Day 20(22): Troubled

We live in an old apartment that just randomly decided it didn't want to have internet anymore on Saturday. Couple that with a family emergency and we have no blog for Saturday! If it had been any other day except Sunday, I would have been able to use the library computer. Here we are, though and you will take what you can get! Let's be real, though, I'm just doing this for me so I guess I'll take what I can get.

I wanted to talk about a really cliche phrase I hear thrown around, "troubled, usually followed by teen. This has become completely meaningless as of late. I know people now who have real problems and I think "Oh man, no internet, I am really troubled by this" but the honest truth is it was a minor inconvenience. Yes, I do work online so it was slightly annoying to have to adjust my schedule to catch up on work that I missed but that's a total first world problem. In fact, that's not even a first world problem anymore, it's just a moment to breath and not be inundated with information for a little while.

The second part of that, though, the "troubled teen" phrase, that's what bothers me. You know what troubles a teen the most? Being a teen. It's that point where you are still treated like a kid but you're also expected to act like an adult. I've been around a teenager long enough now to realize that it's the point where you feel like you know enough to function in the adult world but it's also the point right before how little you really know. I enjoy talking to teenagers if only for the sometimes hilarious misconceptions they hold. Likewise, they can often be surprisingly insightful.I think that's the source of their angst. If I was one second Yoda and the next second Jar-Jar, I would be troubled, too.

I think I don't really have any right to use the phrase "troubled" anymore and that's what troubles me. When I was a kid, I pictured myself living on the edge in some kind of anti-establishment pipe dream. I am so far up the establishment's butthole right now, I'm almost Republican. That scares me because it feels like there was so much left that I wanted to do but now I'm being led down a slaughter chute towards an inevitable, boring death. I think I read that occasionally, a cow will suddenly buck up and try to escape from the single file line that leads into the slaughter house but between the mass of bodies behind him and the narrow path it's on, the cow can't escape and dies anyway, just the same as any of the others. I know I'm not a special snowflake but I guess I just wanted something more for myself and at the same time, I am pretty comfortable with where I'm at. It's a really satisfying yet depressing existence.