I’ve had a similar feeling. One could easily interpret Rift as a comment on generational relationships as well.

You know, one of the saddest social trends I’ve noticed is the move to calling everyone by their first names, regardless of station. Many of the adults who taught, raised, or otherwise influenced me as a child now expect me to treat them as equals, and I honestly have a hard time doing it. Same with anyone who I was first introduced to as an authority figure (like former bishops and others)regardless of age. I’ve forced myself to call my professors by their first names at their request, but it still feels awkward, and I doubt I could ever do it with my teachers from younger years. Yet I know a lot of kids who even call their parents by their first names.

It’s interesting how differently I treat the elders who I’ve met as an adult. I feel far more comfortable familiarly addressing a 70 year old man who I met casually when I was 25 than a 45 year old I met as a teenager. Perhaps the lack of respectful titles and modes of address is one reason those gruff old men can seem less valued these days. Some people I know love to listen to their stories and to hear their responses to various things, but it’s mostly to secretly laugh at them for their “irrelevance” rather than to appreciate them.

An expedition!

There’s a unisex barber shop in our town. I wonder if the magazines would combine extremes from both sexes (playboy+cosmo, Woman’s world + fishing and car magazines) or be neutral so as to make everyone comfortable.

Maybe I should venture in there sometime…

I sense, Katya, that you and I come from completely different moral universes.

———-

Here’s a line I wanted to quote but didn’t fit in:

Later on the hands page quoted above, Stucki tells another feller what he supposes after we die.

After getting there and welcomed,

“Then I guess we get to work, least I hope so…. Some people think it’s like going to church, all day long. God help us if it is.”

“I wouldn’t like it unless I was busy, and I don’t like singing,” Karl said.

What do you think of that? What does heaven look like to a Man?

Ha! Well, if you can rewrite etymology to suit your own rhetorical purposes, I don’t see that you can complain the next time someone uses a coffee-drinking, temple-attending Mormon as a plot device.

My original phrasing suggested that Petersen used hands as a symbol because man = man, but that was presumptuous of me, so I decided to just rewrite the history of language instead.

Is it a coincidence that the Latin for hand is man?

to which the answer is “yes, it is a coincidence.”