Energy Crisis | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Energy Crisis | Previous Challenge Entry
By Karen Lucille Gross
08/04/09
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Energy Crisis
Why are kids in such a hurry to grow up? When I was four, I couldn’t wait to be five to start school. When I was fourteen I couldn’t wait to be sixteen and get a driver’s license. When I was seventeen, I couldn’t wait to be eighteen to leave home. It’s like we think that life will begin when we reach the next stage: finishing high school, finishing college, getting married, having children. Then reality sets in: being a grown up is exhausting! Why was I in such a hurry to get here?
Have you experienced the joys of chasing a toddler or two around for several years? I have come to the conclusion that the energy distribution over a human lifespan is grossly disproportionate. Toddlers are like little Energizer Bunnies: they keep going and going, but they don’t accomplish anything. They just run in circles, taunting their parents whose batteries have been drained since before breakfast.
It doesn’t seem fair that children get to have the most energy but the fewest responsibilities. We could solve all of the world’s energy needs if someone could learn how to harness the energy of all the two year olds. I was astounded at how my kids could run and play all day, fuelled by a couple of Cheerio’s and an arrowroot cookie.
I was present in physical education class the day that calorie counters were handed out and we were taught the mathematics of hours of activity times calories expended for specific forms of physical torment subtracted by number of hot fudge sundaes consumed which is inversely proportional to the quantum leap coordinates which have landed me at my present weight.
The older I get, the more I realise that the mathematics of weight gain and loss have no basis in scientific or mathematical fact whatsoever. Why is it that I can lose twenty pounds and one dress size, and then find those twenty pounds again and go up four dress sizes? It does not compute!
Fellow travellers, why do we allow ourselves to believe the Hollywood myth that if we consume thousands of dollars worth of beauty products and diet supplements on a monthly basis, we can turn back the hands of time, reverse the laws of gravity, and push the sand back up through that little hole in the hourglass figure that was once mine? Actually, I think that that last scientific improbability can be achieved. It is a rather expensive process, and the sand has to be of the silicon variety, but according to the photographs on the covers of those supermarket tabloid papers that I never buy, it can be done.
I don’t think that the energy crisis that most adults experience can be surgically reversed. Your toddlers (or your grand-toddlers) will still be running circles around you.

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