RULE 20

Smoking does not make you look cool.… It makes you look moronic.

Next time you’re out cruising, watch an eleven-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over twenty when you are smoking.

You may also be under the impression that smoking makes you thinner and sexier. Maybe it does, but consider the trade-off: yellow teeth, stained fingers, breath like an ashtray, prematurely winkled skin, charcoal lungs, and eventual heart disease. And not many people can pull off looking hot while they are breathing through a tube.

You also don’t establish your individual identity by having the same nose ring as everyone else, or by wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, and having the same ideas about politics. This is called conformity. Also—trust me on this—the tattoos won’t look so good when you’re fifty. Actually a lot of things that might seem like good ideas now … aren’t.

 

RULE 20B

Even though you have a cool mom, a wimpy principal, and a spineless school board, the world does not revolve around you or your need to express yourself with a nose ring.

This is a true story: A fourteen-year-old girl nags her mother for permission to get her nose pierced. At first the mom resists. Her daughter, after all, is a bit young to start getting things pierced or tattooed. But her daughter begs, cajoles, wheedles, and bargains, and finally Mom—who undoubtedly wants to be her girl’s best friend—gives in.

Unfortunately, the nose piercing is more than a bad adolescent fashion choice. In this girl’s state, it is illegal for anyone under the age of sixteen to get anything other than ears pierced; it is also against school rules. When school officials point out the rules, the girl refuses to remove her newly acquired nose stud. She defies her middle school principal and is given a five-day in-house suspension.

Accustomed by now to adults caving in and to getting her way, the girl appeals on behalf of her nose-piercing self-expression to the full school board, which takes the opportunity to … fawn over her.

“It takes a lot of courage for an adult to stand up for what they believe in,” the board president told the fourteen-year-old, thus demonstrating her own lack of courage to enforce the district’s rules. “And I think I speak for the entire board by saying that I think we’re proud of you.”93 If there were gagging sounds from the audience, they were not recorded.

Understandably inflated by the experience, the defiant girl explained: “I feel it is important to express yourself in an open environment, such as a school. I was always taught by my teachers, peers and parents that school is a place to find out who you are and where you stand. I am simply doing what I was taught.”

And indeed she was, this product of self-affirming, self-expressing, therapeutic education. Clearly, she had not been taught to have any respect for authority. She was unaccustomed to thinking that the word no would ever apply to her directly. Nor was she taught that there are occasions when she may not be able to have everything she wants. Or that she may have to defer gratification, say, until she comes of legal age.

Apparently, if she is ever to learn those lessons, someone will have to buy her this book.