November 23, 2005

To My Children

Dearest Children,

Forgive me, for if you are indeed reading this letter, that means I am veritably a father and probably have much to atone. I sincerely hope you took most of your qualities from your mother, since quite frankly, with the exception of my unwavering cynicism and prolific hatred, I do not offer much, especially genetically. Moreover, she must be quite an amazing woman to have put up with my antics for such a long time.

You must be wondering what might have provoked me to write you this letter, arguably several years prior to your conception, and perhaps might even be mulling over the biological paradox that filially placed someone as cool and hip as yourself with someone as unequivocally pathetic as me. While I do not disagree with the veracity of that sentiment, I must point out that it was not mere boredom, but rather a startling epiphany that brought me to write to you tonight.

You see, dear children, along with the deafening silence of forlorn hotel rooms and blinding darkness of solitary flights and car rides, comes an overwhelming amount of time to think, and today, my thoughts turned to you, or more appropriately, your generation. What brought on these thoughts, at the youthful age of 22? Well, I taught a class of kindergartners last week—children who could have been mine in another age or another state—who could not make sense of my witty nihilist jabs at corporate America, but understood clearly when I explained my job consisted of fighting bad people on the Internet. This made me think: here were kids barely able to spell their own names, but able to legitimately grasp the concept of computer networks. These were the children of computer-literate parents, unlike any other before them.

For my grandparent's generation, computers and the Internet are an enigma (or is that Enigma?), and for my parent's generation, a begrudging acceptance, but for your generation, they will be as commonplace as the electricity that runs them. What is more interesting still, from a sociological perspective at least, is the wealth of information you must have access to about me, your veritable father, from a period of my life you could not have otherwise hoped to know. Who has not wondered during their own coming of age how their respective elders must have been 30 years prior? Were these stern and uncompromising adults you call your parents once the confused, surly, deluded, self-assured, and foolhardy adolescents you surely must be, or were they simply born as steadfast and Republican as their current manifestation?

For me, and those before me, this question has remained buried in the sands of time, masked forever by the undeniably effects of age, work, and responsibility. For you, however, the generation of microscopic haploid cells resting in the gonads of today's 20-somethings¹, waiting on the horizon for the episode of random assortment that will give you life and existence, this question will be as easy as a Google search. Your parents grew up in the age of effortless instant messages and worthless online journals, in the age of petty social networks and ubiquitous digital photography.

So perhaps now you understand my reasoning in writing you several years before your birth. It is first and foremost, to acknowledge the person who you must just be starting to learn about through this web site, the man known as your father before your birth. He was a different person, quite unlike the one you probably recognize as yours, and perhaps one you would like to pretend never existed. Or maybe it's that you would prefer him to what you got now. Whatever the case may be, he was I and I am him, but this is now and that was then. You will only know him through what's left of him on the Internet. Deal with it. Second, perhaps it will be some consolation to know when you next find yourself thinking you know best and I can't hope to understand, that I too once knew best and had parents who couldn't hope to understand. I was probably wrong then, and I'm quite sure you are wrong now. Finally, I would like to offer my deepest apologies for this, this, and especially this. Please don't judge me too harshly.

With Love,

Your Father

P.S. While I do apologize for The Awful Truth, I don't regret it. You really were whack as babies.

¹ If you are indeed my children, you would be quick to realize (and point out) that this assertion is a technically partially incorrect, as spermatogonia are only generated several weeks prior to their maturation into spermatozoa, and thus cannot properly be said to be lying in wait in the gonads of today's 20-somethings. I took a bit of poetic license here and extrapolated from the female case, where this assertion holds true, to avoid delving into technicalities and confusing the point.