![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2cnoEVS:dotsandfoxes replied to your post “i just looked up linda ronstadt and holy fuck i remember her being the…”
Oh hey NPR kid! I had the same kind of culturally out of touch (for values of suburban white America) childhood, all NPR, PBS, and some BBC imports, and I’m surprised I wasn’t *more* of a pariah in 9th grade. On the other hand, I’m pretty useful on trivia night…
I was raised in a pretty rural area. Some of my school friends were a little jealous because I didn’t need them; I had my sisters, and we lived out in the middle of nowhere, and I didn’t ever come around on school breaks or over the summer, because I was perfectly happy on my own and also it was too far to drive. So I grew up with a strict half-hour limit on television per day, unlimited access to library books, and we didn’t listen to the radio except school closings and sometimes various of the classical music programs, and we almost never went to restaurants or movies because there were four of us kids and the money added up fast. Mom had chosen to stay home with us and not work, so we were poor– but it was definitely, definitely the kind of poor where both your parents have Master’s degrees, and you buy everything in bulk and fix your own car and don’t wear shoes in the summer and Mom makes your clothes, but only because she likes to. It was a really privileged kind of poverty. And when as teenagers we all separately decided we wanted to learn about popular culture, we were allowed to do that.
My heart goes out to kids raised in cults and stuff; a lot of that is so superficially similar to how I grew up, only my upbringing was really the idyllic perfection that those things are usually lying about. I knew so much about the broader world; Mom made it her personal mission to bring us to as many free or low-cost activities she locally could find, and most of them were history-focused because that was her graduate degree (she was a museum curator). We had land, and most of our leisure time was spent playing on it, in all four seasons, with mostly our two feet but plenty of heavy machinery; I learned automobile maintenance and how to drive a stick shift as soon as I could reach the pedals. I even got a pony, when I was like twelve, my sister and I; it turns out that caring for a horse is a huge pain in the ass, but I learned it the hard way with all the character-building that entailed.
I am a mixed bag on trivia night. I know random history stuff, but I’m so hopeless when it comes to anything from about 1950 onward. It’s a running joke at work; my coworker was a latchkey kid raised largely by the television, who went to his first rock n roll concert when he was 11. Our references are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible; we might as well be from different countries.
Oh hey NPR kid! I had the same kind of culturally out of touch (for values of suburban white America) childhood, all NPR, PBS, and some BBC imports, and I’m surprised I wasn’t *more* of a pariah in 9th grade. On the other hand, I’m pretty useful on trivia night…
I was raised in a pretty rural area. Some of my school friends were a little jealous because I didn’t need them; I had my sisters, and we lived out in the middle of nowhere, and I didn’t ever come around on school breaks or over the summer, because I was perfectly happy on my own and also it was too far to drive. So I grew up with a strict half-hour limit on television per day, unlimited access to library books, and we didn’t listen to the radio except school closings and sometimes various of the classical music programs, and we almost never went to restaurants or movies because there were four of us kids and the money added up fast. Mom had chosen to stay home with us and not work, so we were poor– but it was definitely, definitely the kind of poor where both your parents have Master’s degrees, and you buy everything in bulk and fix your own car and don’t wear shoes in the summer and Mom makes your clothes, but only because she likes to. It was a really privileged kind of poverty. And when as teenagers we all separately decided we wanted to learn about popular culture, we were allowed to do that.
My heart goes out to kids raised in cults and stuff; a lot of that is so superficially similar to how I grew up, only my upbringing was really the idyllic perfection that those things are usually lying about. I knew so much about the broader world; Mom made it her personal mission to bring us to as many free or low-cost activities she locally could find, and most of them were history-focused because that was her graduate degree (she was a museum curator). We had land, and most of our leisure time was spent playing on it, in all four seasons, with mostly our two feet but plenty of heavy machinery; I learned automobile maintenance and how to drive a stick shift as soon as I could reach the pedals. I even got a pony, when I was like twelve, my sister and I; it turns out that caring for a horse is a huge pain in the ass, but I learned it the hard way with all the character-building that entailed.
I am a mixed bag on trivia night. I know random history stuff, but I’m so hopeless when it comes to anything from about 1950 onward. It’s a running joke at work; my coworker was a latchkey kid raised largely by the television, who went to his first rock n roll concert when he was 11. Our references are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible; we might as well be from different countries.
