It Says So in the Childcraft!

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

In my family, when you made a definitive statement about something you had to be able to prove it. Mom and Dad taught us to question things, so if I said something like “The moon is made out of cheese” someone would ask where I had heard that and then tell me to prove it. Most families had some version of encyclopedias back then, including mine, even if they were a little out of date by the time I started using them. So I’d break out the encyclopedia that included an entry about the moon and then… realize my older brothers had just made a fool of me.

We also had another option that had entries on a whole bunch of topics, a book called Childcraft. It was basically an encyclopedia for kids, with simple language, pictures and illustrations. There were multiple books, but I think we only had one – How Things Work. I used to look up things in there all the time (OK, so I was a little nerdy as a kid), as did other members of my family. That book contained a lot of good information and I found it quite interesting.

One time, my sister had one of those definitive statement moments and when asked how she knew, her simple response was, “It says so in the Childcraft!” While what she said may have been true, my older brothers pounced all over that statement and made a joke out of it. In fact, they thought it was so funny, they started using that line all the time (which us younger ones picked up on and copied so we could be cool like them). That line got used so much it became a Famous Family Saying.

Here are some fictional examples of how this line may have been used:

One of us younger ones: “It’s getting cloudy outside, I think it’s going to rain.”

One of the older ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Me: “Anyone know what’s for dinner?”

Older brother: “Roast beef.”

Me: “Again? Are you sure?”

Older brother: “Yup. It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brother: “Joey has a new girlfriend.”

Me: “I DO NOT! Who told you that?”

Older brother: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brothers: “Don’t tell Mom what we’re doing. You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “Because if you do…” (fist punching other hand) “You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

One of us younger ones: “You’re in TROUBLE!”

One of the older ones: “What?!?! I didn’t do anything. How do you know?”

One of us younger ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

This last example would have been followed by a mad dash to get away before we got a noogie…or worse.

If you made any kind of statement that sounded smart, there was a good chance it would be followed by “It says so in the Childcraft!” It was funny at times, not so funny at other times. When you were just being a know-it-all, it was funny for everyone. When you were trying to be serious about something and got mocked with that line, it could be very frustrating. Now that I think about it, it was always funny for everyone except the person at whom “It says so in the Childcraft!” was aimed.

We used that phrase so often that the publishers should have been paying us royalties. For years, there wasn’t a week that went by that “It says so in the Childcraft!” didn’t get uttered by at least one of us. The strange thing is, I don’t remember Mom or Dad ever getting involved with this and having to stop it like they did with so many other things. I can’t say no one ever got hurt (at least emotionally), but I guess it never got out of hand. Eventually, as we got older, it died out.

Kids today wouldn’t know an encyclopedia from a cyclorama. Instead of researching something using an encyclopedia, they do their research using the internet. You could make a strong case that their “It says so on the internet” is our “It says so in the Childcraft!” With one exception that is; everything in Childcraft was true. I don’t know if the Childcraft books are still published, but if they were, you could probably look up “internet” and it would say that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. That would be awesome, because when someone asked me how I knew, I could say “It says so in the Childcraft!”

It Is What It Is

“It is what it is.”

I have heard people say that so many times that I think I will strangle the next person who says it, mostly because of the reason it is said. You can say “It is what it is” (abbreviated from now on as “IIWII”) and mean that this is how things are right now, many times through no fault of your own, but we’re going to look at things and see if we can make some changes and make them better. However, that’s not usually how it is meant. Instead, when most people say “IIWII” they are saying this is how it is now, we’re not going to try to figure it out or make things better, and it’s never going to change, so why bother. That’s what I hear the most.

This phrase gets tossed around a lot at work when we’re under the gun to get something done. We have a day or two to get a project completed, but the work is going to take twice that amount of time. When this fact gets brought to the attention of the powers-that-be, their response is usually “IIWII”. It doesn’t matter that this happens not just once in a while, but almost every project, because “IIWII”. That we could take a look at how we do projects, change how we estimate the length of time of tasks, or change the number of people assigned to a project don’t seem to be options.

Just think about the “IIWII” attitude for a moment. What if people in the past had had that attitude?

We’d still be reading by candlelight in our darkened homes because Thomas Edison would have never figured out how to make a light bulb work. I can just hear someone that was working with him saying, “Tom, don’t be ridiculous. You’ve tried so many times and nothing works. It is what it is.” There’d be no streetlights, no overhead lights, no lamps to read by, no lights of any kind.

We’d still be riding horses and bikes, or walking, to get around because Henry Ford would have never figured out how to mass produce an affordable vehicle. I don’t know, maybe that would be better in some ways. However, I watched enough westerns on Saturday afternoon and enough episodes of 

“Little House on the Prairie” to know that automobiles are a faster and more comfortable way to get around. After a few failures trying to build a vehicle, maybe his friends and partners told him “IIWII”.    

Advances in medicine, computers, cars, trains, planes, etc., never would have happened if the “IIWII” attitude prevailed. People would still think that Earth was the center of the universe and that it was flat. Not a pretty picture, is it? That’s why I can’t stand it when I’m given the “IIWII” attitude when it wouldn’t take much to change things to what it could be.

I’m glad my parents didn’t have that attitude when I was younger. First, they taught us to do the best we could do in everything, to aim high. That attitude taught us to seek excellence in what we did, not just go along with the status quo. Second, they taught us to question things, which helped us to identify where it was possible to make improvements. Third, they taught us that when we wanted something we needed to persevere. Let’s be real, most things that have any value only come with hard work. Probably most importantly, they taught us how to communicate with others in ways that don’t make them want to give us a smack upside the head. Sometimes how you present something is more important than what you’re saying, frustrating as that may be. They could have easily taken the easy way out and told us to just go along with whatever we were told, to never question anything, to strive for mediocrity so that if we didn’t reach our high goals we wouldn’t be disappointed, to give it a try or two and then forget about it, all in the name of “IIWII”. I’m so grateful they didn’t do that because I would not be the person I am today.

I think that instead of quietly getting ticked off, I’m going to have a new response for “IIWII”. I’m not going to just accept that response anymore without at least a quick discussion. In certain areas, I’m tired of the way things are and I won’t just go quietly. It may be that it is what it is, but it’s not what it could be. It could be better if we took a look and maybe made some changes. I think it’s worth the time and effort.

Categories

“What do you do?”

I’m asked this question a lot, mostly by other guys and mostly by other guys who don’t know me. As I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember a woman ever asking me that question. I know a lot of times it is just small talk, but I really hate this question because I feel like many, if not most, people categorize you based on your answer. What type of education you have, what kind of person you are and the all-important (to some) how much money you make are all gathered from your answer. All the assumptions are based on the stereotypes the questioner subscribes to, not necessarily fact. I don’t like to be categorized and never have.

When I was in high school I was one of those guys that didn’t really fit in with any specific group. Believe it or not, I was pretty smart so I was in honors-level classes. I also played sports, partly because I love sports and partly because I knew it would keep me out of trouble by giving me something to do after school. On top of those things, I was a bit of a partier on the weekends (sports was only Monday – Friday). The smart kids, despite my good grades, never accepted me as one of them because I played sports and there were quite a few “jocks” that gave the “geeks” a hard time in school; the sports kids, despite overcoming my lack of natural ability with hard work, never accepted me as one of them because I partied on the weekends and “jocks” didn’t hang out with “burnouts”; the party kids, despite being at all the so called big parties with some of the same kids they hung out with, never accepted me as one of them because of the double whammy of being a “geek” and a “jock”, and the only thing a “burnout” hated more than a “jock” was a “geek”.

When I use the terms geek, jock and burnout, I’m not trying to make fun of people (or categorize them) but I’m using them as other people did. I didn’t really subscribe to the whole categorization thing even back then. I had acquaintances from all the different groups and some were actually friends, others like me who didn’t really buy into the whole clique thing, but who nonetheless hung out with a specific group. Still, for the most part I had a couple of close friends that I usually hung out with, my best friend being Tony, the New York Yankee loving, Dallas Cowboy adoring fan I mentioned in this post. He didn’t really fit in either, for some of the same reasons as me, but also for a different reason, too. No matter. We were the 2 Musketeers until our friend Jeff moved to town and then we were the 3 Musketeers. The funny thing is we were our own small diversity group: a somewhat poor white kid from a big Catholic family of nine, a moderately poor black kid from a small Catholic family of three, and a reasonably well off white kid from a small Jewish family of two. I guess we did actually see and understand the differences between us, but we didn’t really care about them or about what anyone else thought about us. The three of us can thank our parents for that.

Why should someone who doesn’t know me care about what I do for work? I don’t really care what anyone I don’t know does for work, unless I just happen to be looking for a crocodile wrangler to remove the crocodile from my back yard. So it looks like I’m going to have to come up with some new answers to the “What do you do?” question to change things up a bit, try some of them out and figure out which ones trip up people the most. Things like:

·     I take the trash out on Monday.

·     I listen to music really loud when I drive.

·     I occasionally take the long way instead of the shortcut.

·     I root for the underdog, unless they’re playing “my team”.

·     I observe people so I can use their quirky habits in the stories I write.

·     I laugh out loud at nothing sometimes.

·     I’m a bit klutzy so I randomly trip over stuff.

·     I take the last brownie.

·     When someone says “Don’t even think about it!” I think about it.

·     I forget stuff a lot... Who are you?

·     I tell my wife and kids I love them everyday. Multiple times.

These are all things I do and there is a bunch more that are more of who I am than the job I do, even if they’re not the kind of things someone is looking to hear, small talk or not. How someone chooses to categorize me after hearing any of those lines is up to them.