I fear having children for a few reasons. One, what if you accidentally drop your baby while riding your bike, like I do with your cell phone all the time? You just can't jokingly say, "Ahaha, yeah, his face is all scratched up now, I don't know how that happened! Wait, yeah I do. I was drunk." And two, I know exactly what kind of teenager I was. Undoubtedly, in twenty years, I will be living with an exact replica of my teenage self, listening to her scream, "GOD I WISH I HAD NEVER BEEN BORN" and drinking my fifth scotch and soda. By then, I will also be a scotch drinker.

I put my parents through some tough times between the ages of eleven and twenty-two. I wasn't rebellious. I was just incredibly unlikeable. In my eighth grade yearbook, all my classmates wrote something along the lines of, "You are so hyper and weird!" If there was ever a better euphemism for, "You are intolerable", I do not know it. One girl even wrote, "I don't LOVE RACHEL. SHE IS not MY FRIEND," like she was designing the Rosetta Stone of bitchiness. You fooled me, Julie Olson! I continued to vie for your affection for years before I realized you read at a third grade level!

My teenage years were bad, but at least I was outright crazy. I think the worst came when I was 19, home from my first semester of college, and suddenly THE MOST LIBERAL PERSON IN THE WORLD. Don't get me wrong: I'm liberal now, and I appreciate Grinnell for shaping my post-high school ideas about the world. But on my first winter break, I was awful. Every single conversation was interrupted by me, hem-hem-ing like the Dolores Umbridge of social justice. "This is problematic," I would say, eyeing the problematically phallic trees in the backyard. "This reinforces the patriarchy."

My parents' tolerance waned quickly. "Oh, give it a rest," my mom said after a few days of incessant lecturing. "Judy," my dad said sternly. "You are speaking to a first year college student, have some respect." He turned to me. "More wine, Professor Fields?"

You probably have to let your children go through these annoying phases, knowing (or just hoping) that they'll grow out of them. Not me, though. I plan to out-liberal them. They'll come home and I'll be wrapped in only a rainbow flag, smoking pot with my multi-racial queer lover. I'll look at their regulation jeans and t-shirt and sigh, "College has made you so conservative, man."