Journal 11

An aphorism is "a short, point statement that expresses a wise or clever observation about human experience" according to our textbook. There are a lot of different aphorisms. Some are more clever than others, but they all get their own point across. The aphorism that I will be discussing for three hundred and twenty five words will be "The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy." The author of this quote was unknown.

I found this aphorism extremely funny and a great aphorism. When I was younger, i would always complain about walking to the end of our drive way to my bus stop. We had a very long drive way, and I always hated walking to the end of it. I complained- saying that all my friend's parents drive them to the bus stop. My dad would always come back with the same line: I had to walk to school uphill both ways so I think you can handle walking to the end of the drive way. Parents are always saying how lucky us kids have it with our technology and with how "well" we are treated by our parents. I can not speak for other parents, but mine occasionally go on rants about how hard they had it. They used certain complaints such as "we never got to pick what we had for dinner. Ma put a plate down in front of us, and whatever it was, we were grateful to eat!" Using the same complaints over the course of my childhood, I have memorized their most used ones. Knowing their stories, when I hear them again and they change by getting a little worse, I know that they are exaggerating. That makes me wonder how bad it was in the first place.

This symbolizes how adults think the youth has it easy by saying how hard they had it. Maybe they just want to think they lived a very hard childhood when they really had it alright. Whatever the reason is, it is a humorous tale that can sometimes go a little too far.