Another thing that dawned on me … I have never been to a wedding where there was the following at the reception:
Dancing
A band
Dinner served
Booze served (I’ve seen a bride and groom drinking something but apparently it was just for them)
I’m not Amish, I swear …
You don’t see many sit down dinners at Southern weddings - that’s more of a Yankee thing. That’s why we’re having one. My mom’s from Pittsburgh.
Actually, we’re having all of that except the band. Where do you live that you’ve never been to a wedding with booze and dancing? Even small weddings quite frequently have those.
I’ve been to weddings without a sit-down dinner although there was always a buffet.
I’ve been to weddings with no music or dancing ( every single Chinese wedding I’ve been to), I’ve been to weddings with no band that did have a DJ and dancing, and I’ve been to weddings with no drinking ( close relatives who were recovering alcoholics) but I have never been to a wedding with no music, no dancing,and no booze.
duplicate
When I picture video games in my mind, they come out looking like something from 1993, which was about the last time I even hung around when other people were playing them!
going to the prom- I was a shy geeky bookworm, and didn’t go on my first date until college.
(related to the above)- growing up in a somewhat sheltered life (which I’m mostly thankful for), I never had any interest in drugs, cigarettes, or getting drunk. I do drink now and then.
Buying multiple items of clothing for your children to try on at home and then returning the unwanted for a refund.
I can honestly say that, until my wife started working for a sporting goods store in a nearby city, I had never encountered this. Parents will go shopping for, say, a winter coat and instead of bringing the child along, they’ll buy two or three coats for the kid to choose from and then return the other coats. This didn’t happen just a few times, but was a regular occurrence. Plenty of the customers were more than happy to explain what they were doing, usually with the excuse of “oh, my kid hates to shop” as the reason why.
It is more likely what they mean is that shopping with their child is an ordeal, either embarassing or impossible. My son is two and there are times you just have to go and leave because he is having a meltdown, and it feels oh so good for random employees to believe you hit your child to the floor when they are actually having a tantrum.
They might also have special needs kids that would complicate shopping.
That might be true for some of them, but quite often, the items were clearly for teenagers and, given the tendency for some people to over-share, she heard plenty about how the parent didn’t want to hear the kid whine and complain and take forever to pick out something and it was just easier for them to do it this way. I think some of them thought that if they didn’t have a good excuse, the store wouldn’t let them return the item. Which wasn’t true, but they didn’t know that.
To repeat what a few people have said and add a few more;
Home ownership.
Summer camp.
Family vacations.
“Going to the bar”. I can’t imagine the purpose of going to a place just to drink. I’ll go to a restaurant and have drinks there, or i’ll swing by the bar at a concert venue to have a drink before the show starts, but why would I go to a place just to pay $10 for a glass of scotch when I could go to a store and buy the whole bottle for $30?
Flirting with people. I can’t imagine just walking up to someone I don’t know and trying to flirt with them. I once had someone try to pick me up while I was at a bar waiting for a concert to start - I found it awkward and uncomfortable and excused myself from the situation as soon as I could. (The fact that i’m a heterosexual male and it was a man trying to get me drunk was only incidental to the awkwardness.)
“Last-minute getaways”. You see these ads online all the time for last minute deals on flights to Cancun that are less than 12 hours away, and it seems to be a common enough plot in movies where a couple or a family will say “Screw it, we’re going to Tahiti in the morning.” How can someone DO that? Don’t you have jobs that would frown on you just deciding not to show up tomorrow morning? How do you have enough money just lying around that you can trip off across the world on a whim? How do you even PLAN a trip in that little time?
“Dinner parties”. Never been invited to or hosted one. I’ve gone to friends’ houses for dinner and vice versa, but this idea of putting on my Sunday best, a big roast in the middle of the table, wine and coffee being served, I can’t imagine anyone going through the trouble.
“Love at first sight.” I’m pretty sure you’re suffering from folie a deux.
Neighborhood associations, block parties, etc. I don’t even know my neighbor’s names and I prefer it that way.
School rivalries. I have no idea who my high school’s “rival” was.
School reunions. I have no desire to reunite with any of the twerps I went to school with.
Having a therapist.
Waiting in line for hours at the DMV. Every time i’ve been i’ve either made an appointment - in which case you show up at your designated time and you’re served - or there’s been less than a 15 minute wait to see the teller.
Ordering elaborate, specially made coffees at Starbucks. The handful of times i’ve been to Starbucks I ordered off the menu, and I never heard anyone make any special request more elaborate than “an extra shot” or “with caramel syrup”. If someone actually did ask for a half-caf soy double-shot peppermint creme hazelnut mochachino Americano skim with extra foam and a paper umbrella sticking out the straw hole the way they do on TV, I have to imagine the barista would do a double take and ask them to repeat it slowly while they wrote it down.
Buying or wearing jewelry. If I tried to i’d probably fail as hard as Infovore trying to buy drugs. (Buying drugs, for that matter.)
Haggling over the price of a car. The one time I bought a car, I paid the sticker price.
“Dinner and a movie”. I’ve gone on dates that involved dinner, and dates that involved movies, but I can’t recall going on one that involved both. I’ve never thought it was a very good idea - if you have dinner first and there’s a long wait then you’ll miss your movie, and if you have dinner afterward you’ll be too hungry and you’ll end up filling up on popcorn and spoiling your appetite.
Getting a tan. The only times in my life i’ve ever been tanned it was incidental from playing around all day in the sun. Lying still in the sun for hours on end sounds like the height of boredom to me.
Using condoms. All my sex partners have either been on the pill or no longer fertile, and I knew with certainty that there was no risk of catching a disease from any of them.
Massive family reunions. I don’t know the names of anyone in my extended family aside from my grandparents, my aunts, and my first cousins. (Truth be told, I have a sister whose name I don’t even know.) Once, when I was very little and my great-grandmother was still alive, I was brought to her (90th? 95th?) birthday party and put in a room off to the side with some of my second cousins. I had no idea who they were and can’t remember a thing about them.
Funerals and cemetaries. Never been to one. The only person i’ve ever known to die was my uncle and we skipped his funeral. (Years later, through an odd chain of circumstances, we ended up moving into his old house and the bedroom where he burned to death became my bedroom. I can safely report that I was not haunted by his vengeful ghost.)
In my world, I’m perfectly normal. Here on the SDMB I’m apparently the weird* one.
We seem to do all the common stuff that is listed as “outside life experience” in this thread.
Summer camp? I went as a kid, and my kids have gone to everything from horse camp to water-ski camp.
Lawyer? Not on retainer of course, but there is one’s phone number kept handy in wallet/car/etc.
New cars at 16? Both kids got them soon after they started driving. Nothing fancy, though.
House/Kids/Family? Done the whole thing with the exception of a picket fence.
House as investment? Certainly. Counting down the last year of the mortgage. Seems foolish to throw away 15-30 years of rent payments with nothing to show for it.
Writing your congressman? Definitely done that, although I don’t know how much good it did.
Cosmetic surgery? Not common, but Mizpullin’s done it once.
Driving for pleasure? I really enjoy seeing the sights between A and B on any trip, and actually prefer to use my own vehicle for business trips, rather than airlines. (I *loath *public transportation of any type, and will go to great lengths to avoid it).
Getting a tan? Sure. We’ve often hit the “electric beach” prior to going on vacation.
As to the thread’s premise…
I don’t get Starbuck’s coffee. I’ve never had a cup of coffee worth 6 bucks, and I really don’t think anyone else has either. 
As others pointed out upthread; Expensive designer clothes and purses are perplexing to me. Like the expensive coffee, I don’t believe a purse worth $500 exists. I understand that people will pay that, but I’ll never be convinced it’s worth it.
*I believe we have a member with that phrase as a user name. Apologies.
Oh, that reminds me…having a dad.
You can make an appointment to go to the DMV? I’d be interested to know what states do this and which don’t. I don’t think I have ever lived in state that does this. If so, it is their best kept secret.
Not sure if there’s a compiled state-by-state list, but for example in California you can definitely do that and it cuts your wait time down to about 5 minutes typically.
What’s crazy is that I know people who deliberately choose not to make appointments, even as they’re on the DMV website looking at available times because they believe they’ll just get lucky when they get there. Crazy people.
I think many of these boil down to socioeconomic class.
If you are middle class or lower, you don’t go on European vacations, buy new cars, have lawyers, and buy houses (if you are in an expensive area).
These seem “common” because people write TV shows, books, and magazines about people that are weathier than the average Joe. Apparently people would rather read/watch about people richer than them than pooer than them.
Owning or having the need to own a gun. I don’t know anyone who has a gun, I’ve only seen/touched a gun two times in my life as I recall.
I don’t do that for kids, but I definitely do it for myself. Sometimes I don’t have time to try things on in the store, or I need to know if that shirt goes with the skirt I want it to go with, or I want to show it to Mr. Athena and see if he thinks it fits/looks good. Way easier to do all that at home and return what I don’t want than to figure it out in the store.
Totally not true in my experience. Pretty much everyone I know is middle-class or lower, with jobs like construction worker, plumber, teacher, social worker, etc, and I can say with certainty that many of them have been to Europe, bought new cars (an astonishing number of them really - I can’t figure out how/why they do it), have lawyers, and own houses. Heck, I know a lot of downright POOR people who have done many of these things. Maybe not every year, but it’s not really unusual to save up/get a loan/be stupid with credit cards because you want some or all of these things.
In my case, the rural South. I had probably been to 100 weddings by the time I graduated high school in a dry county in Kentucky in 1994 (I played the piano at a lot of them) and I don’t think I had ever been to one that had booze and dancing.
A lot of people in the backwoods of the South still see drinking as something that Bad People do. It’s not a common attitude among the younger generations, but almost everybody has a grandmother who feels that way. Most people who drink go to a lot of trouble to hide it from the grandparents, or at least to maintain plausible deniability. And even many who drink don’t think it’s kosher to have booze where there are kids, even for casual consumption.
Also, most weddings happen in the church and the receptions happen in the church’s fellowship hall. I’m not sure there’s a public venue in my home county that allows alcohol. And since it’s a dry county, it would be hard to get someone to provide it.
Without booze, of course, there isn’t much dancing.
It was fairly common for couples to have their church wedding and their cake-and-punch reception and then have a party or bonfire somewhere with booze after Granny’s bedtime, but I was always to young to get invited to that part.
Seconding this. Apparently there are a lot of people out there with firearms, but I’ve managed to live close to four decades in the US without ever seeing a handgun out of a police officer’s holster. I’ve seen shotguns or rifles (I don’t know the difference?) hanging on a wall a couple of times, but I think they were antiques for display purposes. It’s always a little jarring to hear people talk about guns like they’re common things like a stapler or a hammer, when that isn’t my experience at all.
I grew up in the midwest and didn’t believe that summer camp really existed. I live on the east coast now and can’t wait to send the kids to summer camp when they’re a little bigger. I mean, seriously, what a freaking great idea!