Sunday 20 January 2013

A Day in the Decade of Joe Ex-teen

As Confuscious  may say my name is not a confusing anagram.

To confuse or not to confuse, I sometimes explain how it was to my kids  and how it is now, to give a benchmark, much as my parents  monetary system counted in twelves and stuff, and I, thank the good Lord, counted in tens. I try to show the teenagers where they came from and in some way where they should go, without defining how they should get there, but hopefully avoiding my mistakes. Things change, sometimes for good reason,. I explain things, they may see I confuse things. They see things through modern dynamic eyes, and I through grey tinted spectacles.

My kids measure time in days, and I in decades. A 10% of my life is a third of theirs, give or take a short month in my book and a long month in their Kindle.

Like other things, I measure things on a different gauge to their view of standard
I measure hair in shades of grey and they in inches.
I measure growth in a buckle in a belt-hole and they on my eyeline and extent of my neck-ache
I judge armpit hair in degrees of density and they in "Yes or No"
I measure nasal hair on their escape velocity to moustache dashes and they with a torch
They measure fashion in S and M and I measure in a lottery of Xs.
I measure pimples counts in singular and they zits in plural.

These are examples of how things have changed for me over the years

And in the same way I can  look around at a home that resembles a quantum leap in technology and stuff from my teens: phones without cords, televisions that are flat, microwaves that have moved on from a joke about a hand gently quivering, computers are not a major piece of furniture. I remember records that were black, wood that was formica, glasses that were NHS.

And they remember a little of nothing as nappies were changed, schools were visited and children deposited in tears and then retrieved with smiles hopefully, footballs  that were kicked in between acrobatic falls. I remember these days, they kind of don't. They believe my stories of old from photographs and videos. Now they remember each day, a new day, each weekend to do things that I am not to be told. They see a canvas, and I see a canvas in a frame with paint-by-numbers guidance provided by moi, they see no boundaries, they see a blank canvas.

And so it should be.... but when I lie on the sofa amidst my middle age crisises and feel that a cup of tea is not going to calm the staying powers of carrying on, do I feel the need for a happy pill .... I say thrice no, not when there's Cadbury Chocolate bar to eat. When all else, hair, dyes, bellies, belts, hair, rashes, nostrils, snobs, trousers, flares, fails there is chocolate.....aah.
And this explains the metal in my teeth, whilst their teeth are only caged in metal.

And the morale of this tale is, as aging progresses and the Age progresses and as Confuscious may say ~I no Scofu ~ which is not really an angram either, more an unnecessary confusion, so its time to go with the flow and perhaps occasionally steer the boat to calmer waters if the boundaries are a waterfall.

2 comments:

  1. You're right, this is probably as it should be. My mum has told me stories of when I was a child all through my adult life, but I was never particularly interested in looking back until I had my own child. I suppose that's when the age gap between parent and child narrows.

    Mind you, speak for yourself with regard to the belly and nose hair!

    Pass the Cadbury's chocolate, will you?

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  2. I feel suitably admonished about letting my belly go further than genetically intended and nasal hair probably going as far as genetically intended. Now how about bum fluff?

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