Thursday, August 02, 2007

Self-Evaluation

In today’s For Better or For Worse, April Patterson does a self-evaluation and judges her life to be good. This time though, she does it without comparing herself to Becky McGuire or having Eva Abuya or Luis Guzmán point it out to her. I find that for me, this makes all the difference for my enjoyment of the strip. In all those cases the comparisons never seemed to be fair to me. Moreover, they seemed to be leading to this moment with April, where the teenaged girl, who has been described as bitter and complaining (primarily in the monthly letters) for almost 2 years now, finally realizes that her life is good. Is this one of those 2-year storylines that Lynn Johnston likes to put together. Are we finally seeing the culmination of 2 years of plotting for April Patterson? If we are, it is really a plotline that I have completely ignored, primarily because I thought April had legitimate complaints.

The other possibility is that we are seeing part 2 of a self-assessment strip sequence. April’s moment is very similar to the strip back last August, where Elly looked in a mirror and evaluated her face and her life at the same time. http://www.fborfw.com/strip_fix/archives/001956.php.

It makes me wonder if all the Patterson characters are going to go through a similar strip sequence. That could be quite dull, unless of course, Edgar and Dixie were included in it.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love today’s strip! April’s self-realization moment reminds me of a defining moment in my own life. I was a typical 11th grader who couldn’t wait to get out of school. I liked school for the social interactions but I wasn’t interested in learning anything. Well, on this particular day, as I was walking home from school, I realized how lucky I was to be learning something new in each of my classes each and every day. I then started to feel sorry for my mother because she was a secretary who was doing the same thing day after day after day. On that sunny day I decided that I would never stop learning.

7:52 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Anonymous,

My father taught college choirs at a small college in Western N.C. One of his favourite stories is when I was a young lad and he asked me what I wanted to do with my life, and I responded I didn't want to teach music because I wanted a job that made money.

Ironically, even though my dad did not make much money compared to other people in our neighbourhood, I had a better life growing up than my own kids have. House prices and land prices and car prices relative to people's salaries were so much less in those days, that my father had more buying power with his salary then, than I have now. Growing up, I had a nice house and a huge yard with much wooded land. Today, I couldn't afford the house I grew up in, even though I make more money than the guys today who teach college choirs.

10:20 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

" I had a better life growing up than my own kids have"

The quality of your life may not have been better. You had more space growing up but from your posts I suspect that your children have the better family dynamics - and that's everything!

12:40 PM  
Blogger howard said...

Anonymous,

My kids haven’t had to deal with divorcing parents, if that’s what you mean. That is certainly true. I am glad my kids didn’t have to deal with that. They understand it to a certain degree, because all of their grandparents are divorced and remarried. However, they didn’t have to experience the splits. All of the grandparents are with partners they have been with for over 20 years.

What I wish I could do for my kids has more to do with the time in which I was brought up. Every kid in the neighbourhood knew every other kid in the neighbourhood, and we all played together without any sense of danger or “watch out for strangers” of having to have a parental escort. In contrast, my daughter does a program called “Girl Power,” where a good portion of the program teaches her how to defend herself if someone tries to abduct her. In my day, we could go into someone’s backyard and play a game of baseball without any fear of knocking a ball through someone’s window; the yards were so large and so removed from the public thoroughfares.

In my neighbourhood today, if my kids go out and ride a scooter on the sidewalk, where there is the most room, either my wife or I have to go out and watch. I was living in Texas when Amber Hagerman of the Amber Alert fame was killed. She was abducted off her bike right in front of her neighbours, and the kidnapper was gone before the parents could get there. That made quite an impression on me.

1:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As a kid I hung out with my friends on the sidewalks of NYC while my brother played stickball on the street. No one told us to wear seatbelts or riding helmets. Parents were OK with this because they were ignorant of the dangers. Today, because bad news travels at the speed of light, everyone is much more vigilant. Statistically speaking, New York is safer now than it was when I was a kid but the public’s perception is the opposite.

4:27 PM  
Blogger howard said...

Anonymous,

Statistically speaking, New York is safer now than it was when I was a kid but the public’s perception is the opposite.

Statistically, fewer kids die from accidents due to their wearing seat belts and helmets. That’s one part of it. However, the other part of it is that child molesters were frequently killed by other prisoners in the old days. Now they are better-protected, most of them live long enough to serve out their term, and return to society.

5:23 PM  

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