F.P.S.

I spent this weekend chaperoning my son Micah at a Future Problem Solving competition. For those of you fortunate enough to not know, Future Problem Solving, or F.P.S., is a group of academic overachievers who solve problems that don’t yet and probably never will exist, hence, the F.P. part of the acronym. As one might expect, F.P.S. attracts many Harry Potter fans.
While I did get to do some stuff I’ve never done when I wasn’t high, such as walking down high school hallways and eating high school cafeteria food, my sense was that the weekend lasted several days longer than normal. Along with fellow FPS parents, I stayed at the Nathan Hale Inn. Nathan Hale was a Revolutionary War hero who was hanged by the British, and around five hours into the weekend, I found myself starting to envy him.
Not only was I a chaperone, I was also a skit judge. The skits were about finding solutions to rapidly accruing debt in developing countries. As fun as these sound to perform, they were even more fun to watch. I started taking bribes late Friday night and by the competition on Saturday afternoon, I had stockpiled some serious cash, which I then used to score some cool educational games and a sweet F.P.S. T shirt that has a human skull with an open zipper and massive brain popping out of the top of it. Anyway, predictably, the first place skit was from Greenwich.
After the skits, some disgruntled parents complained that my scoring reflected my intellectual inability to comprehend the F.P.S. philosophy. I had to set them straight. I told them, hey, we don’t live in the future. We live in the real world, a world in which your kid’s a dork and you, apparently, haven’t figured out how extortion works. So, who’s the stupid one? You tell me.