Am I a freak, or are they just not looking?
I had such fun with the last little bottle, I decided to do it again. This necessitated a run to one of the local antique stores, perusing their glassware collection. I did find one, so there will be playtime with it later.
I am, very often, effectively invisible. It is a quality that amuses me more often than not – only when I need a salesperson to come to the register and none will LOOK AT ME is it bothersome. One of the side effects is that I will often overhear conversations people are having in public, which they continue at volumes I can hear because I don’t register on their radar.
I walked into the antique store and the proprietress was in conversation with another customer that I could hear clear across the store. I paid barely enough attention to them to follow the thread in case I could add something, until one of them mentioned the “g” word. “Generation.” That’s a word that will always catch my attention, because whenever I hear it (in a county with a very large retiree population) it’s usually in reference to *my* generation. In this case, it was slightly less justified (they were saying that certain somewhat undesirable traits had skipped a generation in a particular family). The last time I heard anyone mention “this generation” the quote was: “This generation doesn’t have any appreciation for handmade!”
Now… I am either a freak in relation to the other members of my generation, or the members of *their* generation are not paying much attention. Everyone I know of my generation (which for the loose purposes of this post runs from 20-40) has a deep appreciation for handmade in one form or another. We make things, we hack things, we play with our food in fantastic fashions. We sew, we bead, we build, we fix, we paint, we play, we make by hand. Everyone I know either makes stuff or thinks that people who make stuff are awesome. I stared at that lady until she noticed me, smiled and said “Some of us do,” and she got flustered.
I surprised the ladies in the antique store, too. The conversation wandered from generational trait skipping to “what is this, is it tatting?” and I said the first thing since I walked in, which was:
“Let me see it, I tat.”
The shock in their faces and voices was amusing, “YOU TAT? Where did you learn to tat?” obviously expecting me to have been taught by my grandmother. My perfectly honest answer shocked them.
“The internet.”
We are here. We may be the freaks, but we are here.
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