Friday, June 27
Anyway, there were a few other things my Mum was moaning about, the same things that she always moans about every time she gives us one of her "talks." They are, in no particular order: me and my sister don't do enough around the house to help; we treat her as if she's stupid; we never appreciate the things we have; we're always asking for more; the fact that my Mum "never had half the things we have when she was young" (my personal favourite that one); and the fact that I treat this house "like a hotel."As I said in an earlier post sometime, I've reached saturation point with these topics. They no longer register except to make me more and more pissed off with the whole sequence of events. Let's pick apart these points one-by-one, starting with my favourite one, that I have it a whole lot better than she did when she was young. This one is always, always being brought up, usually preceded by the words "I know I say this a lot, but..." This time we had some new information. Apparently, my Grandparents were so poor / not well-off that when the fashionable socks to wear at school were from Marks & Spencers, my Mum had to go without because my grandparents thought that M&S was too expensive. I hadn't heard this one before. Nowadays, she continued, we (me and my sister) won't wear anything without a brand name on it, and will deliberately pick expensive items over cheaper ones.
I perhaps should point out here that my family is fairly well off, because my Dad has a pretty well-paid job at the moment, and has done for a fair few years. My Mum is the perfect hypocrite here, because she is the one who adores shopping, and thinks nothing of spending a whole load of money on one or two items. In my view, she is trying to make up for the (deprived?) childhood she had by being very materialistic now she can afford to be. Then she berates my sister especially for wanting a pair of £75 Nike (boo!) trainers rather than another pair for £35. Hypocrisy is the lowest common denominator for every person alive. For me, brand names aren't particularly important. I was never one of those kids who refused to wear something if it wasn't (e.g) Nike or Reebok. I'm still that way now, quite happy buying own-brand jeans or whatever from a shop like Burtons or Topman rather than paying a stupid amount for a pair of Levis. The problem with being anti-brands is that whether you like the brands themselves or not, the actual clothing they sell is good quality. Nike trainers are infinitely better than Hi-Tec trainers; FCUK t-shirts are better than Burtons', and so on and so forth. In this way, I'm quite happy to pay big money every once in a while for a quality piece of clothing, but generally I choose to wear crappy, no-name clothes.
The reason why me, my sister and my generation have it better than my parents did is precisely because they had it so (yeah, right) bad. They want us to have a better time of it than they did, and they way to express this is through buying us whatever we want, because they know how they felt when this was refused to them. I'm no psychologist, but is this some sort of guilt transferrence? Maybe my generation is naturally greedy, maybe we are naturally always wanting more. However, maybe we are this way because we know no different. We have generally had it good because our parents' generation want to distance themselves so much from the generation that they grew up as. In a capitalist, materialistic world, the best way to show this is to buy their children whatever they wanted. I offer no solution to this position we find ourselves in, nor attempt to justify it, but I merely question why the older generation have done this, then complain about what they have created / initiated. The creation turning against its master?
The final little thing I want to discuss is the way in which my Mum thinks we regard her as stupid. She isn't stupid, that's obvious, but she maybe isn't as intelligent as my Dad or myself. Excuse me whilst I go deflate my ego a bit... Anyway, she always says things which seem really, really stupid to me in particular, which we bring up time and time again (just like her talk topics, in fact), just to have a laugh at. She doesn't talk in a particularly educated manner (nor do I, to be honest), and she gets her words mixed up every so often. It's just a bit of a laugh when we make light of it. She needs some thicker skin. I've coped for the past 3 or 4 years with being accused of being gay just because I never have any success with women. It doesn't bother me, I just laugh it off, and sometimes live up to the comments by acting overtly camp. It's all one big joke, my friends who rib me about it know that I'm not gay, in the same way my family know that my Mum isn't stupid.
This turned out to be a bit of a long post, so well done for getting this far if you have. My family, the same as everybody else's on the planet.
