I am angry angry bitter man.
My life isn't going the way I hoped. I'm 26 and I still live with my parents. I do all sorts of stuff but most of it doesn't pay or at the very least pay well.
To function and not blame people's who's faults it's not I tend to bury that shit deeper than a septic tank.
It's frustrating but who the hell in my generation is workin' the job or getting the pay they thought they'd have 10 years ago. And to be honest there are things I've done to sabotage myself. Still there isn't some magic solution to make my life better.
My problem is and always has been I'm afraid of being morally wrong. I don't want to be the ass. As the beat goes on I'm slowly getting over that but all the same. I'm 26 and living with my parents and getting major expenses paid by them. I know how lucky I am to be able to do that and how not fair it is to them that I am.
I know how grateful I should be.
All the same it's enraging to have to listen to them when they going on about exactly what mistakes I've made, or exactly what I should be doing with my life. And what I am or am not doing with my life. I'm just plain tired.
Especially my Dad who's life experiences and personality are so dramatically different than mine. The greatest tool and hope of my life is a rock to him. So there's all the more anger and guilt and anger, as I'm just trying to make my next day a little better than my last and despite what he thinks ever so slightly succeeding at that. I'm still shit broke but I'm slightly less shit broke than I usually am at the moment. And that's a victory for me. God knows I need one. I refuse to let him take it away from me.
The biggest shot to his authority in the advice giving game is my own reflections on my past realizing that he's given me some really shitty advice in the past. And he still doesn't realize it. Father doesn't always know best.
It's not because he didn't mean well but because he grew up in a different time and place than I did. The problems I had and still have aren't necessarily the same ones he did with the same solutions.
Donald Glover speaks to me.
My dad is not nor did he ever grow up with the experience of being a nerd. He had a three brother and one sister posse along with a cadre of neighborhood friends. Me I was a socially awkward only child who had trouble making friends. I didn't grow up in a sandlot. Heck by the time high school rolled around half the kids on my block had already moved away and even now almost every friend I had from both high school or college has left the state. The ones that didn't I haven't talked to in years. I do not feel like having the "what you been up to" conversation or the "it's been too long" conversation.
That's just not me. I'll save that drama for the reunion...that I'll probably skip.
Also here's something to think about. I don't hate sports half as much as I pretend to but I find watching them to be completely boring. I never really had enough dudes around to reliably set up a pickup game when I had an hour. I grew up in an age when video games were a pretty easy work around for that. Video games are my sport. I'm into RTS's because I had a blast playing against my friend Marcus in Warcraft.
You don't always take stuff like that take that into account as a kid. Your parents are your parents. Or at least mine were. For what it's worth they did and are still doin' right by me. But when all you say to them is "I'm fine" and "Nothing happened at school" you're kind of left on your own. And to a point that is how I liked it and still do.
Let's do this.
Lindsay vs Sam
What feels like the most honest media depiction of what my life was actually like growing up and really what it was like well into my early 20's, which I'm not quite all that far removed from is Freaks and Geeks.
I've said it in other places but in middle and high school I was a geek and in college I was a freak or at least Lindsay's nerdified version of one.
The show follows a brother and their sister in their duel character arcs. Sam Weir and his group of friends are dealing with the problems of being fairly geeky, nerdy guys in school. His and his friends experiences speak to exactly what was happening in my life 15 years ago.
Part of me is afraid to right my biography because this show would be more or less the first half of it.
Though the jocks were actually pretty nice to me in high school. With the exception of a few friends it was everybody else that made me miserable.
These guys just want to survive the school day with limb intact and maybe just a little bit of dignity.
Let's just say I've had my moments being placed in the waaaaaaaaaaay outfield because the team doesn't want to deal with you. BY MY KIN! Game ended two hours ago and I'm still out there waiting for the end of the inning.
What's also interesting is I'm still kind of living Lindsay's arc of learning that while she does have her problems she's also had a ton of advantages in her life that make her "future" a lot more secure than her new found friends, "the freaks" and that she should appreciate and take advantage of them.
She's relatively smart, and smart in a way that her environment rewards. Despite her parents' cluelessness they actually do care about her, and her family has the resources to provide for her in way a lot of the freaks wish they had. And most importantly the world including her parents doesn't view her as a problem to be solved.
Her problems are one of identity and moral complexity. The death of her grandmother and her aloneness in that moment pointed to her the fallibility of her parents' paradigm. Sometimes despite best intentions things just don't work out. And it's nobody's fault.
All of the "stuff" that went into her upbringing was in the hope that her life would turnout alright. Do well in school so you can go to college and get a good job. But the reality is the world doesn't work like that. There are no guarantees and no promises no matter what you do. Hard work doesn't always get rewarded and deserve ain't got nothing to do with it. Nobody deserves to die.
That's a truth most adults can't handle let alone a kid. Her story is learning how to deal with that and still... live. To try to make a life for herself know things still might not work out as well as trying to appreciate some of the stuff she does have that she took for granted and make use of it.
Her solution is to make a clean break from her old identity but she can't quite stick the landing. She is who she is. And despite her new friends thinking of her as a bit of a corny goody-two-shoes geek herself they also wish they had what she does. Of course they aren't going to tell that to her.
And I've got stuff to do. I want to watch the whole show and talk about it but I've only made it few a few episodes, at least of this go round and need to take care of some stuff. So later days.
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