Someday it’ll be worth something

Me: Hey son, welcome home! Mom and I just worked our butts off to make you your favorite dinner! Tadaaaa!—it’s home-made mac and cheese with turkey chili!

You: Oh.

Me: Oh? Whadya mean, “oh”?

You:  I hate home-made mac and cheese, and last time I ate your turkey chili I almost threw up all over my Legos.

Are you kidding? You LOVE home-made mac and cheese and turkey chili. You’ve always loved it. You asked me to make it just last Thursday.

Well, I hate it now.

But I…you…I just…you always…mom and I…      What is it with you and love-hate relationships with everything? First you love mac and cheese, then you hate it; you love soccer, then you hate it; you love Scooby Doo, then you hate it. How are your mom and I supposed to keep all this straight?

I never loved math. I’ve always hated math and I’m never gonna love it, so, you know, there’s that.

Comforting.

You’re welcome.

I didn’t thank you for hating math.

Well, you should. I’m totally consistent and predictable about math.

You might like it someday.

Yeah, right.

I used to hate math but now I like it.

Yeah, but you’re weird and I’m not.

That’s just a coincidence. You don’t have to be weird to like math.

I bet it helps.

Actually, being a little weird does help make most things bearable.

Told ya.

Let me show you something I found a little while ago. It was in that box of old stuff in the closet. I did this in 7^th grade geometry class in an attempt to make it interesting.

Well at least you’re consistent.

Whadya mean?

Your cartoons made no sense then, and they still make no sense today.

……………..

I found these cartoons in a box of old stuff. Apparently, they kept me sane through geometry class. As far as I know, they’re the first cartoons I ever did.

Despite the stunning success of my 7^th grade cartooning career, I hung up my pencil.

Thirty-five years later, I fired up I’ve Become My Parents. After 3 or 4 posts, I realized that all the good blogs have pictures to help make up for the boring words and stuff, so I decided to add pictures to mine. But I’m lazy and the thought of constantly stalking the web for free pictures to use and having to figure out whether I’d get sued for using them was just too much for me.

Napkins, on the other hand are readily available, and just about anything can be drawn on them without someone claiming you stole their art.

That realization led to the creation of the first Rootstock cartoony scribble. It looked like this:

To celebrate the relative decrease in suckiness of my cartooning skills, I built a new page—the IBMP Cartoon Gallery. There are about 30 revised and updated cartoons in there and I add a few more every week.

Go visit the Gallery. You may find some cartoons that you hadn’t seen before.

And thanks for sticking around despite your better judgment and your shrink’s advice to the contrary.