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.
Friday, September 2, 2016
Sunday, August 28, 2016
A Substantial Identity Crisis
(Originally published in 8/16- re-released 12/18)
Judging by my output over the last several weeks, it should be fairly easy to conclude that I haven't had much to say...
You know you are experiencing a formidable dearth of creativity when the most original thing you've done in two and a half months is create a playlist of all songs with the word 'magic' in them. It was a doozy though, with everything and everyone from Olivia Newton John to the Cars.
I've been in a sort of philosophical 'funk' of late. Inspiration has never seemed so far away. Began to think that I might be experiencing some sort of 'mid-life' crisis...Nothing is more hackneyed and clichéd, I know, but how else to explain the fact that the only things I've looked forward to of late was TCM's Summer Under the Stars Movie festival and the fact that Yacht Rock returned to Sirius XM Radio. Even more worrying was the recent trip I paid to my local used book store in which I spent 45 minutes and emerged empty-handed! That's never happened in my personal history. Not Ever....Absolutely Never.
Panicked, I retreated to a local antique store hoping to find some sort of tchotchke or piece of décor to pluck myself from the oblivion I seemed to be inhabiting. It didn't work. I emerged like a sleepwalker from the shop mumbling to myself some gibberish about not wanting 'more clutter' or 'things that would only collect dust'. Alien phrases I've never before heard myself use...
After retreating home to huddle cocoon-like with a cup of tea and a few pieces of verboten Scottish shortbread on my sofa, I proceeded to spend some time staring off into space contemplating my seemingly erratic behavior of late.
What was happening to me?
I realized that I was tired of the same old, same old. Nothing substantive. I'm sick of reading magazines in which the only 'meaty' reading was the disclosure page for prescription medicines. They seem to be writing periodicals these days for people with zero attention span. The pages were a hodge podge of 'bites' of articles with no real story with a beginning thesis, supportive documentation and a conclusive ending. I went into the bookstore looking for a sweeping novel and all I found were breezy pieces of 'chick lit' and for some reason I can't work out, hundreds upon hundreds of books about vampires, zombies and various other assorted stories of the undead. I couldn't even find any of the Louis L'Amour(s) which were so prized by my late great-aunt.
It's as if I'm in a state of perpetual mourning, (no I'm not really depressed) for more than society is capable of providing. I mourn the lack of civility, manners, the casual dress, the appalling lack of education. In the time period between my last writing on this blog and now, I've been informed that cursive writing is no longer part of the standard curricula in our schools. Upon hearing this, I embarked on a lengthy period of research (nothing thrills me more than doing research) and in several articles I read, I was backed up by several eminent sociologists, many teachers and educators as to the irreparable harm this is doing, but in the midst of my quest for validation, was the far more sobering thought that, "No one cares..." If the parents whose children this is affecting say nothing and thus far, their silence in this case is deafening, then what do I, a parent of none, a childless spinster have to say? I've got no skin in this game. My contemporaries who have school age children argue that "computer skills are more important...and no one writes in cursive these days anyway".
Except well...me...I always write in cursive. Even down to the notes that I write to myself.
So I am once more perhaps, an anachronism in my own time.
Maybe it's foolhardy to be this way, but I find myself unable to deny the fire that burns within me for substance. So in spite of the fact that it is possibly an exercise in futility, I will continue to seek out the elusive well-written sweeping novel, I will keep using 'big words'. I will keep my inner pilot light lit with zeal for the beauty and class of classic movies, for the arts, for music and for the hope that somehow the written word will stand the test of time.
Judging by my output over the last several weeks, it should be fairly easy to conclude that I haven't had much to say...
You know you are experiencing a formidable dearth of creativity when the most original thing you've done in two and a half months is create a playlist of all songs with the word 'magic' in them. It was a doozy though, with everything and everyone from Olivia Newton John to the Cars.
I've been in a sort of philosophical 'funk' of late. Inspiration has never seemed so far away. Began to think that I might be experiencing some sort of 'mid-life' crisis...Nothing is more hackneyed and clichéd, I know, but how else to explain the fact that the only things I've looked forward to of late was TCM's Summer Under the Stars Movie festival and the fact that Yacht Rock returned to Sirius XM Radio. Even more worrying was the recent trip I paid to my local used book store in which I spent 45 minutes and emerged empty-handed! That's never happened in my personal history. Not Ever....Absolutely Never.
Panicked, I retreated to a local antique store hoping to find some sort of tchotchke or piece of décor to pluck myself from the oblivion I seemed to be inhabiting. It didn't work. I emerged like a sleepwalker from the shop mumbling to myself some gibberish about not wanting 'more clutter' or 'things that would only collect dust'. Alien phrases I've never before heard myself use...
After retreating home to huddle cocoon-like with a cup of tea and a few pieces of verboten Scottish shortbread on my sofa, I proceeded to spend some time staring off into space contemplating my seemingly erratic behavior of late.
What was happening to me?
I realized that I was tired of the same old, same old. Nothing substantive. I'm sick of reading magazines in which the only 'meaty' reading was the disclosure page for prescription medicines. They seem to be writing periodicals these days for people with zero attention span. The pages were a hodge podge of 'bites' of articles with no real story with a beginning thesis, supportive documentation and a conclusive ending. I went into the bookstore looking for a sweeping novel and all I found were breezy pieces of 'chick lit' and for some reason I can't work out, hundreds upon hundreds of books about vampires, zombies and various other assorted stories of the undead. I couldn't even find any of the Louis L'Amour(s) which were so prized by my late great-aunt.
It's as if I'm in a state of perpetual mourning, (no I'm not really depressed) for more than society is capable of providing. I mourn the lack of civility, manners, the casual dress, the appalling lack of education. In the time period between my last writing on this blog and now, I've been informed that cursive writing is no longer part of the standard curricula in our schools. Upon hearing this, I embarked on a lengthy period of research (nothing thrills me more than doing research) and in several articles I read, I was backed up by several eminent sociologists, many teachers and educators as to the irreparable harm this is doing, but in the midst of my quest for validation, was the far more sobering thought that, "No one cares..." If the parents whose children this is affecting say nothing and thus far, their silence in this case is deafening, then what do I, a parent of none, a childless spinster have to say? I've got no skin in this game. My contemporaries who have school age children argue that "computer skills are more important...and no one writes in cursive these days anyway".
Except well...me...I always write in cursive. Even down to the notes that I write to myself.
So I am once more perhaps, an anachronism in my own time.
Maybe it's foolhardy to be this way, but I find myself unable to deny the fire that burns within me for substance. So in spite of the fact that it is possibly an exercise in futility, I will continue to seek out the elusive well-written sweeping novel, I will keep using 'big words'. I will keep my inner pilot light lit with zeal for the beauty and class of classic movies, for the arts, for music and for the hope that somehow the written word will stand the test of time.
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