I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

Learning from experience, I've decided that what one ought to do is promote her/his children to despise everything they stand for, believe in, and do, so that one's children will be determined to do things better and not screw up as badly as her/his parents. (After all, since we are all human, except in this case I am substituting my dog for a child, we all make mistakes that can be remedied in future generations, right? I totally agree... with myself, so I guess that isn't really a consensus. But it is good enough for me. At least right now... though I should probably run my philosophy by Birgit before we ever think about having a human child, I suppose. I can see where she might not agree with my philosophy. Perhaps I don't even really agree with it, but am only stating this to make this picture work. Hmmm... I'll have to get back to myself on that.)

Essentially, that is why I don't really like business -- my dad is a sleazy business man selling Chinese child labor. I therefore grew up mistrusting corporations, father figures, and businessmen of all stripes. I decided to do things differently -- steal on the black market rather than legally. But I digress... The reason I bring all of this up is that I fear that because Birgit and I are spoiling Mette with attention and dog treats and alternative music, she might end up thinking that our way of doing, seeing, and visualizing things is the proverbial, yet truly non-existent, "way of the world." To try and stymie brainwashing our child, I have begun feeding her maps for lunch. Everyday I toss out one or two carefully selected maps and let her devour, destroy, and drool on our socially constructed way of the world and the essential tool of Birgit's and my profession. (As cartographers we have an abundance of maps that we never actually use, so we're always lost anyway. Ironic.) Here she is tearing into Chicago. She ripped the loop right out of its heart and spat it out on my foot. Iceland, with its capitalist adverts bordering the map lies underneath in waiting. She is a terror of the terra! She knows no boundaries. And somehow this really does help me relinquish any passive aggression I have against my discipline as a whole.

For indeed, I want her to mistrust geographers. To feast on their excesses and their errant generalizations. And to try to make maps better. To critique and be suspicious of human constructions of space around her.

I am not sure she gets the whole critiquing and mistrusting bit yet. Hell, she can only understand about three words of English -- "sit," "shake," and "kennel." But hopefully her cognitive functioning will develop with an inherent taste for good maps, as she certainly does enjoy the taste of multi-colored, inked paper. And she loves to rip stuff. Better our boxes of old National Geographic maps then the couch. (My dad owns an antique shop. I worked there through high school. Once he did an estate sale for a dead guy with 50,000 books. The dead guy was 85 at the time, back in 1994. He had every issue of National Geographic, with the maps still in them, from 1908 or something. National Geographics are worthless, a dime a dozen. They were all thrown into the dumpster outside his attic window. But not before I stripped them of every map. I have boxes of old World War II maps, Cold War maps, etc. So I have an ample supply for Mette.)

This afternoon I am going to feed Mette a 1939 map of the Japanese Empire -- Korea and Munchiko, their puppet kingdom in Manchuria, are included on it as belonging to Japan. Should be interesting to see how she realigns these historical borders...