When I was 23, I was filling in as the summer reporter at CBC Radio in Quebec City. My assignment editor Peter came up to me on my lunch break and said, “There’s a brouhaha at the Sillery Public Library. The librarians are taking about 40 English titles off the shelf and replacing them with French titles.”

Quebec City has a small and fierce and snooty little English population. Most come from old money and many have not bothered to learn French beyond a Grade 4 level. Most wear scarves and drive around in fancy cars. Half have expansive summer properties in Quebec’s Eastern Townships or Vermont. The little CBC English station catered to these people, all of whom I really didn’t give a shit about. I especially didn’t give a shit about fewer than four-dozen titles being pulled from the public library’s shelves, as most of these people had enough money to go out to the English bookstore in the mall and just BUY the titles they wanted for $15. Or order them online from Amazon.

I looked up at the stained fibreglass ceiling panels and moaned, “But Peter who fucking caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaares?”

Peter only had one eyebrow, but if he’d had two he would have knit them.

“This is important community news, Kathryn,” he said.

I didn’t want to explain to him that I hated the community, because the community was made up of jerks, many whom I’d gone to high school with and who’d called me “hairy gorilla” in gym class when I’d refused to shave the downy blond hair off my legs when I was 13 and had arrived fresh off the boat from France, where our family had been living in a small village that had a house of inbreds who lived down the street from us (My nickname was replaced with “Moose” after my class photo was printed).

With a massive deal of annoyance, I wrote the piece, phoned some jerks for clips and filed it in time for the 4:30 local afternoon news. Minutes before it came on I made sure to leave the office so I didn’t have to hear my stupid report.

It was around then that I realized I hated human beings, and also the news.

No no. That’s not quite right. I actually love people, and can really get behind the way certain media outlets curate the news. But there is something upsetting and unimaginative in the editorial process of so many of these outlets — a process that submits more readily to the whims of the population, rather than relies on and trusts the training of the people who’ve (hopefully) developed a sense of story, honed their curiosity, have trained themselves to think in angles. The Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker triumphs at this.

Fox does not.

Especially WJW Fox 8 Cleveland.

WJW Fox 8 Cleveland, “Bear in Backyard”

- Kathryn Borel

bymuratcan, “Cute Babies Singing Sweety Baby Bebekler” (2007)

The other day I was going through my friend Amy’s baby photos on Facebook. Amy was my first real friend to become pregnant, and while I’d never been interested in babies before, I vowed that her baby — William Wildman (aka “The Whiz”) — would be the one I’d care about. I was ready to be “wacky auntie Kathryn.” I was going to teach her baby about Nietzsche and swearing and how to drink beer. A month after Will was born, I brought over a baby basket full of baby crap: Onesies, a little stuffed giraffe with a bell inside, tiny silk-covered clothes hangers for his baby coats. Things like that.

The basket had been lying around my room for a few weeks — it had been given to me as a joke by my mother, who was reacting to an email I sent her after I finished the first draft of my first book. I told my mother that my baby was a bouncing 71,000 word baby boy manuscript. And that it was even better than a baby, because babies get old and die, whereas art lives on forever. The basket arrived at my workplace a day later. We had a good laugh.

As I delivered the little giraffe and baby coat hangers to Amy, I wanted so badly to make that same joke… about how my book was better than Will because one day Will would die while a dog-eared copy of my memoir would surely be found lying in a $1 laser-book discount bin at a flying truck stop in neo-Kansas in the year 2105.

That was in February of 2008. I haven’t gone to visit Will since. I haven’t forced him to memorize the nine original members of the Wu Tang Clan nor have I made time to introduce him to the documentary Cocksucker Blues. I’ve been very busy with ensuing drafts of my book and I simply don’t have the time. I do, however, reluctantly keep track of his progress on Facebook. I do this reluctantly not because he isn’t cute — he’s a cherubic little fucker — and not because I’ve become disinterested in Amy — she will always be one of my favorite humans — but because Amy’s Facebook page has become colonized with fellow toddler-mothers who are compelled to make syntactically suspect and blandly fawning comments on every new photograph she puts up on the site. Examples…

Will in front of a Christmas tree looking like he is yelling:

“He is a man of many expressions!!! lol love it!”

Will with a book that is age-inappropriate:

“He is growing to be such a little man, I just want to cuddle and cuddle and cuddle some more!”

Will smirking:

“I am scheeming my next evil plan. What is the next thing that I can get into and how can i do it with none of these big people finding out???”

I decided to make a paedophile joke under a photo of Will lying supine, sleeping, with his big bunchy diaper visible under his onesie. I wrote, “Amy, your baby has such a nice package!” No one responded to the comment.

I haven’t placed my finger on where the resentment comes from. Maybe it’s a reaction against the blind celebration that occurs after a baby is born — an act that requires absolutely no critical discourse, no real research, no TALENT. (I am talking about the baby-making bit, not the parenting bit.) Maybe it’s because I find babies crashingly boring. Maybe I miss Amy. Maybe I wish all those grammar-allergic mothers would take a half hour away from rearing their stupid babies and read some goddamn literature so their stupid talentless babies have a chance at growing into interesting human beings who know how to properly spell the word “scheming.”

Which is why I love this clip, taken from the Adult Swim program Tim and Eric “Awesome Show, Great Job!” It is the comic antidote to the precious parent. The comic paedophilic antidote.

Adult Swim, “Tim & Eric Awesome Show”

Paedophile jokes are tricky. Tim and Eric pull off the joke quite cleanly and adeptly.

- Kathryn Borel