"Stand up straight."
"Chin up!"
"Where are you're manners?"
"You are a young lady."
"Be grateful for what you have."
"Be obidient, be grateful, be humble, be a lady."
"Watch your posture."
"Complaining is not attractive."
"There's nothing out there for you."

That's what I hear. The same negativity pentrates my ears and resonates deep into my soul though my straight back and elevated chin always hide my pain. Most people see being old-fashioned as only a minor flaw, but unlike myself most people are not having it forced down their throat with fine gold cutlery. I, a resident of the twenty first century am being prepared to enter the world as a debutante of the nineteenth, but unlike the beautiful Jane Austen stories that I read under my covers at night, there is no grand ball at the end of my journey. No fine jewelry, no corsets beneath elegant dresses, no hidden love letter of passionate fire, no glass slipper to lose, and no dashing suitor to find it. At the end of my journey there only seems to be more apathetic critisism waiting to pounce on me because of her. Her and her mother and her grandmother and whoever it was that implanted these rustic ideas into her grandmother's head with a hammer - the same hammer that she's been using to infect mine. I don't want to allow her to but I'm not sure how to stop it. The only weapons I have at my disposal are of the fine gold cutlery set and I've come to know that in this fleeting life gold and finery mean nothing. The gold and finery that were intended to be our symbol of wealth, wealth that we don't have: a lack that must therefore be compensated by a spotless reputation. How innoncent of me to believe that the make of my reputation would be my own choices. To believe that one day I would be able pick up my gold knife and free myself one way or another. Unfortunately for me, gold butter knives only cut so deep. The hammer cuts deeper. Much deeper.