Summer of Love.

And suddenly, as he noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized
herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such adroit
handling, the situation must indeed be desperate.
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth.

Maybe if I was born during the Summer of Love (1967), with the confluence of social revolutions from no-fault divorce to feminism to free love to Vietnam- and their eventual displacements by punk rock and Reaganomics, I could be the template of individualism. Albeit, personalities are a product of personal development, wouldn’t it be a whole lot simpler if one could just say “It was the times?” The sixties counterculture- along with its alter ego, eighties greed- has found me in this South East Asian region. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the wind” might as well have been playing while I was shitting myself.

In fact the only thing that I wouldn’t agree to about the Summer of Love would be the flower in the hair, which would be terribly unbecoming on me o_O

Even so, I wasn’t raised by some wasted, crazed hippie parents who smoked pot during the day. Nothing could be further from the truth; my mother was considered a square even by other moms (refer: Kimbly ;)) and is the sort of mom who’d perceive a wet towel left on the bed as a serious violation of basic human civility. In reality, I am the waste who smoked pot any time of the day. My mother, instead, has labeled me a hippie on more than one occasion and she says it in an accusatory tone. She said it the day I came home with a skateboard and torn jeans and she said it the time I’d gone 3 full nights without sleep reading Karl Max’s Selected Writings.

Regardless of her knowledge of what being a hippie is really about, and the reversal of idealistic roles, my mother raised me in a traditional household and together with my father; they gave a new sense that anything was possible. And even now, even in this desperate time, I trust that the foundation they had set for me, along with the love I had not merit from my friends, and despite my insurgences, I can hold this down.