It's OK to get upset. It's not like you have much of a choice. It just happens. The important thing is to eventually stop being upset, recognize the world for what it is, and adapt.
Why does my 90 year old granddad pester my brother to get married? "When are you going to meet a nice girl and do your duty to society?" He's got great ideas like, "Let the neighborhood girls bring you baked goods." Asking my brother when he's going to get married is like asking the pope when he'll get into rap. It's not beyond the realm of reason, but boy, wouldn't that make the evening news. Why stake your hope on THAT? Well I think things used to be a lot more homogeneous, expectations-wise. Theoretically, every white man believed in Jesus, popped out babies, and definitely wasn't a sissy. Now, even non-whites are (theoretically) afforded access to the economy and human decency. Non-whites! My grandfather isn't entirely at ease with this development. Old homogeneous ideas are, like, there was once a correct way for all parents to raise all children. I'm using correct in the religious sense here. Correct parents had correct kid...
My son mentioned yesterday that they say the pledge of allegiance every day at school. I said, hey, that's something we have in common, because I had to say it every day growing up too. Then I explained propaganda to him. Let's say you're in power. Your job is a lot easier if everybody is on board with you. So you repeat a message over and over about how great everything is, regardless of if it's true. Like, do we actually live in a land "with liberty and justice for all"? Of course not. You don't have to be very old to see through that one. Then he mentioned that they sing, "My country tis of thee sweet land of liberty," every day and we laughed at how that doesn't even make grammatical sense any more. The funny thing of course is that propaganda works sometimes. Repeat that message over and over again and under the right conditions, people will agree. There's probably some underlying physiological explanation, like hearing a repeated...
We had a great time, but things, as they say, did not go smoothly. I slid my kid's passport into the kiosk at the airport and saw, "Travel document expired." My face fell. The kid panicked. First I calmed him down, but I instantly knew what the rest of my day was going to look like. I was gonna recite identification numbers into telephones. I was gonna quest for strange and magical ingredients for a modern incantation to renew the passport of a child. I was gonna wait in lines in government buildings. I was going to give a lot of money to an airline. In what I consider to be my finest bureaucratic hour, I held a new passport that afternoon and we left the next morning. We arrived in the burnt out woods of the Northwest Territories, 2 hours from any kind of civilization by car. We left 90 degrees and humid and arrived in 40 degrees, wind and rain forecast. We forgot the tent poles. Tent 2x4s, really. It's an old school canvas tent that ties. Anyway, the kid panicked...
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