in there.

Now imagine what the girl on the bus is reading  on  her   KINDLE.

And if anyone is uncomfortable over women getting their wrinkly bits tingly right there in broad daylight, let me tell you what makes me uncomfortable: it’s every person who gets a hard-on when they crack the cover on a novel that lets you put yourself on the zipline down from a Black Hawk behind enemy lines, where you land and deliver silent righteous justice to the filthy terrorist. Total porn. Worse yet, moralizing porn that warps your worldview while getting you off.

So if I want to read about exciting, multi-hour, contortionist sex with a large, strong, attentive lover who sees the hidden value in the heretofore neglected woman? Sue me. What’s the worst that happens? Maybe I decide that I’m turned on enough to ignore the backache, and to pretend the sleeping kids in the other room is “the threat of discovery,” and that sleep is for the weak, and actually get it on with my unsuspecting husband. At least my porn doesn’t encourage me to invade another country.

This is my first blog post, and it’s by way of explaining why I felt strongly enough about the Speak Out with your Geek Out movement — all next week, anywhere and everywhere you want to talk about whatever floats your geeky little boat — that I stepped up to be an admin. I’m doing it because I’m a big geek, of course, but more importantly, I’m doing it for my kids. They’re going to be a frequent subject on my blog, and yes, I’m going to use their names.

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The first thing most people notice about Connor is how *big* everything is for him. His volume is permanently set to 11; every gesture and expression is oversized and repeated two or three times in case you missed it the first (you couldn’t possibly). Then the other extremes about him begin to emerge: the speed of his speech only hints at the speed of his thoughts, and words pop up in the rapid stream that you don’t expect in a fourth-grade vocabulary. All these things might give the impression of excitement by themselves, but there’s real enthusiasm for so many subjects, and genuine delight at the prospect of sharing the coolness with someone new.

This is my kid. He’s a geek. His default setting is love.

He was doomed to geekhood well before his conception, what with two parents of impressive geek credentials. And he showed his own talent for geekhood as well. He started calling his make-believe play “movies” between ages 2 and 3, around the same time he announced he wanted a Jon Stewart 3rd birthday party. His passion for superheroes exploded onto the scene, until we started telling people who asked about potential gifts for him, “Look, if it’s ‘super,’ it’s great.”

What we didn’t know until he turned six was that Connor has Asperger’s Syndrome. The school where he attended kindergarten failed him in every respect. Teachers missed the expanding intellect and hunger for social interaction, and labeled him a discipline problem, a threat to “normal” kids. His classmates saw a child who wanted friends a little too desperately, and probably left them behind when he tried to include them in his elaborate stories. And, at that critical age, when different is dangerous, those children made his life hell. They rejected his friendship. They rejected his enthusiasm. They hurt him on the playground, to the point of stitches one cold winter morning. They threatened his life on the bus after school. Kindergartners told my son they wanted to have a party at his house; he was overjoyed. They said they would have a party at his house, and he would be the pinata, and they would beat him until he broke open and died. He had nightmares. My six-year-old said he wanted to kill himself. He knew what he was saying.

Things got better. We switched schools for first grade, and within a month, they’d identified the Asperger’s. Instead of simply conceding to the previous reigning theory on his behavior issues (i.e., “we’re crap parents”), we built strategies for home and school to address the most serious problems and deal with them constructively and consistently. Connor’s teacher gave him challenging work that kept him from making trouble when he was bored. He made friends who valued his vast cache of knowledge about Star Wars and superheroes.

Connor’s experiences made him a better person too. His fixation on superheroes had taught him the philosophical concept of justice, but now he understood what prejudice and oppression felt like, and why it was important to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. His skill as a storyteller was growing apace, but now he was sensitive to allowing his friends agency in their own stories, and supplied them with information so they could “make cool movies” too.

It’s not for nothing that jaded adults are advised to view the world through the perspective of a child, if they can. Everything is new and amazing to children, and they’re predisposed to love it, to find it literally wonder-full. I heard a parent of an autistic child in a radio interview say that people with autism are “more human than human;” natural human tendencies are amplified to extremes. Geekhood is, I believe, a natural human tendency. We get enthusiastic about things we enjoy; we want to know more, and we want to share them with others. We start with it when we’re children, when we’re geeks about the whole wide world–our default setting is love. And for some lucky people, like Connor, that setting never changes.