Part of the joy/agony of being a parent is that you are simultaneously experiencing life through your own aging, exhausted, crotchety, out of touch viewpoint & also the viewpoint of your child. It is surreal. My child (& don't tell her I called her that or she will scowl me into oblivion) just turned 16 & she is both everything I wasn't (Thank God.) & many things I was (Heaven help us.) Mostly I see her as an individual & not as a reflection of myself. (I've spent my entire life both shielding myself from narcissistic parents & trying desperately not to become one myself.)
I am thankful that I can still appreciate (& recall) the much ballyhooed, highly overrated, & perhaps I skipped them altogether "glory days" of my youth, & also appreciate the new-fangled, fancy-dancy, technological smorgasbord/hellscape that my daughter is growing up in. Every generation has its heroes & villains, I suppose, & many of us likely fall somewhere in between the two, flailing in a vast sea of mediocre primordial soup. But fortuitously, every once in awhile we might breach the surface long enough to sound our "barbaric yawp" into the ether.
While in the midst of our nation's political chaos & upheaval, I try to remain surreptitiously vigilant. My neighbors whom I am friendly with (who once refused my offer of a modified Rubbermaid tub to shelter their recently ousted cat from the winter weather, for fear of appearing "hoosier"), now sport 45/47 decals on the rear windshield of their matte-black extra pick-up truck & hang their giant "Trump Fuck Your Feelings" flag in their garage. But I also remain hopeful. I have to remain hopeful for the sake of my daughter, my daughter's generation, & their aging parents who will someday be hidden away in assisted living facilities, subsisting on pureed diets (or in the words of my Papa "green beans that were run through the lawn mower"). I have already predicted my fate of living out my twilight years in a haunted asylum, singing Beach Boys songs & k-pop tunes in garbled poorly attempted Korean, so I'm set.
Where I'll be in 5 years depends on where my ashes are scattered...the desert or Newark.
imo...our political mess is the result to too few toilets to flush too many turds.
GOP = Gang Of Predators
MAGA = Malevolent Alienated Greedy Assholes
Regardless of all that garbage, I hope you have a stellar week, mon Frere
Part of the joy/agony of being a parent is that you are simultaneously experiencing life through your own aging, exhausted, crotchety, out of touch viewpoint & also the viewpoint of your child. It is surreal. My child (& don't tell her I called her that or she will scowl me into oblivion) just turned 16 & she is both everything I wasn't (Thank God.) & many things I was (Heaven help us.) Mostly I see her as an individual & not as a reflection of myself. (I've spent my entire life both shielding myself from narcissistic parents & trying desperately not to become one myself.)
I am thankful that I can still appreciate (& recall) the much ballyhooed, highly overrated, & perhaps I skipped them altogether "glory days" of my youth, & also appreciate the new-fangled, fancy-dancy, technological smorgasbord/hellscape that my daughter is growing up in. Every generation has its heroes & villains, I suppose, & many of us likely fall somewhere in between the two, flailing in a vast sea of mediocre primordial soup. But fortuitously, every once in awhile we might breach the surface long enough to sound our "barbaric yawp" into the ether.
While in the midst of our nation's political chaos & upheaval, I try to remain surreptitiously vigilant. My neighbors whom I am friendly with (who once refused my offer of a modified Rubbermaid tub to shelter their recently ousted cat from the winter weather, for fear of appearing "hoosier"), now sport 45/47 decals on the rear windshield of their matte-black extra pick-up truck & hang their giant "Trump Fuck Your Feelings" flag in their garage. But I also remain hopeful. I have to remain hopeful for the sake of my daughter, my daughter's generation, & their aging parents who will someday be hidden away in assisted living facilities, subsisting on pureed diets (or in the words of my Papa "green beans that were run through the lawn mower"). I have already predicted my fate of living out my twilight years in a haunted asylum, singing Beach Boys songs & k-pop tunes in garbled poorly attempted Korean, so I'm set.