Monday, December 17, 2007
(5:17 PM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:
Ask Someone Other Than Amy: Holiday Stress
In all my years living in various underpasses of the Kennedy Expressway, no public figure in Chicago has so rankled me as the Chicago Tribune's advice columnist Amy Dickinson. Bereft of Mayor Daley's disarming good looks, FOX News Chicago anchor Mark Suppelsa's plasticity, and the positive qualities of the many other Chicago public figures whose names and characteristics I cannot presently recall, Ms. Dickinson gives the very concept of advice a bad name. Now that I have my own internautical platform from which to spread my own unique outlook, I have accordingly decided to begin an occasional series devoted to correcting her columns by offering alternative answers to the questions she most badly botches.In her most recent column, Alexa in Maryland asks:
Here is how our family handles the stress of holiday giving.Amy's answer to this "question" is a tepid approval of the reader's proposed strategy. My response would be totally different:
Mine is one of those blended families where the oldest "kid" is 32 and the youngest is 8.
Our most recent solution is that all the guys put a fixed and modest sum ($100) for a "guy activity." This might mean spending the day doing paint ball or riding race cars together.
The women do the same thing and usually choose to have a spa day together. The key is to do something together.
Dear Alexa, I apologize for my lack of clarity. When you read that I was running an advice column here, you seem to have read that as an invitation to send in your own advice. Though it is uncanny that you, too, belong to "one of those blended families where the oldest 'kid' is 32 and the youngest is 8," I resent the implication that I do not know how to handle the stress surrounding holiday gift-giving. I know how to handle every life situation with aplomb, and that is why I have a world-renowned advice column -- viz., to offer advice, not to solicit it.
As for the substance of your remarks, I have to wonder from whence this obsession with "togetherness" comes -- a "togetherness" mysteriously predicated on the separation of the sexes. Might not that 32-year-old "kid," be he or she male or female, need a spa day or a game of paintball, respectively? And what of the 8-year-old? If he or she does not build up immunity through exposure to moderate levels of cooties in family settings, his or her chances of contracting a serious case of cooties in school increases tenfold, according to a recent NIH study. With such poor parenting skills on public display, you dare to send advice to me, a noted Internet personality and advice columnist? Fie upon thee! FIE!
