Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

As far as life lessons my parents laid out the secret to success: Do the exact opposite of what they did. Like my notoriously bad luck betting on the Super Bowl, where my friends find out who I am going for and bet on the other team, when it comes to fathering decisions I think about whatever my dad would do and go with the opposite. You know those What Would Jesus Do bracelets? WWJD? I have a WWJD bracelet, too, but for me it means What Wouldn’t Jim Do? So here are a few of my parenting techniques, thanks to watching the failure of my own mom and dad:

1. DON’T BE CHEAP WITH YOURSELF

I’ve thoroughly chronicled my family’s cheapness over the years: Saturdays spent dumpster diving, decorating a potted rubber plant for Christmas instead of a real tree, having a rolling portable dishwasher. But there’s one thing I’ve never written about that I think is completely symbolic of my family’s cheapness, and it is our relationship to Tupperware.

Let me explain. I’m not saying avoid storage containers in general. I hate waste, so I want you to be able to store leftovers. What I’m talking about is hanging on to the container, ironically, past its expiration date.

This may not resonate with the younger folk reading this. It seems like Tupperware had the market cornered from 1959 until about two years ago. During this period, it was as if no one else could figure out how to extrude plastic and make a bowl-and-lid combo out of it. Now there are hundreds of brands of disposable containers you buy at the grocery store, use once and leave behind at the party if the guacamole isn’t completely eaten. Before this, there were these things called Tupperware parties. Housewives would gather and one of the ladies who had hooked up with the Tupperware Corporation because she was bored now that the kids were off at college would sell them containers. You couldn’t get these precious gems at a store. You had to know someone who knows someone and gather under the cloak of darkness.

It’s not just Tupperware having a monopoly on snap-lid containers that boggles my mind. I’m still trying to figure out why, for eighty years, there was one and only one blimp. Above every stadium or sporting event since the 1930s has flown the Goodyear blimp. That’s all there was. But it seems like somewhere around 2004 we got inundated with new blimps. Now there’s the Met Life blimp, the Budweiser blimp, the Fujitsu blimp…

Blimp technology hasn’t changed that much. It’s not like Goodyear had a patent on dirigible technology. Why did it take nearly a century for someone to think, “Hey, you know that blimp that’s getting all the camera time? We should get one, too.” Maybe the Hindenburg got the competitors out of the market. The Goodyear higher-ups must have been thrilled. “If they just keep running this footage every year, we’ll be all set.”

It also occurs to me that a blimp is a weird thing to represent a high-performance tire. Blimps move slower than a donkey and use no tires. If everyone drove a blimp, Goodyear would be out of business. Why’d they go with that? This would be like if Jenny Craig’s mascot was a manatee.

The point is whether its blimps or Tupperware, I don’t know how they fended off the competition for that long. On January first, every year, Bob Tupperware and Roger Goodyear must have gotten up and thought, “I pulled it off. Another year and no one caught on.”

The current cornucopia of containers was not the case when I was a kid, and thus provided ample opportunity for the cheapness of my family to come shining through. My grandmother had one piece of Tupperware, which looked like it had been through three tours in Vietnam. It was so stained, cloudy and scarred that light wouldn’t pass through it. Yet it was treated like the Holy Grail. This was a big-ticket item to the Carollas. It was considered a durable good in our household — on par with an automobile or a washing machine.

This grizzled container was probably as old as me when we reached peak cheapness. I was around twenty-five, and was a struggling starving-artist — bachelor barely staying afloat doing construction. I would go over to my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner, when my Hungarian step-grandfather would make a giant kettle of goulash. There’d always be plenty left over and I’d get to take some home. On more than one occasion, he would be ladling the stew into the solitary piece of Tupperware in my grandmother’s house and I would hear, from my seat in the other room, her come into the kitchen and hit him with some stern words. “What are you doing? No! Give him the mayonnaise jar.”

My grandmother felt I could not be trusted with the sacred Tupperware. She acted as though it had come over on the Mayflower and been passed down generation to generation. I lived three blocks from them, was their flesh and blood and had no history of theft and yet my grandmother forced my grandfather to take the goulash out of the Tupperware and put it into the Best Foods mayonnaise jar with the rusty, crusty metal lid.

I don’t know what she thought would happen. Did she imagine that as soon as the Tupperware and I got out of the house I’d dive into my mini-pickup truck and head to Mexico to start a new life? I was broke as shit. I was definitely going to come back the next Sunday to refill said Tupperware with more goulash.

This is just one of a million examples of the poverty mentality that permeated my family. I’ve declared that I will never force my kids to endure these feelings. I suggest that you do the same. Because the real message you send when you act like a cheap bastard is not “take care of your stuff.” The message is “This item cost me over a dollar and it is not disposable. Our relationship, however, is.”

We have a billion plastic snap-lid containers in our kitchen, and my kids can do whatever the fuck they want with them. I value my relationship with them more than a food-storage container. I can get a new one of those at the grocery store, I can’t get a new son or daughter at the supermarket. At least, not without ending up in an Amber Alert situation.

Speaking of those containers. Because I’ve got twins, I’m getting everything in the jumbo size now. I go to Costco and come home with a huge vat of mayonnaise and a kiddie pool of peanut butter. And then I get into that argument with the wife when we’re scraping the bottom of the container but it’s still taking up a beer keg worth of room in the fridge. “There’s still enough in there for one sandwich.” “It’s empty.” “You have to scrape the bottom of it.” I hate the space it takes up, but I can’t bring myself to just chuck it out like Lynette would.

So here’s my solution. Why not equip every jumbo-sized container of mustard or barbecue sauce with a little escape pod on the side, like the dock of the International Space Station? Just a small container that holds two ounces on the side, so when you’re done with the five-gallon bucket of Dijonnaise, you can scrape the remnants at the bottom into the little bladder on the side, twist it, snap it off, put a cap on it and put it back in the fridge. That way you’ve got just enough for one more sandwich, and will have reclaimed the space above the crisper. Coming soon to a store near you: The Ace Carolla Condiment Dinghy.

2. EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED, FAKE IT…

Both historically and currently, my parents haven’t been able to give a shit about shit I give a shit about.