Yet, they don't bat an EYE at the OTHER person in the family who has an "addiction to technology"; that is, my sister, who spends all of her time listening to music off her iPod and alternately texting/having three-hour phone conversations with her friends and painting unicorns all over her fucking walls like a five year old.
Hell, these people irritate me to no end. Just because "she has a hobby that doesn't have anything to the computer" (note: her hobbies are entirely composed of graffiti-ing her bedroom walls, listening to godawful pop music, and obsessing to a disturbing level over whatever the latest boy band is), they think that it's just fine to worry about how I "play games" all day. Doesn't matter that most of the time I spend on this thing is discussing stuff with, quite frankly, some of the best friends I've had in a while, whatever I'm doing is just "playing games" to them. (Seriously, I was reading a text wall earlier today, and my mom asked me to "pause" it and feed the dog. Yes. She asked me to "pause" the internet.)
I kinda understand my father's point (he spent his childhood doing the kind of thing I
would do, if they
let me), but my mother does not seem to understand that we live in the middle of nowhere and that I don't have the means to actually go do things with my few meatspace friends, which is basically the only thing that would their main argument ("Go outside and
do something!") enjoyable.
Simply put, these people won't actually
let me do anything that they want me to do. Going outside is fucking
boring, because the most I can do outside is ride my bike or just walk around. (I have lived here for YEARS. There is NOTHING interesting out there anymore.) Nothing I think would be cool, like archery or making stone tools or anything, because "you'll hurt yourself!" or because they're too damned lazy to come outside and "supervise" me. My mother won't even let me leave the YARD unsupervised, because of those highly publicized one-in-like-five-million random kidnapping cases and shit. Basically, they tell me to go do stuff, except they won't let me do anything INTERESTING.
Now, my parents aren't exactly bad people or anything, but they seem to have... control issues, in a way. I still have a FUCKING BED TIME, even though I'm in HIGH SCHOOL. My father occasionally has me fill out menial parts of his work for him, and yet, he pays me
less than minimum wage for them and won't bring it up to even three-quarters of it until I do a perfect job on an entire set of them. My mom won't let me visit my only friend within walking/biking distance without her permission-- not just checking in with her, she has to approve of it. This kind of thing goes on and on.
I know that I'm probably having a hard time seeing it from their point of view and all, but they seem to not be doing that from mine, either.