By The Bad Advisor

“Today is my dad’s birthday. We all forgot . . . again.

I have asked him numerous times to just provide a reminder. I always give everyone a heads-up before my birthday — it’s a courtesy as everyone is so busy nowadays.

So I got a midday ‘joking’ email about how no one wished him a happy birthday. I feel guilty, but this could all be avoided if he just gave his forgetful family a little warning instead of playing this game every year. Thoughts?”

—From “I Forgot . . . Again” via Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 6 February 2018

Dear I Forgot,

If only there were some mechanism by which we could visually measure the annual passage of time, broken up into smaller increments — say, 12 allotments of, I don’t know, 30 days or so? — that would enable us to mark important occasions such that we could plan for them before the very moment of their occurrence. What a wonder that would be! Instead, we will simply have to rely on each individual person to remember indefinitely and exhaustively which of life’s milestones are important to which people and how far ahead those people need to be apprised of the coming anniversary of the aforementioned milestones, literally the only way to have any knowledge whatsoever of the day that anything happens, ever. It’s a shame that your father is personally holding you and the rest of the world back from developing another system of measuring time, but obviously he just loves this great annual game!

Bad Advice On Employing A Sexual Harasser To Teach Your Child

“My son, Steven, and daughter-in-law, Julia, are expecting their first child and our first grandchild next month. I had what I thought was a good relationship with Julia, but I find myself devastated. Julia has decided only Steven and her mother will be allowed in the delivery room when she gives birth. I was stunned and hurt by the unfairness of the decision and tried to plead with her and my son, but Julia says she ‘wouldn’t feel comfortable’ with me there. I reminded her that I was a nurse for 40 years, so there is nothing I haven’t seen. I’ve tried to reason with Steven, but he seems to be afraid of angering Julia and will not help. I called Julia’s parents and asked them to please reason with their daughter, but they brusquely and rather rudely got off the phone. I’ve felt nothing but heartache since learning I would be banned from the delivery room. Steven told me I could wait outside and I would be let in after Julia and the baby are cleaned up and ‘presentable.’ Meanwhile, Julia’s mother will be able to witness our grandchild coming into the world. It is so unfair.

I’ve always been close to my son, but I no longer feel valued. I cannot bring myself to speak to Julia. I’m being treated like a second-class grandmother even though I’ve never been anything but supportive and helpful. How can I get them to see how unfair and cruel their decision is?”

— From “Second Class Grandma” via “Dear Prudence,” Slate, 5 February 2018

Dear Second Class Grandma,

Who can call herself “Grandma” who has not personally witnessed, with her own grandmotherly eyes, the progressive dilation of the cervix that is to produce the wee babe she will know as grandchild? What charlatan would take the name “Grandma” if she failed to be within 36 inches of the crowning blood-soaked noggin of her spawn’s spawn? Since the dawn of time, all grandmothers have been within spraying distance of errantly projectile afterbirth, and you and only you are being excluded in this way. It is appalling that your son thinks so little of you that he does not long for his mother to be as close as possible to his wife’s naked, heaving body as she produces this child for you. After all, you are a nurse!

Pregnancy looks beautiful on many women, but obviously it has turned Julia into a self-absorbed cow who believes she should have full control over who surrounds her during one of the most intense and potentially vulnerable moments of her life. Would that she weren’t so selfishly preoccupied with her own meaningless bullshit surrounding bringing a human life into the world and instead could see the incredible opportunity she has to show her respect for you, in the form of her whole entire vagina. Alas, this egotistical woman can’t see past the end of her own baby-nourishing bellybutton to the person at the center of this new family: You.

The only recourse now is to take this over Steven and Julia’s self-obsessed heads to the doctor or administrator in charge of hospital policy and confirm that there’s no rule against having two children in the delivery room.

“I’d like your opinion on a relationship question — but not the typical kind that you get. It’s about the relationship between Americans and British royalty.

Why is it that so many Americans, especially women, are obsessed with those British royals? We fought a war to throw off the oppression of privileged people like them. A couple of decades later, they sent their army to attack us and burn much of our capital. I have no problem with our being friendly to the British people, but monarchy reeks of slavery and imperialism. What do you think? Personally, I blame Walt Disney!”

—From “Paul in Sonora” via “Dear Annie,” Creators.com, 18 February 2018

Dear Paul,

Women are dim-witted fools who will cotton on to anything shiny because they are too dumb to know the difference between fantasy and reality. (Men, of course, would never indulge such an interest because they are very smart and their use of Axe body spray creates a kind of herd immunity to the manipulations of late capitalism.) Sadly in the case of British royalty, American women’s wholesale dipshittery in the face of anything wearing a hoop skirt and a crown also results in a widespread lack of patriotism, making American women an especially degenerate class of traitors to this great country, where slavery and colonization never had a home, and where everyone has always had exactly the same rights and exactly the same access to those rights forever.