If Youth Only Knew, If Age Only Could...

[mallorys_camera]

Continuing in my pissy mood today. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s good. I guess I’m just one of those people who goes about wanting to randomly smash people’s heads into the wall a certain percentage of the time. Must be my Scorpio moon. The rest of the time I’m a pussycat.

Maybe it’s just autumn.

The Future Mother of My Unborn Grandchildren is coming to visit for a couple of days next week and I’m trying to think of ways I can spoil her without seeming too officious.

Liza’s coming to New York without Max who has a fairly demanding job these days. She and I have never really spent any time together, so I decided to invite her up here to get the opportunity to know her a little. Check out her teeth. Measure her thighs. Administer the Stanford Binet. All those things that prospective mothers-in-law need to do to make sure their sons’ choices are good breeding stock.

Ha ha.

“She’s very nervous about visiting you,” Max told me on the phone last night. Squeals of girlish protest in the background. “She doesn’t want to you to know, of course –"

“Put Liza on the phone,” I said. “Hello, Liza. You should be nervous to meet me. In fact, you should be terrified because I’m going to spend 72 hours judging you –“

This was a joke, of course, but possibly the wrong kind of thing to say because it’s not clear to me that Liza has a sense of humor.

“But seriously, Liza, Max is the one who should be nervous because I’m going to share all his childhood secrets with you –“

This time she laughed.

One of my conceits is that I get along very well with people who are much younger than me. That’s probably a delusion. Older people are really quite irrelevant to younger people. Give us half a chance and we’ll start nattering about the way things used to be.

You didn’t invent it! I want to tell them. We were just like you only we used different technology!

Most of the time, though, I’m successful in shutting myself up, smiling vaguely when they get passionate.

Comments

[melissa-maples.livejournal.com]

One of my conceits is that I get along very well with people who are much younger than me. That’s probably a delusion. Older people are really quite irrelevant to younger people.

Au contraire! Clearly you're not familiar with Ari Seth Cohen and his work, which has now become something of a movement. I love him and what he does.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I checked out his blog on yr recommendation.

Good stuff!

I wanna be a Senior Style Icon when I grow up. :-)

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I want to be irrelevant to younger people when I grow up!

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

i think younger people find it delightful when older people break the "respect your elders, i'm gonna judge you" role and display irreverence or "keeping it real", like interact with them in a more personal way.

maybe its an american thing, but i think we all like to feel we are equal in some way. that could be it.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

You have probably already succeeded in that ambition! :-)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

There are a few younger women that I consider friends (including several I first met on LJ.)

Hopefully, Liza won't think I'm a demented old bat.

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I know I'm already invisible ;p

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

if you both want to please one another, most likely you will get along.

i gues that's another way of looking at how some older people can be dismissive of what they dont understand, creating barriers to getting along. young people these days with their...xyz

[saltdawg.livejournal.com]

This was a joke, of course, but possibly the wrong kind of thing to say because it’s not clear to me that Liza has a sense of humor.

I've been chopping wood with my father for most of the past week. This is usually an arduous emotional task because my father and I, despite having 44 years of practice of me holding the flash-light for him, have vastly different approaches to the way work should be performed. However, my sister's fiancee was pressed into service alongside of me, which mitigated the emotional and procedural snarls my father and I usually get into. Besides, having a third person to help out cut out time down by about three quarters. The Fiancee and I have similar ideas about how to work in a "team".

However, about two days ago, My father was chain-sawing all the 4' pieces of wood, from all the trees we'd felled, down to 10" logs and Fiancee was tossing the wood from the chain-sawing station towards my chopping block, and I was splitting that shit with a maul. Anyway, I had just set up a log on the block, and the Fiancee tossed a new log towards me. It skipped on a rock, jumped off of another log, and knocked over my ready-to-be-split log on the block.

You son of a bitch, I said, You just ruined all of my plans! Of course, I was completely joking, in the way that seamen do when, as the brits say, "taking the piss" out of each other. Only, this Birminghamanian ex-coal miner completely took me out of context. I heard him. Under his breath, he said Son of a bitch?

Maybe it's because I was the junior of the group. Maybe it was because he's an adviser/supervisor in his current tunnel-digging vocation, but there has been a palpable cooling between the two of us in the last couple of days.

I always thought he had a sense of humor that would temper my sister's lack of the same. However it seems like I'm back to being the black sheep with no devil's advocate...

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

He may have a sense of humor. The issue with your particular joke -- I'm not criticizing here; just explicating -- is that he does not know you very well and you made the joke under circumstances where an angry response would have been equally appropriate. No ha-ha, funny joke signal in other words.

[saltdawg.livejournal.com]

I've been told that my humor is something to be learned, not understood.
I know these things. I was just saying...

[saltdawg.livejournal.com]

Although if he was on a boat, a thin skin like that would be pierced quite easily.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Right. But a boat is a very specialized environment. :-)