Saying It

I've just been reading over what I recently blogged a few days ago and I wondered who's voice that really was?

It's apparently mine, since I don't have any trouble recalling writing it.
But reading it again...I felt...I don't know... apologetic?

That voice was whiny and somehow...old.
It's not the voice I imagine myself to have or the thoughts either. I came across angry and bitchy and that's not really how I meant it. I'm really neither, angry really or bitchy.

If anything, I'm...bewildered.

I don't know what my place in this world is and I figured by the age of 42, I'd have certainly figured it out. It's the reason I started this blog in the first place.

Gen X.
I'm Gen X and this is my voice, my way of striking back at the things that have changed in my part of the world.

My sister, a Gen X by the skin of her teeth, I think of her as Gen X on the Cusp of Millenial, once said that she rejected that title, and resented being labeled as such.
I've always embraced it, feeling that at least I wasn't a lone figure sitting cross-legged on my bed in front of my laptop venting my spleen, that there was a whole generation of us trying to puzzle out the ways things are from the way things used to be. Safety in numbers if you will.

It's really been on my mind of late. How do I fit myself into this society? I feel it in so many ways, trying not to be swallowed up by past recollections. I chafe at the idea of turning into an ersatz Miss Havisham, although instead of a wedding dress, I would be ensconced in my Benetton rugby shirt circa 1986, neon Swatch and high-top Reeboks. In some ways I want to fully embrace all the future has to offer, but then I take a really hard look at the trappings of our post-modernist society and feel myself contort into an Edvard Munch-esque tableau.

Sometimes it feels like I'm standing up on a table screaming into a megaphone to a world that is mute to all but the clicking of their thumbs.

I'm not angry...I'm confused at a world that consistently rejects the values it once espoused.
I'm not angry...I'm heartbroken that we've shoved all of our optimism and belief in a brighter day into a class struggle where we all end up losers.
I'm not angry...I'm astonished at the fact that arguably sane adults are running into oncoming traffic trying to catch an imaginary Pikachu.

Social media is a particular sticking point. The other day, the Google function on my cellphone began picking out my news items for the day. I admit it, I snapped a bit, 'the gall of Google telling me what news I was and was not going to read'.

   "Dammit, all I want you to do Google, is to tell me the answer when I ask for it, not log everything I've ever 'shown interest' in to pick out the articles that I will read!"

I want the freedom to choose what I want to read and when I will read it, I don't want to be coaxed like a recalcitrant child into reading, "Now be a good girl and let's read our Channel 63 weather forecast, you've shown interest in Channel 63!" Because the truth is, Channel 63 is pretty lame and their digital doppler is nowhere near as mack daddy as Channel 89, but Channel 63 paid out more ducats than 89 to show up first on the Google search list and I'm lazy sometimes!

Then the resentment comes in, resentment at the world where my privacy is so regularly violated. It's not as if there is even anything particularly nefarious, I just want the right to live in a world where if I so choose to re-read an old Judy Blume book to see what they are like as an adult reader, Google and Amazon don't immediately start recommending children's books to me. 

I don't want Twitter to make me feel guilty that I don't 'tweet' more. Or chide me for my lack of followers. And how about you Facebook, telling me the other day, when I finally deigned to look in at my home page that if "I had more FB friends, you would load more stories in my News Feed!"? I can't believe it, I'm 42 and I'm still being mocked by the 'cool kids'!

All of this just makes me feel more isolated and less included and that's why I started writing here, so that my voice wouldn't be just another metric to measure traffic. So that I could write it all out and justify, I don't know, my existence perhaps?

I've always loved "The NeverEnding Story", which worth mentioning is all the more prescient because it just celebrated it's 37th anniversary. I loved the idea that Bastian is not merely reading the story, he's participating in it, he's part of it. Down to the moment, when he has to overcome the feelings of his lack of worthiness and call out the name of the Empress. When he says it, shouting the name in the midst of all of the confusion and cacophony, the Nothing recedes. If you say it, say the name, the Nothing has to recede.

And I guess that's why I keep at this, writing this, saying it, so that my own personal Nothing recedes.