That’s just the way it is, baby

Q: “My friend gets irritated when some of us want to watch trashy movies during our girls’ weekends at the cottage, but she is perfectly happy to have us all read trashy magazines instead. She says there is a difference, but I can’t see it.”

I would say that you are likely not part of a multi-generational, old-fashioned cottage family, accustomed to collecting regatta pennants and scratching tortured verse on sheets of birchbark. Because the difference you cannot see—irrational cottage tradition—is certainly real but invisible to outsiders and newcomers. Most cottagers have moved on from these old