SEVENTY thousand young people were screaming at Leicester Square, London, on a Tuesday night. They had waited for hours; some were said to have camped out overnight on the street, and they were not disappointed. Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Niall Horan arrived in style.
Who?
The fact that I was not impressed by the names of the Great Foursome, a.k.a. One Direction, is because I had left my teenage years a long time ago. I am a parent the worst nightmare that a teenager could morph into.
The teenage years are the strangest ever. It is when everything is about I, me and myself.
If people talk, they are talking about me. If they do not talk, they are not talking about me. I speak in hyperboles. I write in hyperboles.
I even dream in hyberboles. If I fail in anything, the humiliation is magnified many times over. If I am successful, I believe everyone should know what I have achieved and if he does not, I wonder whether he is living on Earth or on an unknown meteor.
If I am committed to a viewpoint, I will defend it to death. If anyone has contrary ideas, I will have to sit down and have a very long discussion with the person ... no, not a discussion, but perhaps more like an argument. My energy is boundless and my dogged determination to get something that I like, usually a popular product that other teens have, is almost unshakable.
That is the teen in me, shouting from the mountain top.
The most common phrase a teen will use in a parent-teen argument is "You don't understand. During your time it was different". But then again, is there any difference? On the surface level, the setting may have changed.
Technology has advanced, toys have changed, holiday destinations are more exotic but underlying principles and teenage experiences, whether specific or general, have not changed much.
Now that I am a parent and am on the other end of the continuum, I can see that there is a great similarity between what I had experienced and gone through and what that young person is going through now. But, of course, when you are a teenager you do not realise that.
I was watching a documentary about the Bee Gees. I enjoyed their songs tremendously when I was a teen and there was this clip that jolted me back to my past. I saw Robin Gibb cupping his ear with his hand as he sang Massachusetts. I remember I was so engrossed in watching the very same performance over a black and white television, oh so many years ago. It was very rare in those days for national television to air a pop group singing and it must have been on one of the festive days.
So there I was watching Gibb cupping his ear, mesmerised until my mother said: "I think he has an ear ache."
I was aghast that my mother would even mention such a thing about this demi god and highly irritated that my precious time with the Bee Gees was interrupted.
I attempted to correct her by saying that he was trying to deaden the side noise so he could hear his own voice better.
Ignoring my reply, my mother contemplated and came up with another more ingenious suggestion.
"I think he must have a toothache."
My face reddened and if my mother had not gone to the kitchen to check on the rice boiling over the charcoal stove, I would not know what I could have done to her.
So now, many years later, when I see Gibb cupping his ear on a flat screen television, I laugh loudly to myself and wonder why I was so uptight over the cupping-ear incident once.
Whether it was a ear ache or a toothache or a sound technique, what did it matter?
Oscar Wilde said, "youth is wasted on the young" and there is a Chinese phrase that goes: "I eat salt more than you eat rice", meaning that the older person has gone through more experiences than the young person would credit him for.
Tell it to an adult and he will shake his head knowingly. Tell it to a teen and he cannot believe that the adult has gone through what he is going through.
I hear that in Dublin, patient parents queued for more than two hours with their excited children to get a good seat in one of the two cinemas that had premiere screening of the movie One Direction: This Is Us.
At a time like this, I am so glad my children have outgrown the phase of going in that direction.
Read more: Strange thing about teenage years - Columnist - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/strange-thing-about-teenage-years-1.351333#ixzz2eK4RZGhI
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