ME: Hey kid, look. Vitamin String Quartet did a whole album of Nirvana.
THE QUEEN: I don’t know them.
ME: You know. Smells Like Teen Spirit? Here, listen.
TQ: Hmmm….nope.
ME: You’re messing with me.
TQ: No, seriously, Mom. That doesn’t sound familiar at all.
ME : develops more gray hair
SHE WAS BORN IN PORTLAND IN THE 1990s FOR CRISSAKES WHAT IS UP WITH THIS I DON’T EVEN
No parents were harmed in the making of the slumber party. Nobody broke anything, or cried, or abused the cat. (Total injuries: One nonbleeding scrape, which was fixed with a Pirates of the Caribbean type band-aid.)
Note to self for the future: teenagers eat a lot of food. There is no such thing as “I’m a little concerned that we’re going to have leftovers.”
Edited: Athenian Abroad kindly pointed out that I referred back to the previous “the sky is falling” report by the NEA, which was issued in 2002. The latest report can be accessed here.
The National Endowment for the Arts is supposed to promote the arts, of course, so one is unsurprised to find them arguing that people need to, you know, spend more time doing artsy things. Especially those damn philistine kids with their PSPs and their Intertubes.
What’s unfortunate is that their advocacy piece is being taken as objective proof that “Americans don’t read.”
The short version: As soon as you start whining about how coddled Kids These Days are and how overprotecting [other] parents are, you have officially become a blathering old fart, and you might as well have a disclaimer slung around your neck: “Please disregard the above as fatally tainted with half-assed nostalgia. Also, my memory isn’t what it used to be.”
Yes, I am old enough to remember Gerald Ford being President. My only real commentary on his time as President was that, as a very young child, I apparently had some dim awareness of inflation and that things cost too much, and that poor people couldn’t afford food. (That would have been my dad’s explanation, I think. Mom would probably have explained price indexing.) Being, oh, four or five, it occurred to me that the solution to this problem would simply be to make a law that nothing should cost over $2. Naturally, the person to best implement such a law was the President.
Back in those days, when you wanted to write the President, you sat down and wrote a letter. On paper. And you mailed it with a stamp, not via e-mail or an online petition fercrissakes.
You also used your very best crayons for the job.
President Ford probably could have implemented my $2 into WIN for all the good it did the country, and for all I know he did. I was not appointed to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, but I did receive a thank-you letter and an autographed 8″x10″ glossy photo of the President.
It was very likely read by an intern and signed with an autopen. Even before e-mail, I doubt that Ford had time to personally read and respond to his correspondence, even amusing letters by grade-schoolers. I like to think that he might have, though. He was that kind of President.
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