I went on
vacation this last weekend (4th of July) and Fourthkid stayed home. On Saturday, I learn, she “hung with” Blade (can this possibly be the name on his birth certificate??), a young man she met about a year ago. At a bar. I’ve actually met the guy, and he seems innocuous enough. He’s got the hots for Fourthkid, actually.
Anyway, it was Blade and Fourthkid and Blade’s girlfriend, who was not exactly appreciative of Fourthkid’s presence. (Or, appearance. I went out and bought her a bunch of hot new clothes, more on this later.) Fourthkid said, “Well, jealousy is OK, but there’s adult jealousy and then there’s behaving like a 5 year old.”
I said, “No, you’re wrong. Jealousy degrades everyone to the age of 5, if not further down.”
“Well,” said Fourthkid (who is not really interested in Blade, so far as I can tell), “I’m cuter and smarter than she is. And besides, she’s a tranny and I’m a bio-girl.” A “tranny”, I learned by inquiry, is a transexual. She started out a boy, whereas Fourthkid started out as a girl (“bio-girl”). It’s going to be one hot tranny who looks better than this bio-girl, by the way.
Is it just me, or is every third person moushing around the gender boundary in a state of confusion? In a telephone conversation with my good friend Kate, who is a lesbian, I floated out the term “bio-girl”, which Kate had never heard. She passed this on to her partner Angela (both these women are my age (60-ish), and Angela is a former Benedictine nun) and Angela was suitably bemused. (And trying mightily – and not entirely successfully – not to be appalled.)
It’s not gay/straight. This whole thing is generational.
Is the world as we know it ending? I doubt it. My parents thought the world was ending too, when they saw our behavior, and lo and behold it didn’t. I suspect it won’t this time either. But think. What can Fourthkid do to rattle the cage of a woman (me) who is in fact well old enough to be her grandmother? Growing your hair out and saying fuck a lot won’t work this time around, and neither will drugs. Going the other way and being super-straight, not to mention stuffy? Her older sibs have that territory well colonized.
What can she and her contemporaries do to get EVERYONE upset, parents (the ages of her older sibs, and maybe a bit older) and grandparents (us) alike? This is a nice try, you have to give it that. It occurs to me that instead of being relentlessly understanding, which I am being, I should probably at some point fly into a horrified rage just to give her her pellet, to reward this behavior as it seeks to be rewarded, if for no other reason than to stop her from going further and further looking for that very reaction.
But y’know, I’ve played this game before, on the other end, and it’s a bore. I don’t want to play any more. Fourthkid might just have to grown the uff up and stop seeking to get a reaction out of me. Y’think?