Are you cooler than your parents?

[ExiStanc3]

Um, yeah... Really depends on "cool"
My parents were totally outside the pop culture of their time.
My mother worked for the airlines (TWA) in the 1960s, and actually used her travel benefits to visit as many places as possible. After a couple years in the London office, she transferred to Sudan. She would take her weekend trips to anywhere she could. (remember, traveling alone was almost unheard of for women, especially in African or the Middle East)
My father was an Egyptology professor who jumped the Berlin Wall.
Neither was into the "modern" music of their era. Working in Africa cut my mother off from most pop music from 1958-67
I would argue that they were way cooler than pop culture./QUOTE]
That's surly to be cool!! More than me!! Especially for a woman. How about you? How was it for a child in that context? How about you as a parent?

 

[sabrinathecat]

Um, yeah... Really depends on "cool"
My parents were totally outside the pop culture of their time.
My mother worked for the airlines (TWA) in the 1960s, and actually used her travel benefits to visit as many places as possible. After a couple years in the London office, she transferred to Sudan. She would take her weekend trips to anywhere she could. (remember, traveling alone was almost unheard of for women, especially in African or the Middle East)
My father was an Egyptology professor who jumped the Berlin Wall.
Neither was into the "modern" music of their era. Working in Africa cut my mother off from most pop music from 1958-67
I would argue that they were way cooler than pop culture.

That's surly to be cool!! More than me!! Especially for a woman. How about you? How was it for a child in that context? How about you as a parent?

Well, my mother became a single parent when I was about 6, so I was totally cut off from my father's side of the family until 1991.
I guess the big difference is that I never bought into or understood the chauvinism that women just want to have pretty dresses and tea parties and such like.
No effect at all as a parent, as I'm not (unless you count responsibility for felines), nor likely ever to be.

 

[Nellisir]

I find the notion of 'coolness' in no way related to pop culture myself. Might be my age though.

Yeah, I'm mostly much more aware of general pop culture than my siblings (though my brother, working with 7th-graders and HS students, gets a really intense dose of it), but it doesn't make me "cooler".

I don't think an unawareness of it is necessarily cool either, though. My father likes to act like modern culture is horrible, but it's pretty rote stuff, and he's usually objecting to something already gone by.

 

[Bullgrit]

Bullgrit: neat sword. Original or replica?

The sword is something I've had since I was 18 or 19. My girlfriend at the time gave it to me as a gift. I don't remember where she found it. It's not anything particular, just a sword.

Bullgrit