According to Oscar Wilde, the only thing to do with good advice is pass it along because it’s never of any use to the person receiving it.

And that’s on my mind right now as I ponder the new condition of my son’s ears.

Cheetah Boy just turned 18, and his first act as a legal adult was to run away and join the circus.

No, just kidding, he didn’t run away. Now that he’s attained his majority, he just did something he’s been threatening to do for years: He got both of his ears pierced.

And, to add insult to injury, he put big fake rhinestone studs in them that almost seem to glow in the dark. They make my otherwise handsome son look like a cheesy wannabe hip-hop star. And, by the way, I don’t mean rhinestones that are fake diamonds. I mean fake rhinestones. The faux following the faux.

The day after the birthday dinner, he came home with these headlights in his ears, glowing with pride and defiance. He couldn’t wait for me to see them.

I made him happy by yelling when I saw them because I’d banned him from getting a pair of earrings for years. I knew he was waiting for the outburst, so I didn’t want to disappoint him, but secretly I thought they wouldn’t be so bad if they were just small gold studs or hoops.

The reason I bring up Oscar Wilde is that the 1,872 parenting books I’ve read since my kids were little all advised me to ignore grooming issues on the theory that you should “pick your battles” and only throw a hissy over things that really matter.

Your kid comes home with blue hair? Cool. Dye yours to match. Just make sure he still does his homework. Because it’s really the homework you care about, right?

Because the blue hair will probably disappear of its own accord if you ignore it.

The irony is that I wouldn’t have minded if he’d only gotten one ear pierced, like the guys of my generation.

I’d tried to help him get one ear pierced when we happened to be in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district on his 16th birthday. I thought it would be a great way to remember his first visit to the Haight. He’d been asking to get an ear pierced for a while.

Unfortunately, all the tattoo shops we visited required proof of age before they’d stick any needles in, and he didn’t have any with him. So he came home with earlobes intactus.

But that condition still bothered him. After he started playing football, he began agitating to get earrings in both ears.

“No,” I told him. “It would make you look like a thug.”

“My football coach has them,” my son insisted. “So do all the players in the NFL.”

“I don’t care,” I told him. “They look trashy.”

Perhaps I was just making distinctions that seem arbitrary to the teenage mind, but the double-ear piercing look has always seemed “ghetto” to me, the province of disreputable types and rappers who act and sound like they’re from Compton even though they grew up in Woodland Hills.

Or as my kids would say, it’s “ratchet.”

Ratchet is a somewhat fluid slang expression that once meant a trashy, slutty woman but has since morphed into all things vaguely ghetto, lawless and tasteless.

Reminds me of my own teenage years, to be sure, and the first few years I worked in Hollywood. But no need to mention any of that to the offspring.

In my distress over my son’s new ratchet earlobes, I turned for sympathy to my teenage daughter, who often agrees with me over the general issue of whether her brother is a moron.

“Don’t you think those earrings look hideous?” I asked Curly Girl, needing some reassurance.

She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “No.”

“What are you talking about? They’re awful,” I continued, even as it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t going to get any backup here.

“Mom, every guy at school is wearing earrings like that,” she told me.

“What, they’re all Liza Minnelli impersonators?” I asked. She looked at me quizzically and I realized she no more had any idea who Liza Minnelli was than I did Wiz Khalifa.

I also realized that my son used the money I had given him as a birthday present to get the ears pierced and buy the earrings I detested, which seemed wrong on so many levels that it short-circuited my brain to think about it.

Still, I’m trying to think positively about the whole situation. I guess I can be grateful that it was only his ears that were pierced. And at least they weren’t a tattoo, or plugs.

The first night he brought them home, he came into my bathroom with the special ear cleaning solution he’d spent untold money to buy – when we have three bottles of peroxide that would work just as well – and asked me to come and help him clean his piercings.

“No, thanks,” I told him. “I’d rather not.”

“What?” he asked me, outraged that I wouldn’t help him with his medical needs. “Why not?”

“Don’t want to,” I answered and turned the page on the book I was reading. He shook his head at this sign of maternal neglect and started working with the disinfectant himself.

I realized then that I do have some hope. If he keeps his ears as clean as he keeps his bedroom, they’re bound to get infected. I’m not wishing infection on my son, but if it did happen, he’d have to take the earrings out until they healed.

Hmm. Then it’s possible they could just disappear. Things disappear around our house all the time.

It certainly would have nothing to do with me.

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Contact the writer: 714-796-7994 or mfisher@ocregister.com