SHOUTS & MURMURS: THINGS I'VE HEARD MYSELF SAY ALOUD TO MY KIDS

I just told everyone to keep their bodies to themselves in the car, and then you put your feet on the back of your brother's head, and we see you're on your phone, which we repeatedly asked you to leave at home, and so now there's going to have to be a big consequence, and now a chasm has opened between my consciousness and the words emerging from my mouth, and I hear a cascade of scolding clichés rush forth in a frictionless flow, as if I'm an A.I. chatbot with the prompt "Lecture my kids in a style that they will completely ignore and will cause me deep sadness," because I don't know where all this boilerplate hectoring comes from, but the reason we keep our bodies to ourselves is that we treat our bodies and other people's bodies with respect, and if you keep doing that we're going to tell Nana how you behaved.

- JAY KATSIR

Could Nana be the one who planted this forest of platitudes in my brain, where it silently germinated until the moment when stop that right now, we told you that word is inappropriate, and it's even more inappropriate to sing it repeatedly as a catchy jingle so that your brother remembers it and repeats it in the Fives Room at preschool, so if we hear it again it means we have a listening problem, and it means that at some point I must have unwittingly memorized a book titled "Empty Threats for Desperate Weenies." All I know is that if we don't start improving our rule following we're going to start examining why we say everything in the first-person plural, because we sure seem afraid of the implications of saying that it is you who have upset me and that I have decided to enforce a boundary that might cause you unhappiness, and that's why you're going to lose Switch for a week, or at least I'll hide MLB: The Show under an old nasal-strip box in the nightstand and then forget where I put it. Sticker chart.