Skip to main content

Bug or Feature

 Loved this bit of Seth Godin wisdom first thing this morning. For adults he says "Crankiness isn’t a feature. It’s a bug". He is right ofcourse but the idea extends to many other forms of childishness that adults display. What was cute in kindergarten is repulsive in a thirty year old. Though often those bad habits stick around way past thirty and you have on your hands an absolutely insufferable sixty year old. It is like they needed behavior training their whole life and never received any. Bad parenting is a gift that keeps giving and its the world at large that is left to deal with it. 

This brought to mind a certain individual I happen to know. V by any objective measure is very hard to deal with and be around, even her kids attest to that. She has developed coping mechanisms over the years to attention bomb random strangers who she can strike up conversations with on demand and then go on with her life. So observing from the outside she seems friendly and chatty. That is only good for a fifteen minute interaction. Beyond that V is unable to control that bratty toddler inside her that is now a full featured menace at sixty. Maybe no one told her that for an adult bratty is not a feature but a bug. 

I don't know if I am done raising J yet. Even though there is little for me to do actively these days, I do draw her attention to areas of improvement, quirks of character that are cute at her age but won't be ten years out. Some of the advisory sticks and I do see change over time. The rest I expect is a process of smoothing as she goes through life, meeting various forms of resistance and friction.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more