To be fair, I know a lot of parents who are down-to-earth, honest, hardworking, caring people who want to instill logic and reason and good qualities and traits in their children. But for every one good child out there, it sure feels like there's five miserable, obnoxious children who have parents that are miserable, obnoxious people themselves, or just don't know how to keep their child in check. I don't know about the proportion... it hasn't been scientifically proven... and I could be exaggerating for dramatics sake.
But then there are children I feel sorry for, because they were doomed from the start for having the stupidest parents ever, and if those kids end up decent, it's through no help from their parents other than the kid having the realization that their mom or dad or both are complete idiots and they want to grow up being NOT them.
Case in point: Patricia Krentcil, a mom in New Jersey, was arrested the other day for allegedly bringing her five-year-old daughter to the tanning salon and giving her a tan, after she went to school with a sunburn and saying she got her burn from going to the tanning salon with her mom. Now, the mom says she's not guilty because she never let her inside the booth, but rather her daughter was outside as the mother was being tanned, and that the daughter got the sunburn from playing out in the sun.
Now, I'm going to give the mother the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she didn't let her daughter get burned by a box of ultraviolet lamps and rather, it happened the old fashioned way. Let's just take a look at the mother in question, more specifically her police mugshot grabbed from The Smoking Gun.
So apparently, the Smurfs have Smurfette and the Oompa Loompas have... this. And apparently after she got arrested, she felt she needed more tanning to get ready for her interview with the local news station... and looked like this:
Wow. I don't know what to say. Actually, I'm lying; I have plenty to say.
1. What the fuck?
2. This is the danger of tanning booths... a 44-year-old white woman ends up looking like a 58-year-old white woman in blackface.
3. Seriously, what the fuck?
4. When telling a couple of friends about this, my friend from New Jersey, without even watching or hearing about the news story, asked: "Was she from Jersey?" He knows what's up.
5. She compares bringing her daughter to a tanning salon to bringing her to the grocery store. I don't know whether to feel infuriated by the stupidity of that statement or deathly afraid by teaching her daughter that tanning is just as normal as an everyday errand. Unfortunately, to Leatherface, it is. 2012/05/04 UPDATE: Apparently, the fine folks at Happy Place/Jockular/someecards think her face looks like a football.
6. For some reason, if this woman wasn't hellbent on burning her skin off her body, she'd still remind me of Sheila Keith, the old lady from "Frightmare."
7. Her daughter is red-haired and fair-skinned. All the red-haired, fair-skinned people I know don't normally tan as much as just burn. I could be wrong. Even if the daughter got burned from the sun and not from the tanning booth, isn't there some neglect here and not properly watching the kid or making sure she had some type of protection? Though to be fair, sunscreen doesn't even work for me and just leaves me worse than if I didn't put anything on at all.
I could bash New Jersey in creating this type of culture (and some Jersey people might actually agree) but I'm not. This person is either completely stupid, completely obsessed and misinformed on a specific image to the point she doesn't even see the damage, or just a mixture of both.
Krentcil wants her daughter to have the ability to choose to tan or not, whenever she's legally old enough to tan in a salon. My parents had a similar philosophy for me... for religion. It's nice to know her mother thinks she's not forcing her into the tanning culture *snark*, but by bringing her to a salon and that overtanning is completely normal and mommy does it to look beautiful, it doesn't really help things.
Look, I'm no saint. If I had kids, there's a 80% chance their first word would be "fuck," but I think I would be able to teach my kids about proper sunbeam protection. That, and tanning salons are fucking stupid and are only around for petty, narcissistic people who think they'll look prettier if their skin was eleven shades darker. Newsflash... no. I just hope her daughter grows up to be competent and figures out that too much of something is a bad thing... especially when it leads to skin cancer.
No comments:
Post a Comment