{"id":17628,"date":"2014-03-29T15:08:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-29T15:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/im-talking-with-a-boy-hes-at-that-age-when-the\/"},"modified":"2014-03-29T15:08:19","modified_gmt":"2014-03-29T15:08:19","slug":"im-talking-with-a-boy-hes-at-that-age-when-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/im-talking-with-a-boy-hes-at-that-age-when-the\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>I\u2019m talking with a boy. He\u2019s at that age when the edges of the man he will become are just starting to press against his baby-round face. He\u2019s got his first opinions and ideas and jokes, which are horrible, because there is nothing that boys his age love more than corny jokes. There is a whole industry of knock-knock-joke books for boys this age. Everything about him is gangly; his voice and his limbs fit awkwardly, like hand-me-downs. He\u2019s young enough that his smile is easy, and he is the kind of boy who finds reasons to smile in everything: the cracking of his voice, a fire-engine siren, the fact that a grown-up is talking to him and listening to what he says. When I talk with kids like this, our conversations always seem to go the same way:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo you\u2019re telling me these are all the books published last year for kids?\u201d they ask me. \u201cThat\u2019s a lot of books. That\u2019s more books than I could read in a year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>    There was something missing. I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYep, it\u2019s a few thousand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd in all of those thousands of books, I\u2019m just not in them?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWell\u2026um\u2026yes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAre there books about talking animals?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOh, sure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd crazy magical futures?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAbsolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd superpowers? And the olden days when people dressed funny? And all the combinations of those things? Like talking animals with superpowers in magical futures \u2026 but no me?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBecause you\u2019re brown.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/03\/16\/opinion\/sunday\/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html?_r=0\">&ldquo;The Apartheid of Children\u2019s Literature&rdquo;<\/a> (via <a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/cauda-pavonis.tumblr.com\/\">cauda-pavonis<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m talking with a boy. He\u2019s at that age when the edges of the man he will become are just starting to press against his baby-round face. He\u2019s got his first opinions and ideas and jokes, which are horrible, because there is nothing that boys his age love more than corny jokes. There is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4Ak","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}