Yes, another blogpost concerning "Jack"...but it MOSTLY concerns parents, and the way they handle things...
“So I can't go to Providence this weekend.”
My heart sank as it pounded in my chest, hard and painful.
“Jack...why not?”
“My dad went through my computer history. He looked all through my myspace and my livejournal.”
My chest tightened, making the pounding of my heart all the more painful.
“No...”
“He saw all that crap we posted to each other...you know, to mess with my friends. Now he seriously thinks we DID IT in Japan, and that you're a whore, and...”
“BUT NONE OF THAT WAS TRUE!”
“Tell it to HIM.”
My world ended. I was alone in darkness, with just my cell phone and this distressing news. Three months. Three months without him had been ENOUGH. It's impossible to go straight from LIVING with someone for two weeks to not seeing them at ALL.
All because of a bad joke that came into existence because his friends were CONVINCED something would happen. We gave them what they wanted. We kept it up because their reactions gave us something to talk about, and we thought they were funny. After a while it had become such a big part of our lives it might as well have been real...but it WASN'T.
It tore at me all that day and all through the weekend, and still tears at me today. I was looking forward to this weekend, and now it's gone. Something inside me shattered when he told me the news, and it is going to take a while for the pieces to come back together. He stood up for me when I really needed it. I'd never before had a friend with enough BALLS to do that for me. All the others were too non-confrontational or so desperate to avoid drama that they wouldn't even uphold one of the most important duties of a friend. HE didn't let me down.
Where was he now?
Taken away because of some dumb joke and an overzealous Christian father. Teenagers today are expected to be so PRISTINE. When will parents learn that that's simply not the way it is? When will they learn that we have a different sort of humor? And that the world is CHANGING, and they shouldn't try to shape us by their outdated ideals?
Either they do or they don't. I know of jokes like that. I have a running one with friends of mine, not as bad as that one but it consists of us all being a family with me being the mother of my best friend and on down the line. My parents so far as I know don't know about it, don't think they'd care either, there not that Christian. But I have an idea what your going through.
The best way to a man's heart is really through his stomach, that way you don't have to deal with that pesky rib cage!
~Anomous
"Teenagers today are expected to be so PRISTINE. When will parents learn that that's simply not the way it is? When will they learn that we have a different sort of humor? And that the world is CHANGING, and they shouldn't try to shape us by their outdated ideals? "
Parents want to feel that they are successful. Some feel 100% responsible for whatever you turn out to be and if your not 100% PRISTINE then the parents feel as if they have failed. This happens alot with Christian parents because when you are born and formally dedicated in church, the parents committ to being responsible for you and your spiritual life and committ to giving a full account to God for how you turned out, a wee bit of pressure si eh ?
Yea, I had a huge fight back in high school with my mother because she overheard one of my dear friends say "C'ya tonight whore", which as weird as it sounds is typical amongst my friends. It involves extensive inside jokes between us and was not meant for my mother to hear, but cell phones have loud speakers and she did hear and was pissed. That is our humor, she had to learn to deal with that. We live is a different culture that comes out of a revolt over the "perfect 80s/90s" where wholesomeness was so important. Now we are on an edgier slope that our parents did not raise us in and they do not understand where we are coming from. My mother was horrified the first time she saw me go into Hot Topic and Spencers. There is nothing you can do to change their ideas about how we should behave and just learn to keep your secrets private. I personally always delete my cookies, history, and lock up my accounts to protect my lives from intersecting (hence why I don't have a myspace since they proved multiple times the inability to keep things private).
Think about it...
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tomorrowtoday
Maybe I'm over analyzing and over generalizing, but it seems to me that you're saying that Christian ideals are outdated. At least from your last paragraph. Christianity is still alive and thriving, and while it's not about being pristine as much as striving for Christ-likeness (trying while realizing that we are all sinful), those values are still held by young people today. However, just to clarify, I don't believe that Christians should judge or condemn non-Christians. I am fully convinced that that is God's job, and His only.