Haylookitsa Parents

I know I am maturing because my life is becoming a litany of pointless stories.

My mom is in Nepal right now. This sucks for two reasons. One, she is a semi-old woman running around a second and sometimes third world country in hiking boots and a naive sense of adventure which is a fantastic way to worry a coddled Jewish son like myself. And second, she is further east than me. For a while I was the most eastward Kersten, and as we all know, if you are a white person from the western world your coolness is rated based on just how deep into the wild untamed orient you venture. My mom is basically a less racist version of a Kipling character. Also I'm pretty sure she has never shot a gun. This actually makes me worried more.

[This next part is for Mudnt, my economist friend...]

I keep getting asked if I am going to seek out my biological parents. I usually answer with a no and give an emotional answer about how much I love my current parents. I do love, to an extent, my current parents very much. However this goes much more elliptical than that.


What would I say?
What would her reaction be?
How would the other mother who taught me everything I know feel about this?

Here's the long reason,

I usually answer the question of my interest about my biological parents with a 'no', and emotional response, and leave it there. The REAL-ish reason I don't look for my biological mom or pop, is that I just don't care and I am a very lazy person. there are few things a lazy person wants to do less than stuff they don't want to do.

I mean there are at LEAST two million fuckers living on this peninsula and demographics dictate that half of them are women. This means there are AT LEAST a million women that I am supposed to comb through to find my mum. And, let's take this one step further, if there are AT LEAST two million people on this little priapic country, there are AT LEAST a million more men for me to have to go through in order to find my biological dad. That said, I am sure that with AT LEAST two million people on this geological tribute to Ron Jeremy AT LEAST a thousand people from each gender has died. This means that my sample size for finding my biological parents is AT LEAST about 2 out of 2002000. That leaves a very poor chance of finding my parents on this country that looks like a penis. I am also very bad at estimating.

Case in story.

When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Gardiner, had a reward system for rewarding kids with rewards where we had to guess how many beans were in a jar. Each time you participated in class you received an opportunity to guess the number of beans and write it down on a board. The one most close to the actual number at the end of the week received two prizes: one, they were given a Costco sized box of candy, and two, they were allowed to bring in the next guessing thing.

Now, I (kind of) teach fifth graders right now and I thought about using this. And then I remembered how this scenario actually played out. In theory this game should work, it's based on a few simple ideas: people love gambling, kids can count up to certain numbers, people love collections of stuff, and candy is awesome. By all accounts this idea should work. Likewise, Stringer Bell should have gotten out of the 212 game cleanly with his undeniable ambition and intelligence, however, he gets got by a street rat wannabe Robin Hood via a granddad double barrel because of a call he made half a decade earlier.

My fifth grade experience with the estimating game was like a season of the Wire. Ms. Gardiner began the game by having the base rules stated above. Players were the only active participants, those who didn't play- the civilians were exempt, and although opportunity came a-knocking on the back of ambition, you would only be truly rewarded if lady luck deemed you worthy. It was an excellent metaphor for life(and selling heroin). If you were smart you were given an gambler's chance at winning a small bit of fleeting power and some hard sugar. The power, of course, is just a proliferation of the game itself so, in theory, it should never allow the game itself to get played and thus undermine the integrity of the guessing game's base conceit, to control and manipulate kids into sitting down and shutting up (that said, getting kids to sit down and shut up without hurting them physically is a fucking artform- more on this later).

The problems arise when someone figures out how to use the internal rules of the game itself to actually INCREASE the influence of the game. First case. A kid named Renee figures out that the most (and easiest) opportunities for participation are at the beginning of class, so Renee answers as many questions as he can at the beginning of each day, letting the rest of the sycophants in the class to squabble after the remaining bits of more prestigious but ultimately equal-valuable of the questions. Renee then waits for the smiling sycophants to write down their estimates at the end of the day. When he reaches the estimation paper he proceeds to use his handful of guesses to straddle the guesses other kids write down. So, in example, if Suzy Crackho writes down 560 he uses two of his day's estimations to do 561 and 559. This neutralizes Ms. Crackho's guess for the day. He also, being an engineer of both people and their systems, takes the time to figure out who is MOST likely to guess right. If given the choice, little Renee will spend his resources neutralizing kids with glasses or kids who seem to have the early signs of Asbergers/Autism (he ignores the obvious political incorrectness of this impulse, I mean the kid is in fucking fifth grade, give him some credit). Now, at the end of the month, when the number is called, Renee has covered a massive range of numbers. And of course, he wins more than his classmates. Now, he has a big box of treats and a little bit of power. But Ms. Gardiner is on to him.

Case 2. Ms. Gardiner is not an idiot, no, she is a Keynesian. seeing what Renee has done, she starts limiting the number of times a single kid can guess and forces each estimate to be a certain distance from the other she is introducing some artificial efficiency into her market. Now, Renee can no longer hustle his system. But of course, he is holding the power and the candy. Leveraging the candy, Renee begins approaching the aforementioned most likely candidates to win on the playground and starts lending them a milkyway here or a dipping dot there. Likewise, when it's his turn to run the guessing game, he uses materials that are almost impossible to properly guess, things like legos or peanut brittle where there are no real uniform sizes with which a rainman can run his voodoo(once again, kid is a fifth grader, cut him some slack on the PC side of things). This insures that he can have some semblance of control of the game. In fact now he controls both the street end (the play ground) and the business end (the guessing game) of things. Using his influence he begins leaking answers to his beneficiaries which are off enough such that Ms. Gardiner cannot see the manipulative distribution but close enough that outlying players who are not under Renee's influence can gain a foothold. Now, each time on of them wins, Renee takes a 35% candy cut and a promise to choose the next material. This 35% insures that bribes keep reaching the right hands while the choosing gives him the power to keep competition at bay. Influence and domination. That's how Escobar did it.

I always hated Renee. When I finally got to choose the things to be guessed, I tried to choose sand and Ms. Gardiner told me I wasn't allowed to do that and gave the choice to one of Renee's lackies. Renee also was later kicked out of school for biting a teacher, a nurse, and one of his colleagues in 6th grade. So there's always that.

Anyway, the game became the sole reason that we worked in the class.

In a sense, all fifth graders are sociopaths.

Renee's game worked for a simple reason. The simplest vision is usually the most easy to execute. This is because simple ideas tend to be linked into the more mechanical naturalistic processes of the world and society. It's why the Colosseum and Parthenon are still standing, why Jersey Shore is a cultural force, and why there are, and will be, so many illegitimate children.

I am an illegitimate child. And my biological parents want nothing to do with me. This isn't why I would not approach them though. They lost any say over my actions when they sent me to an orphanage, and I will ignore their autonomy from me because I don't care about their emotional states. That would be pretentious.

Being an illegitimate child is not that big of a deal because the whole concept is based off of relationships and relationships are becoming less of a big deal, and those are losing influence over how we navigate our lives for the same reason that Mrs. Gardiner's estimating game, and the DOJ's 'Operation Fast and Furious' failed.

Relationships are becoming more complex. And complex things fail. People have more things they want, more ambitions to see through, and more ways to not do either. Likewise, with the sexual revolution, there are more people to have sex with and more ways to pretend you are having sex. All these mores tend to lead to complication, and complication kills good ideas based in simplicity.

And I am not just talking about relationships that involve sex, in fact, in some ways I think the ones of the Philos and Agape are more complicated. Of course parental relationships involve both. This is a discussion for later though.

The point is that if I were to actually play the odds and hunt down my Bio-Mom, all my life and relationships with my adoptive parents, their parents, my cousins, my friends, and my life would come into play. I would be forced to feel and think about things I actively try not to care about but inform everything my identity informs in my day-to-day life which is indeed everything. This is a complex problem. I don't need to talk about this. In fact, I probably can't because I am not Amy Tan, I really don't know how to talk about identity issues in this kind of medium. Just imagine your own family and then multiply it by two families. Of course, I do know that this complexity would boil down into an unproductive act if I did find my biological parents.

I would probably just say passive aggressive shit to her. She would be getting groceries and I would say, "those tomatoes you got there sure do look like a SON of a gun..." or when she is waiting for a traffic crossing I would say, "Boy this sure takes a long time, someone could GIVE BIRTH waiting for a green light."

And here's the kicker. With all my trepidation and over-thinking this, I could say all the most twisted, bitter, things I wanted to her and you know what her reaction would be? She would just smile, nod, and cross the street. And I would be the silly young man out of fifteen million people in the greater Seoul area who mumbled something to her at the crosswalk.

And if she smiled and if this were her reaction, there would really be nothing else to say.