Crossroads

At the beginning I would like to thank Mr Santa Claus for a quite decent Santa Claus Slide (Zjazd Świętego Mikołaja) – Warsaw Stock Exchange Blue Chip index (WIG20) dropped by 4,67 per cent in the passing week – it could have been better (bigger drop) of course. I am looking forward to seeing a battlefield on the SE charts next weeks, when two players, or maybe without mincing words – two American investment banks will stage a nice battlefield on the trading floor. For those who are not privy – next Friday is the settlement date for December series of futures on WIG20. One of the players is likely to end up black and blue before Yule.

Secondly, I am delighted to thank all the ones who remembered and whose wishes somehow squared with my wishes, dreams, goals and aspirations.

In the third paragraph of my post, I’ll copy what I wrote on Pinolona’s blog some two weeks ago. It is on why my contemporaries feel disturbingly old.

I have my own theory on why Poles in their early 20's feel oldish. There's already a kind of gulf between us and contemporary teenagers. Those fluorescent-adolescents who are now attending middle and high schools are a totally different generation. Mostly girls, my female friends from teenage years didn't look like that, didn't act like that, talked about different things. The change is visible - all my former teachers who I meet recall my peers and me as "good as gold" children and gripe about rowdy teenagers of these days - those born in the nineties and brought up in affluence, much bigger than the one my generation experienced.

I hear it almost every day, but only from the my female friends – either they gripe about being so old (so old means around 22 – 24), or they declare it is high time to get married and have children. Men in their early twenties, in turn, feel oddly comfortably with their year count.

The feeling of observing the different generation does not ebb, however, I can share with one crucial observation. Those of you who live next to middle or high schools or travel often by public transport probably have noted it as well. All those teenage girls look basically the same – similar coats, trousers, shoes, hairdos, scarves, etc. – there’s no diversity among them (unless you classify two most popular types of coats or shoes as diversity). None of them wants to stand out, a basic goal of a teenager is to blend into the scenery set out by fashion styles. They’re not like my peers and me a few years ago… They behave in a different way, they look like teenagers I saw when I was abroad at the beginning of the new millennium and believe me or not, I was shocked. And I can assure those of you, who complain that your homelands are in decline because of the youngsters, that Poland will meet the same fate. The best proof of this theory are the results of school leaving exams (it concerns the one after primary, middle and high school leaving ones – PL: egzamin szóstoklasisty, egzamin gimnazjalny, matura). The exam papers are getting easier and figures are getting worse. And I wonder what is amiss here, where was the mistake made?

And to conclude, a thought for today’s evening.

Mamusię oszukasz,
tatusia oszukasz,
ale życia nie oszukasz.

In English it reads:

You can fool your mum,
you can fool your dad,
but you won't fool the life.