the sickness

I'm fighting off some crud that my family has delivered unto me for my birthday weekend. It's not too bad, but still. Poor timing. Boohoo. I was thinking about the fact that if I worked a blue collar job I'd have to just fight through it, driving through rush hour, busting my arse for a solid 8 hours, then rush hour back home. I'm glad I grew up the way I did and had to work some less than good jobs over the years to be able to appreciate that perspective.

Of course I worry about my kids growing up with entitlementitis or affluenza or whatever. I'm not sure how you even work around that. They are pretty good kids at their core, but I'm trying to give them experiences that will lessen the blow of "real life" once they graduate college or whatever they do after high school.

All the things that I, and probably the previous 100 generations, consider things essential to being a grown-up, haven't been transferred to the extent I would like.

For instance, I was changing the brakes on my Audi awhile back and was trying to explain to AB how disc brakes work and how to change them and all that. It took me way longer to change them out than it should have, and he was quick to question why I bothered if I probably could have just paid a mechanic to do it. While that is true, sometimes there is pleasure to be found in manual labor. It's the feeling that knowing you aren't a completely worthless sack whose usefulness is limited by the reach of his checkbook.

These are the things we probably all have to worry about raising kids in this immediate-fulfillment-generation. I'm not sure where we're headed with all this, but it certainly will widen the gap between the have's and have-not's. Eventually the damn thing will snap as I'm not sure how much more society can take. But that's a different blog for a different time. Probably one of those angry posts I'll have.

This turned into a bit of a ramble, but that's how this codgy old brain works these days. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Speaking of ride, I'm dying for the next dirt church. I gotta get this stuff outta my lungs first, especially with these freezing air temperatures.