“Just Tossin’ Ideas Around!”

Kid riffs on dinner concepts

For a few months now, Kina has taken to blurting out charming and appropriate colloquialisms at random moments, and their frequency is growing. The robustness of her small talk, which now veers troublingly towards office-speak, is slightly absurd—would she have spoken like this had we not been trapped together at home for the last year? I forget sometimes how easy it is to hear me from the living room through the hollow-core door of our bedroom; I assume some of this jargon comes from me, though a decent chunk of it is just dialogue from She-Ra. It was hard enough keeping track of my behavior in the house when I wasn’t trying to do my job, but now I have to think about the way that I talk and act at work: my tone of voice, my choice of words, my response to stress. I have become lax in the last year, and I have no way of knowing what kinds of eavesdropping this kid is doing, or what strange neurons she’s connecting. At this point, she’ll become a management consultant by the age of five. She’ll ping me once she’s started, I imagine, and we can toss some ideas around. Like a baseball, but with more capitalism.

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