A Critical Stance: The View from the Balcony

My View

Last night, I had an argument with my mom. The topic of discussion for that night was whether or not I could download ringtones on my phone. I was going to go ahead and download them without permission, but decided to give my parents the courtesy of asking them first. After all, they are paying for this family plan. So, I phoned my parents and my mom picked up. I asked her if I could purchase a few ringtones. She said she didn't want to have me downloading anything on my phone. I proceeded to inform her that they were only a measily $1.99 a piece, and I was only going to download a few. Plus, my brother already told me that I needed to download some ringtones. She said she didn't care what my brother said, I wasn't going to download anything. I think she thought that downloading was illegal or that I was going to download a bunch of songs and spend a lot of money but that was obviously not the case. The conflict ended with a unsatifactory "Ringtones aren't important. We'll talk about this later."

My Mother's View

My daughter called me at night to talk to me about downloading ringtones. I'm not a big fan of her downloading anything because I'm not sure if she's doing it illegally. She then told me that they were only $1.99. I didn't care how cheap they were because she'd probably end up downloading a lot of songs for her phone and it would get expensive. Plus, this is the daughter that was just panicking because she forgot her hairdryer at home and had to fork out the cash to buy a new one for the week. Plus I was stressed because I was trying to complete a resume that had to be emailed by the next day. I didn't want to hear about ringtones. However, I agreed to talk about it later. I just don't think it's such an important thing that we need to come to a decision about it right here and now.

Balcony View

For a balcony view of this situation we are going to have to reach into our imagination quite a deal. We'll just have to assume this balcony is a rather large balcony that covers Pillager and Bemidji at the same time.

I observed an argument between a rather impatient daughter and a stressed mother from my balcony. The daughter asked her mother if she could download some ringtones for $1.99. The mother was busily doing a resume on the computer and didn't exactly want to talk about ringtones when she was stressing trying to get a job done. The daughter continued to ask her mother about ringtones and tried to explain that her brother had said she should get some for her phone. Her mother did not care what the brother had said. The mother also made a good point that the daughter had just complained about having to spend money on another hairdryer so she didn't need to buy ringtones. I could tell by the daughter's face that she had been through a bad day, and didn't have the strength to continue arguing. I think it was just a bad time for this discussion because the mom was obviously stressed and the daughter looked like she was in a bad mood, too. The mom was right to postpone the conversation for another time when they are both in better spirits.