(no subject)
It's my sister's birthday today; I've just returned from a birthday morning celebration at a cute cafe at the port, where my grandmother took sister, self and one of my cousins out for breakfast. Conversation topics included:
* My grandmother's upcoming weekend trip to Amsterdam, in honor of her 79th/80th (everyone's diplomatically ambiguous about it) birthday. Apparently, to my shock, she's never been there! Or rather, never on a real touristy trip. She was in the Netherlands once, for a day and a half in 1956. It was during her two year stint as an emissary in London; she'd traveled to Paris for a convention, and instead of taking the ferry back, one of the guys she worked with gave her a lift to the Netherlands where his brother owned a textile factory, said he'd show her around, and that she could take a flight from there. So the drive through Belgium took less than a day (Europe is smaller than I remembered, yo), and at the textile factory he told her to just take whatever clothes she wanted, but she was too shy to accept it so she took the cheapest thing she could find, a blue velvet skirt, and never wore it. They went to one museum, and then she took a plane back to London, her first plane flight ever! Awesomecakes. So this weekend she's gonna be there for real, with her two daughters, and her son-in-law flying the plane back and forth, and she's gonna hang out with her grandson my cousin whose been living there for the past two years and nagging him not to smoke ♥.
* Hilariously unsubtle prodding into (a) our love lives (b) our drinking habits, in a very "I'm cool, you can talk to me" kind of way.
* The cafe logo, which is a painting of a house that belongs to a friend of hers. "This is Ora's house in Rosh Pina! Did I tell you this is Ora's house? Did you see the painting? I sat here with her last week!" LOL, she made us read about it on the back of the menu, and then goo around to see the painting on the wall by the restroom, and then gave us all the place's business card so we could all have small paintings of Ora's house in our wallets.
* Reprimanding our generation for being apathetic /o\ Which is in a lot of ways true, and she sounds so disappointed by it, and it makes me sad. She said that the past Independence Day was one of the saddest of her life. That she and her friends see what's going on in politics, in the government, and they convene in their little cabinet in her kitchen, headed by a 93-year-old, and discuss what can be done and send letters and write newspaper columns and rage and think, really? A group of 80-year-olds, we're the ones trying to change things? Where are the students? Where is the young generation? Why don't they care? And that they worked so hard for this country to exist -- that so many people died for it (yeah, I'm ignoring that part, but a quote's a quote) -- and that it's depressing and worrying that this is the state of the country that they're leaving our generation, and that it just seems like our generation doesn't care.
And you know, I have some justifications -- about idealizing the past and about our generation not being as apathetic as it seems and students focusing more on social issues than political ones -- but you know, in the end, I got nothing. To make an enormous generalization, my generation, especially those from my social class, really are generally apathetic to creating change, other than sliding a ballot into the box once every four 2.5 years. I really don't know how to comfort her about that.
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* My grandmother's upcoming weekend trip to Amsterdam, in honor of her 79th/80th (everyone's diplomatically ambiguous about it) birthday. Apparently, to my shock, she's never been there! Or rather, never on a real touristy trip. She was in the Netherlands once, for a day and a half in 1956. It was during her two year stint as an emissary in London; she'd traveled to Paris for a convention, and instead of taking the ferry back, one of the guys she worked with gave her a lift to the Netherlands where his brother owned a textile factory, said he'd show her around, and that she could take a flight from there. So the drive through Belgium took less than a day (Europe is smaller than I remembered, yo), and at the textile factory he told her to just take whatever clothes she wanted, but she was too shy to accept it so she took the cheapest thing she could find, a blue velvet skirt, and never wore it. They went to one museum, and then she took a plane back to London, her first plane flight ever! Awesomecakes. So this weekend she's gonna be there for real, with her two daughters, and her son-in-law flying the plane back and forth, and she's gonna hang out with her grandson my cousin whose been living there for the past two years and nagging him not to smoke ♥.
* Hilariously unsubtle prodding into (a) our love lives (b) our drinking habits, in a very "I'm cool, you can talk to me" kind of way.
* The cafe logo, which is a painting of a house that belongs to a friend of hers. "This is Ora's house in Rosh Pina! Did I tell you this is Ora's house? Did you see the painting? I sat here with her last week!" LOL, she made us read about it on the back of the menu, and then goo around to see the painting on the wall by the restroom, and then gave us all the place's business card so we could all have small paintings of Ora's house in our wallets.
* Reprimanding our generation for being apathetic /o\ Which is in a lot of ways true, and she sounds so disappointed by it, and it makes me sad. She said that the past Independence Day was one of the saddest of her life. That she and her friends see what's going on in politics, in the government, and they convene in their little cabinet in her kitchen, headed by a 93-year-old, and discuss what can be done and send letters and write newspaper columns and rage and think, really? A group of 80-year-olds, we're the ones trying to change things? Where are the students? Where is the young generation? Why don't they care? And that they worked so hard for this country to exist -- that so many people died for it (yeah, I'm ignoring that part, but a quote's a quote) -- and that it's depressing and worrying that this is the state of the country that they're leaving our generation, and that it just seems like our generation doesn't care.
And you know, I have some justifications -- about idealizing the past and about our generation not being as apathetic as it seems and students focusing more on social issues than political ones -- but you know, in the end, I got nothing. To make an enormous generalization, my generation, especially those from my social class, really are generally apathetic to creating change, other than sliding a ballot into the box once every four 2.5 years. I really don't know how to comfort her about that.
comments on Dreamwidth.