Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Week 10 Series: A fucking big bill and a generation gap.

Every month, my roommates and I fork out an average of $40 to pay for the utilities we have grown so accustomed to. I turn off the lights when I’m not using them and I try to conserve water as much as I can. But this month the bill expressed a number I couldn’t comprehend. The fucking water bill alone was $876. Somehow, Irvine Ranch Water charged our household almost 20 times more than our usual payment. It said in one month’s time, we used 95,000 gallons of water like we’re running some aquarium at our humble residency. Anyone in their right mind would their was an error to this absurdly high amount… right?

Not our fucking landlord. After telling us about the damage, he begins to question about how we’ve been using this water. He actually expects that we pony up the scrilla for this nonsense. He asks:

Did you have a party or something?

Are you serious, sir? What kind of fucking party uses 90,000 gallons of water? I think if we decided to seal off our house and turn the living room into a giant pool, it wouldn’t come near the usage that the company said we used. If anything, it frustrates me that our landlord thinks that an outrageous charge like this could be completely our fault. So this got me thinking, there is a big generation gap in our society, especially between Asian parents and their offsprings.
While we do learn morals and other “acceptable” mannerisms from our parents, a lot of what we learn and actually accept is from the bigger society we live in. My mom stumbled across my cousin’s hookah and was completely terrified of the morose potential it could have. The first time I saw a hookah I was extremely curious in exactly what it is. Elders are quicker to judge I think. We can’t hate our elders though because we wouldn’t exist without them. I just hope they would understand our differences.

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