WHAT THE CICADAS HAVE TAUGHT ME

In what appears to be its 963rd consecutive daily story about the ongoing cicada invasion here in the DC area, the Washington Post trots out a columnist to opine that the "half-blind bugs" (as my 5-year-old calls them) can teach us all Something Important about life. I couldn't read the whole thing without wanting to gouge my own eyes out, but I think it had something to do with cell phones, magnet schools and ajustable rate mortgage refinancing. Valuable lessons, indeed.

But what can we really learn? First, if you work for a major-metro daily, ask to be moved off the cicada beat before they start talking back to you. For the rest of us, consider this: Cicadas crawl out of the ground and shed their skins. Then they fly around lopsidedly like drunken congressmen, randomly bouncing off trees, walls and other inanimate objects. If you pick one up and toss it in the air, a few moments pass before it occurs to it that it might be a good idea to start flapping its wings. They're edible by just about everything even a notch above them in the food chain (including the French), so their natural defense is to sit out in the open like the delectable morsels they are. They don't bite, don't fly, don't even move much, and are pretty much the most passive sentient beings this side of Codependents Anonymous.

If it wasn't for the fact that they appear by the millions -- too many to all die in gruesome yet comically inept airborne collisions, too many to all be squashed, stepped on or eaten while on the ground -- their continued existence would prove Darwin wrong about that whole survival-of-the-fittest, or at least the survival-of-the-smartest, thing. Then again, the same could be said for the folks who post comments on this site (scroll down to the comments).

BECAUSE EVERY DAY IS NARCISSIST DAY

I'd like to think I'm a fairly enlightened parent, as these things go. So I read this excerpt from an upcoming book of edgy essays by hip, literary fathers, or something like that. I'm still laughing.

If I could be said to contour my life in those days around any image, I think it would be one I grew up with... the one featuring a guy with a raincoat slung over his shoulder, a guy on the verge of needing a haircut, with a quizzical, slightly weary, but (don't be fooled) absolutely thrilled look about him... In the first two or three years after my daughter was born, I went on trying to live that life, with the raincoat thrown over my shoulder and the weary, sexy, thrilled expression. I went on writing plays and seeing them produced and writing that first novel and seeing it published, and on weekends joining the other parents in Riverside Park, pushing my daughter on the swings and enduring the jostling, competitive chatter of the other Upper West Side parents.

Yeah, and I wander around with the same half-asleep, thrilled, and undoubtedly sexy expression as I write the random blog entry every odd week, or month, joining the other parents at the Reston(tm) Burger King, enjoying the jostling, competitive chatter of the SWAT team as it makes its appointed rounds.

But there's more.

One afternoon, after hoisting our daughter's stroller up the stairs of our walkup and entering the dim light of our cramped quarters, I just turned to my wife and said, without knowing I was going to say it, "Let's move."

I say that just about every day. So would life in the suburbs bring a new, marginally less solipisitic outlook? Or at least a haircut? Let's read on:

When my daughter turned 5 and started kindergarten, there was a particular lunchbox she insisted she had to have, and I remember now the intensity of the search for that lunchbox, which was, of course, out of stock everywhere. We drove far afield, in the beautiful late-summer dusk, to Ames and Caldor and Kmart, each of them a tall, beckoning, neon-lit tree on the branches of which the Holy Grail of that phantom lunchbox might be found hanging. Though I felt it intensely, it was still not possible for me to admit consciously that this quest had become more important to me than the quest to complete my troublesome second novel.

"Troublesome" is one word for it, I'm sure. Judging by the particularly purplish hue of his prose, I'd bet that "slush pile" is an even better choice of words.

But then again, what can you expect from a person whose worldview can be summed up by this one sentence:

But it really wasn't until I saw "Kramer vs. Kramer" that it all came together for me.

Funny. For me, it was Army of Darkness.

MORE RIGHT-THINKING IN THE HINTERLANDS

I have just one question about this letter to the editor which ran in one of my previous places of employment: Is it more sexist than racist, or more racist than sexist?

Either way, nice headline.