Menstrual Mondays – Here’s your weekly pension check

My folks always encouraged a healthy respect for my elders. They wanted my sister and I to grow up learning from those that had done it before, seen it before and lived it before us. Mum and Dad expected us to visit the grandparents willingly, give up your seat on the bus for those older than you, and generally help and pay respect to the elderly wherever we interacted with them. I wouldn’t sit in a bus priority seat as a kid, even if the bus was full and there were no elderly onboard – just incase someone who needed it got onboard, they wouldn’t have to ask.

But a few years out in the workforce, a few years out from under the folk’s roof, and I’ve had a dawning realisation. The “elders” – the people I was taught to admire and see as role models – are a very select few, and are distinctly different from another group they are commonly confused with.

A group I like to call “old people”

Try giving me the finger when I break your arthritic hands with your own Zimmer frame

“Old people” are the absolute bain of my existence. While “elders” share fascinating and thought-provoking stories of another time; “old people” wont stop repeating the stories about how they last ate mud crab in 1967, how the road to Armadale used to have 3 less traffic lights, or how the speed limit for house boats in South Australia has been dropped from 7km/hr to 5.

NEWS FLASH GRAMPS – NO ONE GIVES A SHIT

You might think I’m just making these examples up, but after 3 weeks with my grandparents staying with us, I’m genuinely ready to start hunting an endangered species just to watch something precious die. Mindlessly reading a news article on the web last night I zoned out for about a minute, thinking about another bullshit story my grandfather had told me at dinner – some garbled crap about how they used to buy apples for 5c from a guy in a horse and cart on the side of the road. And in that mere 30 seconds, I managed to subconsciously navigate onto a site about the movie “Logan’s Run”.

Coincidence? I think not.

Jenny Agatta – probably the real reason for my subconcious navigation

Just a tiny selection of the classics I’ve heard recently:

• “This suburb hasn’t changed much since we were last here in 1973” – passing through a suburb that didn’t exist till 2005.

• “No, no – this is definitely the road to the airport” – driving along a road I took every day to school for 5 years.

And ofcourse the coup de grace,

• “Yes, well I think everybody is an outside person, except for those people that like the inside” – discussing work in an office environment.

The truly sad thing is you don’t need to be old to be an old person – you know that annoying Chemistry major you always bump into in the café, the one that always wants to dribble on-and-on about the latest precipitate they produced in the class? You know the chick at your local service station that wants to tell you what the petrol prices have been since you came in the week before? And the guy at work that has told you the same joke every day for the last week?

Guess what – their stories and jokes don’t get better with time. They just get older and more repetitive. They’ll just keep telling everyone the exact same stories they’re telling everyone now – except in 60 years time it’s even less interesting or relevant.

And that’s why we need a breeding-licence system….