Parents Got Swag

I like walks on the beach and chocolate behind glass counters and used leather diaries with frayed yellow edges. I also like texting words like, "quintessence."

I know, I'm a bit outdated. I like to think of it as classic or "old school," but I think the harsh truth of the matter is that I'm still living like a kid from 1995.

My parents, on the other hand, have unintentionally functioned as the foil to my [lack of] youth and modernity. They have subverted the notion of age, of generational gap, and have created with vigor a new sense of the word, "cool." They're hip.

Most people find it amusing when their parents discover the Google. Sometimes, amusement concedes to frustration when their parents text their children blank messages, with false hope that the apparatus will convey messages in the same capacity as telepathy. Most people, however, do not have parents who can build and program computers, who look thirty years younger than their age, and who use "lol" the way it was intended--not when they're actually laughing, but when they don't have time to humor me.



The Young & the Restless (25 years ago, "lol")

 Last week, I had my usual mid-May, half-birthday break down, and I reached out to my parents for emotional support. Our basement is currently undergoing renovation, so our home phone has been acting a bit shoddy, and my sister's phone got rained on, so I was left with my parents' cell phones. I first texted my mother.

Rucha: Hi. Miss you!
Mother: mu
Rucha: What's mu?
Mother: miss you

I then tried my father.

Rucha: Hi. Love you!
Father: luv u2
Rucha: [insert blank text of exasperation]
Father: u try2 send pic?

I subsequently ate a $15 salad topped with veggie burger strips and watched Parks & Rec on my iPad (extent to my connection with Gen Y). I then got ready for bed. When I'm home, right before I go to bed my mother smiles at me, strokes my hair, and with a sincerity unparalleled, one that can only be produced by my parents (Gen Y's guests of honor), will say, "Jai Sri Krishna." It's a blessing, something that my parents sort of automatically chant without much heed, or at least, one that I usually receive without much heed. It never mattered much to me, but it's the entire practice around it--the smiling, the warmth, the genuineness--that touches me, that subverts the indifference of the world.

After I burped up some veggie burger meat, I texted my mother again.

Rucha: Love you! Good night.
Mother: lu gn beta
Rucha: gn?
Mother: good night
Rucha: how fitting
Mother: lol jsk

It took me about 12 seconds to realized "jsk" refers to the aforementioned blessing. I audibly sighed (to no one in particular.)

Rucha: Quintessence.
[no response]

six months in, and still can't microwave a cookie.

I almost burned down the office today.

(My bad.)

Today officially marks the six-month countdown till Death of Youth Day. (Yes, every year I seem to go through the same gastrointestinal acrobats about my increasingly apparent senescence. However, this year it's significantly worse. No, really, it just is. Humor an old lady.)

In six months, I will be the age my mother was when she gave birth to me.

In six months, I will be the age Nat Turner was when he sold Invite Media to Google for $70 million.

In six months, I will be the age Lawrence Braggs was one year before he won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

In six months, it will be the 24th Veterans' Day since 1988.

There was some sort of rager on the third floor of the building last night, so I slept with my ear plugs, the ones I bought on overstock.com with my LivingSocial offer. I woke up about 45 minutes before the alarm clock to take out the ear plugs, so that I would then hear the alarm clock when I woke up.

Evidently, I had thought much about this morning when I was tossing in conscious, exhausted misery all night.

And what I realized when I awoke (for the second time, after my alarm did go off) was not just that my most pronounced gray was leering at me, or that I may need to switch to Sensodyne, or that my perfume no longer masks the scent of Ben-Gay, but that the more I fall prey to the vagaries of a cold, indifferent world, the more I desperately hold onto the comfort of a past in which heartache was raw, friendship was pure, and hips did not retain pizza, which was inevitably voraciously consumed.

So it's not youth I miss. It's the fact that my screw ups were just that--mistakes in their most honest, benign capacity. No implications of cataclysmic proportions. No calculations, no derivations.

When my family first moved to this country, we were not as fortunate as we are today. Still, my mother, my father, and I (we were not blessed with my little sister till two years after our migration), lived gorgeously. In the first year in which we lived in America, we had not yet come to associate the notion of choice restrictions and authentic living as characteristics of wealth; rather, we were enamored of the mass producing capabilities of the American food & beverage industry, and so without heed to our effectively clogging 56% of our cardiovascular system, we engorged upon Entenmann's and fruit colas and Ellio's pizza.

My favorite snack was those large Pepperidge Farm cookies, the ones in the paper bag with tops folded over. I liked the white chocolate chip macadamia ones. I never knew till I took a bite if the piece in question was a nut or chip. It was a surprise every time. To emulate the just-baked sensation without just baking anything, my family would pop these already processed cookies into the microwave for ten seconds. (Yes, in addition to our cardiovascular health, we may have risked cancer. I personally think little gustatory pleasure is worth genetic mutations.) The microwaved cookies would be gooey and warm and exude a sense of American spirit so wonderfully pervasive on WB11 (CW11's predecessor, a station of the 90's).

I wanted to feel warm and gooey (and genetically mutated) today. We had Pepperidge Farm cookies in the office, and so after I bought my Oren's, I grabbed a cookie from the paper bag. I brought it to the kitchen on a Chipotle napkin, and put it in the microwave.

I stood around, looking up at the dusty ceiling, thinking about chocolate and young people and new Americans, when I smelled smoke.

I had put the cookie in the microwave for over a minute.

I ran to the microwave and opened the door. Dark grey smoke billowed from the apparatus, and the entire kitchen was engulfed in a thick stench. My cookie was steaming, the napkin was burned through, and the chocolate chips went beyond melty and gooey to blackened and hardened.

23 and a half years later, and I still manage to transform a bout of culinary genius into a case of pyromania. No, I may not be able to cook a precooked, thoroughly processed cookie, but I can definitely set things on fire and get ash on recently dry cleaned dress, all before 8:30 AM.

The office manager came running to the kitchen, smelling the smoke. I looked up, abashed, still holding my elfish cookie.

"Good morning. Did I tell you today was my half birthday?"