Sewing Classes

Puberty is a horrible time for teenagers. So many things are happening at once and it’s difficult to find your footing. This is not helped by the readily available consortium of drugs and alcohol to lead you astray and as of late asphyxia has become an even scarier form of rebellion. It’s difficult to get into the crowd, it’s difficult to stay in the crowd and it’s even more difficult to get out of the crowd.

So tell me, in an age where everyone is seeking to prove that they are unique, why is it that there is still a certain hierarchy?

Why is everyone trying to prove they are unique by blending into the crowd? And how does pasting your body full of tattoos and piercings make you unique, when all you are doing is conforming to a certain ‘genre’ of people, whilst quietly hoping to get revenge on your parents for being so strict.

The solution is to go back a few years when men had to go to the army and woman were expected to go to sewing and cooking classes.

Now, I never grew up to the bitter drone of an army veteran’s repetitive stories about ‘when he was in the army’ so I may be slightly out of my depth here, but men went to the army for a year or two and came back more chiselled, more confident and more sure of themselves. And they came back to women who were lusty and good cooks.

I am not saying that men and women should be forced into a stereotype I am merely pointing out that if, after your final year of school, you have two years of discipline and fun then the pressure is off.

There is so much pressure put on you at the age of eighteen to decide what you want to do with your life, where you want to be in ten years, the kind of person you want to be, that teenagers are forcing themselves into these cliques to make themselves feel better about the fact that they still have no clue who they are!

How on earth are you supposed to be unique when you go through 60 emotions everyday due to the raging hormones pumping through your body making you bigger and hairier? It’s terrifying enough going through puberty without all the pressure of making decisions that will affect the rest of your life.

And then there is the GAP year, although I’m not entirely sure that a year of pointless drinking and tending at some bar in the back streets of London counts as ‘figuring out your life.’

So what do we do?

We end up studying some arbitrary course in a university where we hear the parties are great and we half-heartedly meander through three years of meaningless rubbish at dad’s expense all so that at the end of it we can get a job at a company where our degrees are completely useless anyway.

Well, I’m actually kind of enjoying doing that at the moment, so maybe it isn’t such a problem after all.

But in my next life, sign me up for sewing classes!