These Kids Will Need Prozac

They have me writing kids' stuff at work these days, and I'm just plain deplorable at it. I mean really, really bad. When left alone I tend toward long, complex sentences with too many clauses; I have to force myself in order to write otherwise. Having to write in a cutesy, punny manner does not come naturally to me at all, so everything I type comes out sounding stilted and utterly insincere.


And my mood's been dark, so most of the topics I can come up with are frightfully dreary. For instance--AIDS in Africa, mercury poisoning, the disappearance of girls in China, pollution in Mexico City, genocide, droughts, skin cancer, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, polio, Huntington's disease, the Great Depression. Some rather heavy stuff. The few topics that aren't dreary are probably just plain boring for any half-normal kid. What ten year old is interested in William Wilberforce or erosion mechanisms? Certainly no ten year old I would have wanted to be seen with at that age, and I was a total dork.

Since I'm slow at kid-writing I've had to work on it at home, too. Doubleplusuncool.


I promise to blog about work every day so that within a month no one reads this at all.