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As is correct after a show which argues that family is more important than work (but then realises that you need to work in order to look after your family and that actually you now have something to work for), I didn’t do any work today (apart from catching up with my blogs) and spent my time with my family (only blogging when my baby was asleep). Phoebe spends most of her time with me trying to scratch my face, pull my hair, gouge out my eyes and slap me in the face and yet still I love her. Maybe it’s an abusive relationship and I haven’t yet realised it. Yet if i punched her in the face it would be me that was in the wrong.
She’s a whole lot of fun though and trusts everyone and doesn’t judge them by their appearance. She really wanted to make friends with a scary looking old man in Caffe Nero today, but he was having none of it. But that didn’t stop her. It makes me consider my own prejudice and maybe I should just smile and wave at strangers until they realise that I am OK and we all become friends. Alternatively I will just fill her with suspicion and hatred of everyone, which has got me through my life all right.
Why wouldn’t a strange old man love my daughter? All right, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
We watched Heathers tonight, a 1980s film that I must surely have seen before, but don’t remember too much. Given its themes of teen suicide and school-based murders and someone wanting to blow up their classmates, all treated in with black comedy, I am not sure it would be made today. Though that’s a shame, as we continue to pussyfoot around serious subjects and worry about the effects they might have on our teenagers, when in fact stuff like this actually helps teenagers to process their alienation. Last night in the first half of the show I read my 1980s diary entry starting “Fuck off World” in which I professed the desire to kick my sister’s head in and my hatred of all my “so-called” friends. I was not, in reality, ever going to do anything with these feelings, but using the diary to vent (and indeed by the end of the entry I have calmed down). If you had come across that entry at the time you would have assumed I was about to murder someone or was the Unabomber (and I am not saying I wasn’t), but those are just the ridiculous emotions we have to deal with as hormones attack us. There’s a lot of acting with hindsight these days when someone does go crazy and shoot their classmates or blow up their school, with all the clues left on social media. But I suspect that most teenagers social network sites are littered with anger and idle threats. A film like Heathers, as dated as it now is, at least acknowledged to us 1980s teens (though I may have been in my 20s when it came out) that feeling that way was normal, as well as accurately (if cartoonishly) satirising the social pecking order of all schools and I like the clever conceit of the cool and charming Slater turning out to be psychotic. And it feels dangerous and thrilling and wrong. But not as wrong that all the people in it are now in their 50s. And it’s somehow no longer 1988 and I don’t remember anything that happened in the interim.
