Recent college grad here. Parents weekend was always such a fun time throughout school. Getting to meet my best friends' parents and drink with them felt so freeing. They would talk openly about their lives and it felt like I was talking to them as individuals, not just the formal 'mom and dad' relationship everyone learns in childhood. My mom would come occasionally and would maybe have 1 or 2 drinks. Nothing crazy, she just loved coming to the parties and meeting all of my friends. The other parents were the wild ones though. One game day years ago we watched an older woman chug beer from a 2-story beer funnel in seconds. I remember people taking videos and captioning it "whose mom is this". lol.
My dad showing up to drink with me on campus uninvited is why I'm a recovering alcoholic. I never wanted to drink, but the pressures from my _parents_ vastly outweighed that from my peers. Screw them both, tbh. And screw these parents perpetuating that very pain. Oh well, it'll certainly be good for the therapy and addiction treatment industrial complex.
My dad came to drink with me once in college. He never went, and we share a birthday. So he came up for my 21st. It was super fun.
He got to see what college life was like, and I got to see what he was like as a friend instead of just parent.
The problem is that a lot of folks just use these kinds of weekends as a way to either relive their glory days or live vicariously through their children.
I have worked in colleges and universities for a few decades now, and this phenomena is growing because more parents have gone to college than in prior decades.
It's very, very, very cringeworthy. The amount of second hand embarrassment I feel after these weekends is enormous.
I don't think they are paying for education - they are paying for the "experience". What school you go to effectively does not matter after your first job.
It's easier to go to a cheaper state/city college and then take your first job severely underpaid. You will still be much better off than $200K in the hole and learn actual skills useful in the job market.
>It's easier to go to a cheaper state/city college and then take your first job severely underpaid. You will still be much better off than $200K in the hole and learn actual skills useful in the job market.
The person you responded to was jokingly implying that the parents paying for the education were trying to get a return on their investment by enjoying themselves during parents weekend. In the case of the parents paying, the student isn't in the hole for anything.
Even as a millennial who graduated 15 years ago, it was well-known that "Mom's Weekend" was one of the highest grossing weekends at the bars near campus.
We went to one parents' weekend, during our son's freshman year. It was not an especially exciting time, and really all I remember of it was a bit of a football game. I assume that we consumed alcohol, but moderately. I did not see middle-aged drunks staggering about.
Graduation weekend 1989 at SUNY Fredonia, my housemate's father was visiting. We were four guys sharing an apartment right next door to the biggest party bar in town. At some point during the night before ceremonies, in the midst of our revelries, my one housemate went out through one of our apartment's windows and onto the roof, followed immediately by my other housemate's father. The cops were, at that moment, in the street breaking up some kind of fight outside the bar. A cop turned and shined his flashlight on the two of them on the roof. The two of them, visiting dad and my other housemate, in response, gave the cops the finger. Good times!
Completely off topic, I lived in Fredonia around that time. I worked at the school, so I pretty much hung out in the townie bars (Coughlan's and an family run bar/italian restaurant I'm blanking on) . What was the big party bar you are talking about?
Sunny's. I know it was actually a dance bar. I hung out a lot at Rooney's and sometimes the OMI.
On the one side of Sunny's was a gym. On the other side was a Sears catalog showroom. Above the Sears were two apartments. My friends and I lived in one of them. I was a music major, as was another one of us. The other two were graphic design and communications, respectfully.
The Sears was at the end of the street, at the start of which was the police department. It was a one-way street, so the cops were always traveling past. My understanding is that the Sears eventually turned into a topless bar, after the Sears showrooms went out of business.
Where did you work at the school? I worked for a short time in the food service. I waited tables at the Topiary Tree. I also was part of the wait staff for events at the president's house.
Yes, Sunny's I went there more than a few times. I worked in the Computer Center in Maytum. The primary terminal room was in the bottom of the Library. I also taught some of the CS classes. I ate at the Topiary tree more often that I'd like to admit. It was a fun time. It was very creative school with the music and design people everywhere.
Any chance you remember the italian place? It was small, 1/2 was a restaurant, 1/2 was a bar. It was named after the family. Grandma was still working, making really awesome gravy. Awesome sausage sandwiches and Beef on Weck.
My email is in my profile, if you want to chat that way.
There are 330 million of us, too. The vast majority can be reasonable people and that still leaves millions of batshit crazy Americans out there to write about.
If people could understand this and have a better sense about the scale of millions and billions, a lot of social problems plaguing humanity would be gone.
Which social problems? I think many people do understand this and problems directly resulting from a lack of this understanding aren't actually that present in the real world, but by the same reasoning, people think others don't because that's the poison you see on the Internet.
In day to day life, it's fairly acceptable to just acknowledge that some contingent of whichever population is made up of lunatics and move on with your life. It's only other lunatics, typically also only on social media, that can't do that, but normal people just don't bother paying attention to them. and hope they burn out.
I'm American and I grew up with many perfectly nice people (including family) that have held morally repugnant beliefs. Same for people in many other countries. Only exception are cab drivers - they get talkative quickly with no filter. I think the US is veering in the direction. People are complex. It's only when you get to know them beyond superficial conversations / introductions that this becomes apparent.
I don't know, I've seen Americans stereotype people up and down, but the moment you mention an American stereotype, it's always "this is a big country, there are lots of people here". Just notice how "Chinese people" and "IP theft" go hand in hand here.
For what it’s worth to was in college in the late 2000s early 2010s and parents coming to party wasn’t really a thing at my university (private, research university).
That being said, both my parents died when I was a young child so I would’ve given anything to have some drinks with them as adults on equal footing. I don’t particularly find it odd that parents (humans too, after all) want to occasionally let loose.
"Dog Bites man" doesn't make headlines, but "Man Bites Dog" does. You'd probably be aghast at what sort of British and Australian news manages to make it to the States.
Media in general, but American media especially, is hyper optimized for clickbait. Informing people about news and current events is useful, but inducing outrage is _profitable_. Newsrooms across the country have realtime metrics dashboards showing what stories are doing numbers, and its not meeting minutes of local PTA meetings.
All incentives drive journalists to search out stories designed to light up your monkey brain, and a byproduct of that is every stereotype under the sun is magnified and distorted into a caricature.
I just wonder why more Americans don't consume News in a raw form. You can watch speeches and Congressional minutes on C-Span. No talking heads (at least when they're directly covering an event) or ad breaks. I can watch C-Span 2 segments online, series like Book TV, but I never hear about Americans watching C-Span for their news
For the same reason people will choose to get calories from Twinkies rather than home cooked meals, I would imagine. You have to put a conscious effort in to avoid the product which is bad for you but has been meticulously crafted to be easier and hit the dopamine centers of your brain harder.
It works the other way as well. More or less everything I know about the UK I learned from watching "Spitting Image", both the original as a child and the more recent revival.
> I can only assume that American media is an environment in which only the very most extreme and grotesque representations can break through.
Pretty much this. Our media is hyper-optimized for what drives clicks/views/subscriptions, and it turns out that nothing drives those things so much as showing outrageous behavior, rather than trying to portray what is typical. You can see it in our political culture as well: if you listen to the media, every single member of (insert other side here) is a step below Hitler on the evil scale. But if you talk to people across the political spectrum, you will find that the vast majority are good, decent people who share your same values and merely disagree on how to best reach them.
I genuinely think that the media is responsible for most of the social issues in our country, and if we could get rid of them we would be significantly better off.
>nothing drives those things so much as showing outrageous behavior
Visiting my parents and having to watch linear tv made this more apparent than anything. MTV seems to just have a show on repeat for hours called "Ridiculousness". The commercials blare (and were split between political ads and random drugs for obscure conditions) and the 'news' channels have bright colors and everyone yelling at each other.
It's sad that those outside America think negatively of us (while in Iceland I met Europeans who felt the same) because of horrid media that a lot of it is made up crap and lies especially in politics (on all sides). I am sure to get downvoted and by other Americans for saying this as I've said many times here for years and it gets downvoted. Yet one argument that other Americans are feeling the same is via who the 47th US president will be. A president who I never voted for but has been strung up left/right/sideways by his opposition yet all that mattered zero and was ignored. Their political games got tiresome and didn't work yet more importantly though is inflation and no doubt people were paying less for things when the idiot was in office. Wages skyrocketed during covid to get ppl back to work causing things to get more expensive to pay for higher wages is one reason things are more expensive.
The United States is a big fuckin place. If you don't want to have your world view challenged by other cultures, you can travel up to 3300 miles and still find people who think quite a bit the way you do - And that's without including Alaska.
So if you encounter Americans outside of America, and they aren't holding guns, you're already in a pretty filtered group. Like anybody, some of us don't discover how uncomfortable being out of your comfort zone is until you try, and they revert to their lesser selves. But at least they tried.
