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Flowers in the Attic: A Barometer for The Moral Degradation of Society

Truly, when I was very young, way back in the 80s, I believed all of life would be like one long and perfect summer day. After all, it did start out that way...Ooops, a bit of plagiarizing from my favorite guilty pleasure, Flowers In the Attic.  Yes, that's right.  You can start making fun, but it's really nostalgic when I reread this literary *ahem* gem.  I can't help remembering the first time I read it, stuck in the back seat of my folks' car on a drive to the beach, devouring every page in disbelief, not knowing that there existed in this world books I may like that weren't set in Sweet Valley.  But at least this book had characters who were also blond and perfect, and it even had twins, too.  There was just the little parts about devil's spawn, incest, and being locked in some attic that kind of changed it up a bit from the usual Jessica and Elizabeth shenanigans.

This book, when I was growing up, was sort of the gateway drug for every young girl into the smutty novels that were to become par for the course during summer vacations.  Almost every girl I knew somehow found in her hands, during her 7th grade year, a worn, dog-eared copy of Flowers in the Attic, given to her with hushed instructions to not let her parents know what the book was about.  And so, for many girls like me, it was our first example of sex, albeit between Cathy and her brother, Chris (ewwww!  No, make that EWWWWWW!!).  I wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies, so I hadn't even seen a sex scene at this point.  All I knew about sex was what other kids told me, and the lame stuff we learned about when they told us about our periods at school (which, in turn, I really first learned about from Are You There God?  It's Me, Margaret).

For those of you not in the know, the book is about a family of four Hitler's Dream Children blond, perfect, beautiful kids whose idyllic life is suddenly thrown for a loop when their beloved blond, handsome, daddy dies in a car accident.  Aww heck, I'm too lazy to write it all out...here's what Amazon says:

After a tragic accident leaves them fatherless, four children return to their mother's mysterious family mansion hoping for an inheritance. But when they are imprisoned and abandoned by their evil grandmother, the children must survive a nightmare of brutal cruelty, forbidden passion and a final shocking discovery that will shatter their innocence forever.



The four kids, all haunted and locked up and stuff

 In the title of this post I said that Flowers in the Attic is actually a barometer of sorts that measures the moral degradation of society.  It's true.  I mentioned earlier that when I was a kid, we hid the book from our parents, or at least hid what it was about.  It was something that made it all the more great because it was taboo.  But now we are in an era where taboos are a thing of the past and anything goes, and I found this out at the library one day.  Back when I was young, you had to go into the "horror" section of the library (it even had the little skull sticker on the spine of the book) to find Flowers, even though it was mostly read by young girls in their early teens.  But someone knew that it had sex, abuse, torture, and incest in it, so it would just be wrong to put it anywhere else.  Today?  Not so much.  It's there, smack-dab in the middle of the Young Adult section now!   Yikes!! Good golly day*, is NOTHING sacred anymore?
 
Oh, but it get even better.  If you look at the top of this post, you'll see the original book cover to Flowers.  Now check out the newest cover:
 

 
Yeah, that's right.  They don't even pretend that Cathy and Chris don't hook-up.  But not only that, they make the cover look like some teen romance!!  At least in the book the hook-up is shameful to the kids, they feel sick about it.  But this cover!!  THIS COVER makes it look like incest between siblings is just another sweet teen aged right-of-passage.  It's Rome all over again, I tell you!
 
I really feel bad for kids these days.  No longer are they given the wonderful taste of taboos.  That was one of my favorite things about adolescence...getting to get away with things my parents knew weren't healthy or good for me.  Now, not so much, as Flowers in the Attic has inadvertently shown us.  I for one plan to put up some boundaries with my kids, if just so they can have the fun of knocking them down, just a little.
 
*Cathy's favorite saying in the book, to show she's a kid of the 50s

Pet Peeves #1 ('cause I'm sure there will be more)

This blog is shaping up to be real positive, isn't it?  In keeping with that, here are some of my favorite pet peeves.  Ever seen those old Donald Duck cartoons where he gets really mad and turns red and then starts flipping out?  That's me when I encounter these pet peeves.


No Hooks in Public Bathroom Stalls

There is nothing that just makes my day more than when I go into a public restroom (usually Walmart),  and there is no place to hang my purse.  Then I'm left with two options, to either put my purse on the floor, or to try to balance it on my lap.  No way am I going to put my purse on the floor of a store that has Crazies around every corner, probably just waiting to use that floor as a restroom/sanitary disposal/1-hour hotel.  Option one is out.  So I have to go with option two.  What inevitably happens is that I balance the purse, the purse falls off onto the floor, then I run screaming to find Lysol.  Thanks Walmart!


Rubberneckers

This one never ceases to amaze me.  People who slow down and look at accidents, causing a backup on the freeway.  Or even better, when it's just a cop car that's stopped someone for speeding and people still find this important to look at.  Either way, this is one of those things that reminds me that people are no different than animals who get hypnotized by something shiny.  It's like "Really?  You've NEVER seen an accident?  NEVER?  Oh, ok.  Please, check it out and take your time.  I have brain surgery to perform, but it can wait.  I wouldn't want to deprive you of your chance to possibly see mangled bodies."  It's like the reptilian part of the brain just takes over and people can't do anything to stop it.  I guess this explains the fascination with reality TV, too.  Which I would NEVER watch.  Never...  Anyway...


People Who Invade Your Personal Space at Checkout

Cool, can you please shove your cart a little further up my arse?  Oh, go ahead and look at my pin number, too.  And my shins, didn't need them!  They are useless, like an appendix.


Being Too Lazy To Return the Shopping Cart to the Cart Return

This is one of those things I like to feel superior about.   Like "look at how unlazy I am."  When I was very pregnant with my younger daughter, I had a shopping cart full of groceries and a toddler in the seat, and some young 20-year-old girl in workout clothes comes over and put her cart RIGHT NEXT to my car, with the cart return only a few spaces over.  The absurdity that she just worked out or was going to work out, but was still too lazy to walk a couple of feet, well, it was just too much for me. So I made a big production of walking past her to a cart return even further away, saying "Wow, I'm 8 months pregant and not THAT lazy".  She choose to ignore me and hopped into her little sports car, her missing link, baseball-hat-on-backwards boyfriend laughing like a d-bag in the passenger seat.  This sort of thing still bugs the crap out of me, though.  I just can't stand it when people are this lazy when they have things as good as we have it in this country.  Hmph! Ok, ok, I'll stop preaching now.


I do hope I helped make your day a little brighter with my post.  No?  Hey, this ain't no "Zen Habits" or some other serious, enlightened blog.

Vertically Challenged

I've always been short, and unlike most women who are, I've never wished to be tall.  I am exactly 5'3" and 1/2, but I always round down to 5'3",  just to rebel. See, I don't subscribe to feeling bad about something I can't help, and I had many a time in college wearing huge-ass heels and falling on my face.  My friends really like to bring those stories up.  My friends are hilarious. 

I've also realized that the universe doesn't want me to try to be anything but short,  that it just likes to point and laugh at me when I try to wear heels and fall, that it gets a real kick when I try to be anything I'm not.  Like in college when I thought I would be cool and smoke.  Did I lose weight from smoking like you're supposed to?  No, I GAINED it.  A lot.  The minute I quit smoking, down 20 lbs.  See, I figure the universe knows how dense I am, so it can't mess around with being subtle.   There's no way I would get being told something in a dream, or some possibly questionable crap like that.  I would just be like "Oh, that dream was effed up" and be on with my day, never knowing there was supposed to be a message in there somewhere.

One of my favorite things in the whole world is how anyone remotely taller than me calls me "really" short.  Like they want to emphasize just how tall and supermodelesque they are in comparison.  "Oh Erin's REALLY short".  No, actually, REALLY short is, like, 4'10" or something.  Not that it's bad being really short, it's just that I can't stand improper use of an adverb, especially when it's used to make someone feel superior.  I've also heard tall girls say how seeing a tall man with a short girl is "a waste of height".  No kidding?  My husband is 6'2".  AND they have the nerve to tell me they say that, like I'm going to commiserate with them.  "Oh, that is so true, so true! Ha ha!  Oh, you!" Sorry sister, being short has a lot of inconveniences, so it's only right that being tall does, too.  You can't find someone you don't tower over?  Not my prob.  Not my prob at all.

Third Times A Charm! Right?

So here I am, yet again.  Third blog titled "Adversaria"* in the past five years.  The first one I kept the longest, but due to the fact that I alternate between a fear of looking egotistical because I'm writing about myself, with a need for validation from others, I just decided to delete that one and save myself the anxiety.  The second one failed because I was lazy and just stopped posting.  "So why this one?" all you people out there not reading my blog don't ask.  Well, I mainly operate on fear and loathing, and I've begun to fear and loath my Facebook posts.  For one, I feel like I'm reaching critical mass with them, loathing the fact that I post multiple times a day when I should be doing other things.  Two, I fear that in my quest to be funny, I inadvertently offend someone with either a comment or my immaturity (though it's not lost on me that I think about myself way more than others do, so others probably don't even notice I post at all).  And third, I just type A LOT and it's getting hard to fit what I want to say in their 420 character limit.  Oh, and the fact that they don't allow you to edit your posts.  Eff that.

The problem with first posts of blogs is that they are your intro post, and you just explain why you are starting your blog, and then you kind of leave it at that.  I find that kind of boring and I want to talk about something else, but I can't figure out how to segue into another topic. 

So, for now, I'll just leave it at that.


*Adversaria is just a fancy way of saying "journal".  Yay for online thesauri!