It's possible that the weird signs in my home have been around a long time and I just didn't notice. But ever since we had children, it's occurred to me that there might be more going on here than meets the eye.
Initially, I just thought that my children were remarkably lazy. Instead, as I discovered in the course of an investigation just recently, strange and unseen forces are at work here. It all came to light when I made the mistake of asking them to clean up their rooms.
The answer was predictable. "But, Daddy, we can't."
In response, I assumed my traditional role of "Dopey Dad", and asked the predictably stupid question, "Why not?" They were in the middle of a far-flung explanation when it first occurred to me that my children might, in fact, be from an advanced alien civilization.
In other words, I couldn't make heads or tails of the convoluted rationale they gave me for why they couldn't clean up after themselves. It had something to do with gravitational pulls and alignment of the planets and Albert Einstein trading cards and the cereal they had for breakfast and something they saw on television. It only reinforced my suspicions about them being aliens.
Even so, I decided that I needed to press the issue just in case I was wrong and they were really my children and thus my responsibility if and when I unleash them on the world. "That's odd," I suggested. "You were able to get all that stuff out of the closet and mess up your rooms in the first place."
"Yes, but you don't understand," they rebutted. Obviously, my brain is not as well developed as their alien brains. That's why they tried to simplify it for me. "If we do that, then we won't be able to finish the experiment we're working on in the kitchen."
Experiments in the kitchen are considered my wife's province, and I usually try to stay out of the way. Even so, I took a stab at sanity and suggested, "Why don't you take a break from your experiment and try cleaning up?"
"Well, because our kitchen experiment is more important than cleaning up. And besides, we can't get the stuff up off the floor. It won't move."
That prompted me to take a more serious investigative approach. "You mean that there is some physical law of nature at work here that we ordinary humans don't understand? Is there some sort of invisible forcefield that has developed around all your dirty clothes preventing you from touching them once they hit the floor?"
"Yes," they yelled excitedly. "That's what we've been trying to tell you all this time. But you wouldn't listen." I was speechless, and apparently, deaf as well. Unfortunately, while I was considering all this, the three of them were able to break free from the Father-Daughter Conversational Forcefield and returned to their kitchen experiment.
I was still mulling over the potential dangers and drawbacks of raising aliens without a license when I wandered into the bedroom and found my wife. "What are you doing?," she asked.
"Oh, I just came up here to warn you that the girls are experimenting in the kitchen again." The blood drained from her face fairly rapidly. Her mouth opened but no words came out and I figured she had gone deaf and speechless, too.
But before she left for the kitchen, I told her that I would be in the backyard making weird geometric patterns in our lawn if she needed me. I explained that I wanted the aliens to know that they can come back and get their kids whenever they're ready.
You know, just in case.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/10/188371