Petrarchive – Thread 12801

I respect my parents for what they have accomplished in life but, in a very gentle manner of commentary, I would describe them as more "street smart"; and so these posts where peoples' parents make such a remark (pseud as academic terminology might get), or talk about slightly more in-depth arts subjects or other references, sometimes I feel a twinge of guilty envy after my initial re-calibrating.

Sorry for the aside. Your folks are right though. Lumpenization is a great reaction to something they see as not only low income in a literal sense but also shows the helplessness, the lack of quick or practical thinking, that embodies that class as well. It's a socialcultural marker as much as an economic one.

I guess I should add, the onus is ultimately on them to have had raised you to act on your own and take care of yourself no matter the consequences. They probably neglected this aspect of cultural transmission. Not atypical of Anglos but increasingly part of the social fabric in the rest of the world, too.

this is actually a very interesting answer that i did not expect at all. i guess a strong part of it is that i neglected to include context that my friends, expected recipients of such a message, would not have required since they already have it, but my father is kind of a huge sack of shit, and while he said this to my mother with a concerned tone, there was also a component of his speech that was... mocking. both me, for being a college student who does not have the money for repairs and wouldn't know where to start if i did, and my mother for her more genuine concern about my shower breaking.

i'm not saying this context to justify myself in living in a house with a broken shower for a while (or rather, not asking the people who could help as soon as possible, because the house isn't mine and i'm broke and in college), i'm saying it because the response actually made me consciously process some of the underlying elements of my mindset that i would have had a very hard time discerning on my own, because when someone is constantly trolling and getting on people's nerves for fun, it can be hard, and seem counterproductive, to actually discern the value in their shit, and the comedic value of my 50 year old father laughing to himself in front of his family after calling me a lumpen kinda stole all of the focus away from "this is actually an important thing that's going on and i should pay attention to"

i'm not anglosphere btw, i'm in latin america, but my parents are middle class and upwardly mobile former proletarian respectively, and the latter is a demographic that i've discovered is predominantly full of people who would disembowel their best friends and stop feeding their own children if it meant career advancement for them. it's probably just a bias in my sample size though; most lifelong proletarians and actual rich people i know are normal

>>12183
>there was also a component of his speech that was... mocking

Are you male? He is calling you less of a man for not fixing the problem. He's from a previous time where people did shit on their own and sees you as weak and modern. This is true on many levels, but like I said, the onus is also on him to transmit this sort of information and to be aware enough that you wouldn't learn it on your own from cultural osmosis because you don't inhabit that world -- starting from the fact that dorm or rental rules prohibit you from repairing your surroundings and so on, tools are more expensive and materials may be more difficult to find, there are higher safety and other code standards and you can't just build your mud hut/log cabin in the woods.. and so on and so on.

Your father is laughing at you but he's doing that as an ego defense for his own shame at himself for not raising you right. He probably doesn't even realize that this is his reaction.

that's probably correct, he does appear to be kind of insecure about shit like that