I told an Argentinean friend about the the virus that caused my pericarditis in January.
"You are getting old," she responds immediately. "Now you should expect your body to start failing you on a regular basis."
"I'm only 34," I say.
"Well, old age comes sooner to some people than to others," she informs me brightly.
She's not a mean person at all. She's just Argentinean.
10 comments:
Would you explain, please, why she might appear mean to some people? I don't get it. I think I'm too much of an old-fashioned Indian :-)
34 is not old age. And viruses are not caused by anybody's age.
Argentinean people have this very special way of being that I love but that takes some getting used to. :-)
Oh I get that entirely. I thought her superstitious or, you know, kind of psuedo-scientific. But the use of 'mean' suprised me.
I found out since, from other sources, that ageing is not seen as a desirable thing in the west, hence "old", like "fat", has a mean connotation.
Are there cultures where people want to be considered old at the age of 34?
Yes. Even till three generations back my culture considered women "old" by their early twenties, men by their late twenties. "Kurite buri", people joked. A girl is an old lady at twenty. And even now, in a globalised urban milieu of shared values, my peers consider forty "quite old enough', and when I was sixteen a man of thirty three insisted I call him "uncle" and not "brother" (it's impolite not to assign familial addresses even to strangers if you're speaking to them) because he felt he'd acheived a certain dignity we associate with age.
But you miss the point. My point was not the relative benchmarks for "old". My question was, why would someone who implies a person is old while in their thirties be thought 'mean'? Clearly, there's quite a different mindset towards the riper years which makes a young man of thirty-two claim unclehood, while in another culture calling someone 'old' is thought rude.
"why would someone who implies a person is old while in their thirties be thought 'mean'?"
-My life expectancy here in North America is over 80. Which means that I'm planning to live for about 50 more years. A person who implies that I'm old now is denying that I will and suggesting that I'll die a lot sooner. That's mean.
"Clearly, there's quite a different mindset towards the riper years which makes a young man of thirty-two claim unclehood, while in another culture calling someone 'old' is thought rude."
-What does unclehood have to do with anything? I know a person who became an aunt when she was 2 months old. Did that make her an old person?
"Even till three generations back my culture considered women "old" by their early twenties, men by their late twenties. "
-And it made people happy and joyous to be considered old by 20?
"my peers consider forty "quite old enough'"
-Quite old enough for what?
I'm afraid, Clarissa, that you're so steeped ina culture where youth is joyous and the implication of old age mean and horrible, that you've failed entirely to grasp the core of my comments. You've also read a young man's view of himself as an avuncular figure to a young woman with actual unclehood attained by family ties. That misreading, in particular, shows me there is very little hope for this discussion.
These things happen. Let's move on.
I'd still like to know, though: does it make people happy and joyous to be considered old by 20?
Also: if I tell a friend from India: "You are so old!" will that be taken as a compliment?
But you're quite incapable of 'knowing', it appears, because of your immersion in your own cultural paradigm :-) Damned paradox, isn't it?
Yeah, we have a certain "je ne sais quoi". And we think that if you don't go to therapy, it means you have a problem (since you don't want to confront your issues).
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