Blogging Around

Harrison Marick - An Inconvenient Truth: Adult Superiority
Harrison discusses how elders do not take advice from him or listen to him even though he's right, and he gives an example where he called a limo company and they laughed that a 16-year-old was booking a limo.

My comment:
I think this is a very valid point you made. I used to feel the same way, as my parents and elders also hesitate take advice from me. I feel I am right a lot of the times and although 'they are older and wiser' and they know 'much more than me', they refuse to listen to me and regard themselves as my superior.

And then I realized how they felt because I had conversations with kids younger then me who believed they knew what was right, for example my younger brother. He thinks he is right most of the time, when in fact I know I am right and later I find out that my assumption was correct. Now there have been a few times that he has been capable of doing things that I was not able to do, or if I was able to do it, he could do it slightly better. But sometimes you ignore a younger person in order to establish your superiority and acknowledge your own wisdom/intelligence.

Altogether, through years of trying to argue with my parents, I've discovered that when it comes to adult situations (for example dealing with money), their decisions usually triumph mine because they have more experience in that area. But we are the younger generation, and when dealing with a lot of other situations, we may have more expertise than our parents. And as you said, this 'class' between adults and children is inflexible, as parents are meant to be the wisdom-givers and not the wisdom-receivers, and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.

Ben Wolch- Best of Week: Cliché
Ben discusses how even though clichés have a negative connotation, they sometimes are dead on. The utility of clichés outweighs all negativity. He uses the metaphor that just as a movie has music, a novel has clichés; they're crucial to putting the reader in the situation.

My comment: This post brings up a really great point. It's a cliché on clichés. And after reading this, I began to think: isn't all of life just a cliché. Everything we do, someone else has been through the same thing. Life is just a routine, passed down from generation to generation. Take the book Our Town for example, which wonderfully portrays this concept. Life has three 'milestones' birth, marriage, and death. Aren't these all clichés, done by nearly everyone? Happiness, obstacles, relationships, life passing and going, enemies, etc.; they're existent in everyone's life. Sure, a cliché is an overused phrase or opinion, but whether or not you use a cliché phrase, the overlooking notion is cliché in and of itself.

As you mentioned, clichés generally have negative connotations, but they are sometimes dead on. They are used to express events in a more general concept. So why do we use clichés? Well, an author wants to connect to his/her reader, right?. I think that a cliché purposefully has this trite meaning because it assures the author that the reader will be able to connect to that feeling. Even if a person is not aware of a certain cliché, the general idea embellished upon by the cliché is usually familiar to all. So clichés are sometimes necessary to express a feeling in the simplest of ways.