Club Soda
I wrote this in the shower one morning. The flow is incoherent, but I've published it as is, for now, in an effort to get more of my thoughts out of the shower and into the... unshower.
My mother knows everything, which is an astounding accomplishment considering that in her long life, she has experienced and accomplished nothing other than a long list of people who can't stand her.
But she has an answer for everything. She knows that you can get out blood stains with club soda. If you ask her if she’s done it before, she’ll say yes, in that "no further questions" sort of way, you know, the way that liars say yes.
My generation, on the other hand, has no problem admitting that we don’t know something. We don’t need to know everything. For one thing, YouTube knows everything so we don’t have to.
But my mother’s generation, if they were to admit that they didn’t know something, they’d have to go to the library. But it’s not going to the library that’s the problem – the problem is having to ask someone else for help. Someone like my mother goes up to the clerk and ask where they can find a book on types of local snakes, the clerk tries to say, "it’s in this section, I can show you if you’d like", but they're interrupted by a “that’s what I thought” while she storms off in the wrong direction.
When you have an entire generation ashamed to ever ask for help, you end up with boomers, a generation whose kids came home saying "I got a snake bite on my ankle!" to which they replied "hurry and take your pants off, we’ve got to get club soda on them before the stain sets!"