After spending a great Mother's Day helping my Mom open cards and gifts, it occurred to me before long that the method my family chose to prepare our gifts and cards for my Mom was not unique at all to our area where we live. Unfortunately, we pulled the classic "Dad-buys-the-card-and-signs-for-everybody." I remembered talking about this with my friends before, all of them being from upper class families, and they had all said that their family does the same thing on holidays and birthdays. Then, I remembered some of my friends from middle class families saying they made homemade cards, and spent a lot of time arranging them with brothers, sisters, and parents.
While rushing to the store and buying a picture frame after making this realization, I thought about in what way this could be considered a class marker. A distinction between the holidays for upper, middle, and lower class was clear, but I had never thought about the cards presented on the holiday in different families. In upper class families, we need hallmark to phrase things for us, while in middle/lower class, cards are much more sentimental and intimate.
Why are cards usually not as personal in upper class families?
This could be for a few reasons. Maybe a typical upper class family isn't as close to each other because of work schedule for parents (traveling, long hours, etc.) and a common use of a nanny in wealthy families, causing a lack of communication. It could also be the general high tension in the family due to things like pressure from parents which is common in upper class families.
I am not in any way intentionally belittling or judging any type of family, so if you have an exception to this thought, please feel free to comment back and elaborate on it!
Recently in AS, we have been talking about movies and the way we watch them. I started thinking about movies today and realized that although we consistently have movies coming out, few of them are very good or original. So many movies have 2, 3, or 4 sequels out because our consumerist tendencies have movie making companies milking one good movie for all it's worth.
This also must mean that original scripts are becoming less and less common, as our theaters are filled with movies like Shrek 4 and Spiderman 3. I looked at the movie listings on Fandango and found that the movies coming out consist of a lot of sequels. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda 2, Cars 2, X-Men: First Class, Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, and Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil all were listed, just to name a few. Another large portion of the list was repetitive movies, but in 3-D, or "IMAX Experience," or even the IMAX 3-D Experience. I then proceeded to look at the Top Box Office sellers, and found that the number of weeks a film was released averaged from about 1 to 2 weeks. To me, this seemed very different from when I was younger, when films seemed to be out for a month, or a month and a half. These observations seem to indicated that the quality of movies and the movie industry has gone way down. What will movies be like in 20 years? or 50 years? Will they exist at all?
