Life is shitty, get over it.

 This thread got me thinking.

 Something I hate is when parents not only minimize the challenges that face non-parents, but they treat them (the non-parent's difficulties) as totally optional - something brought upon themselves - whereas the parents are noble victims of the hardships of parenting.

For example, I spend lots of time in the course of my experiments cleaning up rat urine and feces. Of course when I sat in Psych 101 thinking how cool it would be to study animal behavior, I was not picturing myself kneeling on the floor, wiping down plexiglass chambers smeared in poop. But sometime between my initial daydreams about neuroscience and the first day I faced the messy chambers, something like this went through my brain...

• Our rats are not litter trained.

• Cocaine makes them poop more.

• Rats walk around on all fours, thereby getting feces on their paws, and occasionally rear up and put their paws on the walls, thereby transferring feces to the walls.

• Rats do not clean up after themselves.

• Therefore, I will need to clean up the poop from the chambers. 

I pursued this course of study in spite of this knowledge because although I don't enjoy cleaning excrement, I realize that it is a necessary part of research that I really want to and enjoy doing.

I don't complain much about it, because I know that this is the life I chose, and because I know that every other behavioral scientist has to do the same damn thing at some point. It's not like I'm being persecuted by the poo. I don't post pictures of it on Facebook or my blog, because I know that absolutely no one thinks that it is interesting or pleasant to look at. I don't brag about how much I have to clean or how long it takes, because no one cares. It doesn't make me special or superior or anything else - other than one person among many who does what she has to do.


How is that different from parents, who know damn well that babies can't control their bodily functions (or clean up after themselves) but choose to have them anyhow? They made a choice, just like I did, that something outweighed this unpleasantness. They know that every parent has to do the same thing for their offspring. They must have some clue that photos of their baby's excrement are not aesthetically pleasing.  Yet still we have pictures of "diaper blowouts," shit here, shit there, shit shit everywhere. Please explain it to me.