April 22 – We went and watched ‘The Hunger Games’ last night. It was a good flick, but I’m sure there is so much more detail to the book. As we walked to our car, a tweenaged girl was excitedly telling her father the differences between the ending in the book and movie. She was as euphoric as one would expect a girl her age to be after meeting a Bieber. I do hope our kids have that passion for reading that I never developed until much later.
Occasionally I look back at my childhood under the spotlight of modern standards and laugh or thank my lucky stars that I got out alive and unharmed. In-school paddlings and candy cigarettes are two things that would be outrageous if introduced today (Big League Chew anyone?). My dad used to smoke Salems, and he once brought home this toy. It was like a flat snow globe, but the object was to turn it around until all the plastic cigarettes floated their way into the package. I played with that thing for hours. I think in 2012 it’d be the basis for some lawsuit.
My brother and I would wrestle (he’s four-and-a-half years older than I am) but he also had no problem wrestling with my good friend Matt. A friend of my brother’s would issue “Pain Points” and pound on us whenever we irritated him, which we did often, sometimes on purpose sometimes not. I mean he’d really sock us in the arm or leg, or he’d go all Iron Sheik on us and use a Camel Clutch (The creativity he showed in pain dispersal should be applauded). Yet no one questioned this. Today, he’d be labeled a bully but Matt and I looked up to these two.
In 10 or 12 years, if I found out Ashton’s best friend’s older brother was beating on him “just for fun,” would I be as comfortable with that arrangement? It’s an interesting question.
OOPSY! DAISY! DAD SAID NOT TO TELL MOM! L, MOM & DAD
GUESS WE WERE UNATTENTIVE, HUH!?