SAY WHAT?

Hi folks!  It’s Connie this week welcoming you back with us in the year 2012.

I was hoping that this year would be much better than the last one in some respects, and I’m sure that it will be, but thinking about what happened recently with my teenage granddaughter, Tina, it looks like some things might remain the same.

You see, a short while ago she rushed into my house flushed with excitement.  Her eyes were shining.  Her smile lit up the room like sunshine.  I just knew that she was about to make a major announcement that would have me beaming with grandmotherly pride.  Maybe she had gotten straight A’s on her report card, or perhaps she was running for class president.  No!  Better yet, maybe she had decided to work toward the goal of becoming the first woman President of the United States!  She could do it.  I knew that she could! I would help her, groom her, and encourage her along the way.  After high school she would go to Yale or Harvard where she would graduate at the top of her class. She would become an attorney, win headline making cases and eventually run for the U.S. Senate and then become the unchallenged nominee for the President of the— 

“Beyonce and Jay Z just had their baby!”  Tina gushed breathlessly as she made her announcement. 

Say what?  My grandiose daydream crashed to earth like a meteor. All I could do was stand there and look at her.

“It’s a girl!”  She squealed, prancing around the room like a contestant on Dancing with the Stars.  “Her name is Blue.” 

Huh? Who names their kid a crayon color?  So I asked, “What’s her middle name, Red?” 

She didn’t appreciate the flash of humor.  “Her middle name is Ivey,” she informed me haughtily.

“Blue Ivey?” I echoed.  “I wonder what they’re going to name the next one, Red Beans and Rice?  Yellow Fever?”

I thought that was funny, but Tina didn’t like that one either as she said with an adolescent pout, “It’s obvious that you don’t get it.”

She was right.  I don’t get it. Why in the hell am suppose to care if some singer and her rapper husband had a baby?  It wasn’t as though married couples didn’t have babies every day. 

What I do get is that this obsession that our country has with celebrities has gotten out of hand, and it seems to be getting worse.  Maybe as our lives become burdened with the realities of life—unemployment, foreclosures, divorce, infidelity—it’s much more exciting getting wrapped up in the lives of people who seem to have everything.  We want to be them. Unfortunately, these obsessions don’t solve our problems. Instead it uses up the energy we might be able to direct toward making our own lives a little more satisfying.  What a waste.

Meanwhile, Tina did give me credit for at least knowing who Beyonce and Jay Z were.  She gave up on me ever understanding the significance of the birth of Blue Ivey to mankind.  She says that I’m “hopeless”; but she’s wrong about that.

I have a lot of hope that her obsession with the lives and success of others will become a self obsession that will take her far in life. I know that I plan on doing everything that I can do to see to it that the next time she waltzes into the room so excited her announcement will be about real accomplishments—her own.  

Happy Musings!