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- Who Are You? [Short Version]
The Who
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 10:25 PM | no comments
Tagged: teenagers
I found an inner glimpse into the teen psyche in an unexpected place the other day: a 1970's roller disco movie.
In one scene, our heroine, Terri Barkley, is sulking around the house in typical teenage attention-seeking fashion. She asks an age-old typical teenage attention-seeking question of her mother: "do you love me?". Her mother, of course, responds in the fashion that mothers are legally bound to answer in, but this obviously does not satisfy Terri. She stomps around and yells "I do not want to play the flute, I do not go to Julliard, I do not want to be paired off with Franklin Potter, and I do not want to hear another string quartet in my life!".
Her mother responds in a way that reminded me frighteningly of my own parents: "Well. Now that we know what you don't want, what is it that you do?".
That's just the thing: teenagers don't know what they want to do, they only know what they don't. We haven't experienced enough to know what we want to be stuck doing for the rest of our lives, but we know it's not getting up every day and flipping burgers down at McDonald's. Nor do we …