You Can't Expect Better

Working with teenagers can be... Let's just say it can be interesting. They can be very creative, often in ways that will get them in trouble. Often in ways they know will get them in trouble because they're coming up with creative ways to do things they know they're not supposed to do. Fortunately, it's only very rarely that they come up with some brand new way to get into trouble. Usually, they're just re-inventing the wheel and doing the kinds of things we did when we were kids. Like telling your parents that you're sleeping over at someone else's house while that person tells his parents that he's sleeping over at your house.

Not that I ever did that. Or anything, really. Because I was the "good kid" who never got in trouble. But I had friends who did things and, mostly, what they wanted from me was to cover for them, because, hey, if I said it, it must be true. "Good kid," remember? My parents never had to bother with giving me a curfew, because I never stayed out late.

As I have mentioned before, I spent more than a few years working as a youth pastor. I learned very early on to be completely explicit with expectations and consequences. If you're not completely explicit, teenagers will try to get creative on you. Or, you know, tell you that you never said whatever it was you were trying to imply. When dealing with teens, never imply. Actually, when dealing with people, never imply. In general, leaving things to implication will never lead anywhere positive.

The first church I was youth pastor at after I moved out to CA didn't have its own building. The church rented space in a school auditorium for Sunday services. When I got there, that's all they had, Sunday services, and nothing specifically set up for the teenagers. As such, the youth group was very small. Less than a dozen kids and a significant portion of those were kids of the other staff. One of the first things I did was set up a midweek youth service that we had in the church offices, which were quite small. And, so, it didn't take us long to outgrow the space (we grew to over 30 kids within the first year I was there), which is when I had to start getting creative.

We moved to a house with a large living room that could fit everyone. The explicit rule was that once you got there, you stayed, a rule made after one of the girls turned 17, got a car for her birthday, and started using youth group as her excuse to go cruise. She'd show up for long enough to say she was there then cut and run. But it was still a house and had a more casual feel to it. People did things like ring the doorbell when they arrived, which was disruptive when they got there late.

So, one night, one particular girl -- she was 15 or 16 -- was sitting on the couch by the window, and she kept looking outside. A car pulled up and, before the person got all the way to the door, she jumped up to get it. As it turned out, it was her boyfriend and, instead of coming in, she went out, and they left. On Sunday after, I let her know that she couldn't back on Wednesday night, the explicit consequence, until I had had a meeting with her father about her behavior. My view was this: If you were going to leave in the middle, then you didn't want to be there. If you didn't want to be there, you didn't need to be there.

Let's just say there was wailing and gnashing of teeth.

During the meeting with her father (for which the pastor was also there, because this was a buddy of his), he said something along the lines of "Well, you can't expect better behavior than that. She's just a teenager." Basically, my daughter shouldn't suffer any consequences, because you can't expect her to act better than she is. I was blown away. I had never heard a parent say anything like that before.

After I finished staring, I said, "Actually, I most certainly can expect better behavior than that. In fact, I do expect better behavior than that, and the other 35 kids haven't had a problem living up to that expectation. You'll never get better behavior if you don't expect it." I believe that.

It was with some distress that I saw someone post on facebook last week that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, basically, deserved what they got because they provoked terrorists and you can't expect terrorists to do more than kill you when you provoke them. Now, while it's true that teenagers will misbehave and, yes, terrorists will kill people, that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't expect better behavior.

After all, terrorists, just like teenagers, are people, and we should be able to expect better of people.

I mean, it hasn't really been that long since we had a significant issue with racial terrorism in the United States and, while that's not 100% solved, it's a lot better than it was. It's better because we, as a nation, expected better behavior. In fact, we demanded it. We had clear expectations and clear consequences. Maybe it's time that we, as a world people, did the same. Terrorism, whether it's racially motivated or politically motivated or religiously motivated or whatever, is unacceptable behavior. We expect better.

The Tick (or How I Wish I Could Write) (an IWSG post)

There are always two forces at play: the way things are and the way we want things to be. Both things pull at us: acceptance and desire. It's a rough road, but it's one we all have to make our way down. Well, that's not actually true. Giving into acceptance is always an option. Allowing things to just be the way they are even when we want things to change.

However, there are areas where acceptance can be a good thing. To a certain extent.

A while back, I had the opportunity to hear Jeff Kinney speak. He's the guy that writes the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Now, I've never read any of them, but my kids have really enjoyed them, so I wanted to hear what he had to say, so my younger son and I went to a Q&A and book signing he had at the Shulz museum. The thing I found most interesting is that he never wanted to be a writer; he wanted to be a cartoonist (see the link to the Shulz museum?). However, the more he tried to get into being a cartoonist, the more he found he didn't quite fit. It came down to the fact that he couldn't draw a circle.

I'm almost completely serious about that. What he actually said is that it was because he couldn't draw the same character over and over and have that character look the same each time he drew it. He also said he can't draw circles and implied that those two things are related, which I can see. If, as an artist, you can't freehand a circle, it makes it difficult to draw heads.

After many years of trying to be a cartoonist and just not being able to get anyone to pick him up and having  the reason repeatedly be that it was because his characters never looked the same, he realized he was going to have to do something else. But what? This is that point where the struggle between the way things are and the way you want things to be can be really debilitating. He could have just given up. Thrown in the towel. Gone off to flip burgers.

He could have surrendered and just accepted that he couldn't be a cartoonist and gone off to do something else entirely. Like flip burgers.

Instead, he wrote The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, because, in that format, it didn't matter that he couldn't draw a circle. It was okay for his characters to never match. Sure, it's still not in his ideal world how he would have it be, but he's doing something close to what he wanted to do, and he's been very successful at it.

At this point, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with The Tick.

The Tick, of course, is a comic book, but it's not one I ever read. The character was invented by Ben Edlund, and the comic series started up at a time when I just wasn't interested in spoofs and the like. Actually, it was my low time for comics in general, the end of high school and beginning of college. I'd pretty much dropped down to just Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman at that point. Once I got back into comics for real, I didn't pick it up because it was farther into the series than I wanted to try to go back and get, and I hated picking up series, especially new series, somewhere in the middle.

However, when The Tick came out as a live action TV series in 2001 with Patrick Warburton as The Tick, I was all over that. Mostly because of Warburton who has the greatest voice/chin combo in the world, but, after I started watching it, it became because of the writing. Which is Wow. I mean, there were such great lines in this show:

• And, so, may Evil beware and may Good dress warmly and eat plenty of fresh vegetables.
• And isn't sanity just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean, all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but, when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit.
• Destiny's powerful hand has made the bed of my future, and it's up to me to lie in it. I am destined to be a superhero. To right wrongs, and to pound two-fisted justice into the hearts of evildoers everywhere. And you don't fight destiny. No, sir. And you don't eat crackers in the bed of your future, or you get all... scratchy.
• Eating kittens is just plain... plain wrong! And no one should do it! Ever!
• Everybody was a baby once, Arthur. Oh, sure, maybe not today or even yesterday, but once. Babies, Chum: tiny, dimpled, fleshy mirrors of us-ness that we parents hurl into the future like leathery footballs of hope. And you've got to get a good spiral on that baby or evil will make an interception.
• I'm taking off the kid gloves and putting on the very mad gloves.
• Well, once again, my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice; it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences. But the other head of science is bad. Oh, beware the other head of science, Arthur; it bites.
• You know why super villains are so unhappy, Arthur? They don't treasure little things.
• When you get in bed with evil incarnate, it always steals the covers.

That last one is my favorite.

The point, though, is this:
I wish I could write like that. I really do. Ben Edlund is credited with writing the TV show, but I'm not sure if he was the only writer or not. I do know that Douglas Adams was the only writer of his books, and I wish I could write like that, too. Do you see a connection here?

But, see, I just don't think that way. At all. I read (or watch, because Monty Python falls into this same category) this stuff, and all I can think is "where in the world did that come from?" My mind just really isn't wired that way. So this stuff that I love, this bizarre stuff that I wish I could do, I will never be able to do. It's just not my thing.

So I could decide that since I can't write in this "Monty Python" way that I just won't write at all. I could decide that.
But I don't.
I don't decide that, because I'm a good writer. I'm a good story teller. I'm just not good at those kinds of stories with bizarre leaps of logic.

And you know what? That's okay, because I'm embracing the kind of writing that I am good at, because I like that stuff, too. Like Jeff Kinney. He never became a comic strip artist and had his own syndicated strip the way he wanted, but he is doing cartoons, and he likes what he's doing even if it's not the thing he most wanted to do. It's that conflict between what is and what is wished for.

All of that to say this:
Just because you may not be able to do something (like bizarre humor or epic fantasy or hard sci-fi) that you really want to do doesn't mean that you can't do something like it. Try things out and figure out which thing you are good at and grow that thing. Grow into that thing. Maybe it's not what you always dreamed about, but it might be close. Or it might be something you end up liking even more. The point is that you shouldn't give up the struggle just because that one thing, that one thing you always thought was the only thing, is out of reach. Keep struggling and striving and working and being but don't ever just accept defeat. Accept the thing you can't do and subvert the things you can do to get as close to that thing as you can.