You will warp your children. It’s an inevitable byproduct of the parenting process, just like how you can’t make a hot dog without two or three rat turds finding their way into the mix.

Some warping is a good thing, in the long run. A completely unwarped, innocent child would grow up to be one of those scary, infantile grown ups who’s way too into Harry Potter. If you’re lucky, you warp your child so that they have a healthy skepticism about The Ways of the World. If you’re unlucky, they grow up to collect other people’s skin. But in all likelihood, you won’t know how you’ve warped your child for good.

I can trace my own warping–positive and negative–to a lot of things. But I know that parental TV viewing played a major part. Particularly, my dad’s fondness for Monty Python. He never forced me to watch it, but it was on in the house often, back in the days when Python was a PBS staple.

I remember liking it a lot when I was way too young to know what I was watching. I had to ask my dad to translate certain Britishisms like pram and lorry and explain allusions to historic events I hadn’t learned about yet. But I liked the really weird cartoons, and the fact that in any given episode you’d probably see some boobs (PBS was the best friend to a kid without cable in the 80s).

Was I destined to be a nerd anyway, and annoy the shit out of my friends by repeating sketches they’d never see? Yeah, probably. But the fact that I could recite “The Lumberjack Song” at age 7 definitely sped up the process. Was it my father’s intention to bruise my fragile psyche with anagrams and cross dressing? I doubt it. Still, it happened.

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