another Rybarczyk column from the P-D that was mildly amusing...

Sometimes I wish my kids were as stupid as my cats

By Bob Rybarczyk

SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH

02/19/2008

One of the things I like best about my cats is that they’re incredibly stupid.

Wait, that sounded mean. What I meant to say was, sometimes stupid is good.

OK, that didn’t sound right, either. Let me explain.

Right before Christmas, Colette went out and bought a few toys for our new kitty, Charlie, to play with. She ended up spending about $15 on balls with jingle bells inside them, little stuffed animals filled with catnip, things like that.

Charlie dug the little jingly balls for a day or two, before he managed to lose them. I should note that it’s a little unsettling to me that two months later, we still have not found any of the balls. It’s like our house wields the power to somehow absorb physical objects. This is one of the many reasons why we don’t home-school the kids; the less they’re at home, the better our odds.

Anyway, Charlie also loved the catnip animals for a day or two. After that, apparently the catnip lost its freshness or something, because he lost interest. It was kind of a drag, because watching him roll around on the floor with his little stuffed animal was really entertaining. It was like he was having such a good time that his simple kitty mind was warping onto itself.

The money spent on cat toys seemed like it had been wasted. They’d all either become boring or gotten lost after just a few days.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, when Colette brought home some pipe cleaners for an art project one of the kids was required to do. A couple of them ended up on the floor of our bedroom, slightly crumpled.

When Charlie found them, it was like a chocolate bar stumbling into a pool of peanut butter. He spent the better part of that day playing with those pipe cleaners like they were delightfully injured field mice. He’d bat them around, chew on them, flip them in the air, and pounce on them with great flying leaps.

We loved watching him play with those pipe cleaners. We kept thinking he’d get bored with them, especially once he realized that they were in fact pipe cleaners and not delicious yet grievously wounded rodents. But he never did. Every time he found a pipe cleaner on the floor, he’d spend a half hour acting like he was losing his mind and it was the pipe cleaner’s fault.

Now compare this to the behavior of my children.

It’s probably safe to say that the kids are smarter than our cats. Sometimes I think it’s a closer contest than it should be; these are, after all, children who think “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” is an excellent TV show. But we’ll give the kids the benefit of the doubt, because they aren’t terrified by string and show far less interest in drinking out of the toilet.

It just so happens that both of my daughters, Gustavo and Chi Chi (not their real names), have birthdays coming up next month. I asked Gustavo the other day, when I was “just visiting” an electronics store and she got stuck coming with me, what she wanted on her wish list. “A Wii,” she said instantly, grinning like a drunken beauty pageant contestant.

“Nice try,” I said.

“Why can’t I have a Wii?”

“They’re $250. Besides, where would we hook it up? We already have the PlayStation connected to the TV.”

“We could get another TV.”

“Where would we keep it?”

“In my room.”

I suddenly had flashes of the two other children in the house whining that they wanted TVs in their rooms, too, and asking why Gustavo gets a TV in her room when they can’t have one in theirs, and all of this causing my head to explode like a rotten pumpkin colliding with an F-18.

“What else do you want?” I asked.

“How about an iPod?”

It dawned on me that I should have had this conversation at the library, rather than in the middle of an electronics store. “You already have an MP3 player,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s not as cool as an iPod.”

“Tell you what,” I said, “if I get an iTouch for my birthday, you can have my old iPod.”

“What’s an iTouch?”

“I’ll show you,” I said. Coincidentally, a viewing of the iTouch just so happened to be on my list of to-do’s at this particular store. Fortunate, no?

We found the iTouch display. I showed her the sweet, delicious touch-screen and let her listen to a song.

“I know what I really want for my birthday,” she said, her pupils dilating as she stared at the iTouch. “One of these.”

I decided to table the birthday-list discussion for a while.

The thing about kids and gifts is that you never know what they’ll really use, and what will end up collecting dust in a closet. This isn’t as big of a deal when the gifts are $18 Barbies. When we’re talking about $300 bleeding-edge electronics, it’s a little bit more of a gamble.

It wasn’t that long ago that Gustavo was ecstatic over a $10 shirt or a $20 board game. But she got older, and more sophisticated, and, well, smarter. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of smarter. I’m sure hoping that smarter will help pay for college in a few years. But in a lot of ways smarter makes life more complicated. Smarter kids want to use e-mail, and borrow cell phones, and surf the web, and all sorts of other things that make me clench involuntarily.

Which is why I’m often grateful for Charlie’s thunderous stupidity. Sometimes it’s just nice to hang out with someone who can entertain himself for days on end with a ten-cent piece of wire and fuzz.

Plus, it’s sometimes really fun to hide his pipe cleaner under my shirt and watch him spaz out as he tries to figure out what just happened.

Smarter does have its advantages.

Bob Rybarczyk writes stuff. He tries not to squat because doing so makes his knees hurt. His first novel, “Acoustic Kitty,” ($15.95) is available at Amazon and many other online booksellers. Drop him a line to sign up for his handy FringeMail reminder service.