New litmus test for personal compatibility: Are you willing to crash a movie set w/ me? Take a rubber bullet to the shoulder if you have to?

- Moi via Twitter

I knew before I even hung up the phone that I’d made a mistake. An uncharacteristically amateur mistake at that. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. Truth.

I was calling to see if I could swing by the movie set, check things out, maybe snap a few pictures and turn it into a feature for True/Slant. Yes, I’ve become the kind of person who skulks around movie sets, decides to turn her living room into a homage to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, tries to convince friends to go on a wild goose chase for a kombucha starter (in order to brew a fermented tea that may or may not kill me) or to stalk Mitt Romney on his book tour (Does he really look that much like Guy Smiley in real life? I must know). Mixed in with the manic pixie dream girl antics are some legitimately solid plans to pursue opportunities and adventures ( I say this word a lot lately. A LOT.) of both the travel and business-based variety.

Photo by roberthuffstutter

Lately, I’ve been on a one-woman whimsy campaign. Instead of moping about the fact that I don’t have my own Algonquin Roundtable on speed dial, or that no one wants to blow off the day-to-day grind to cover Route 66 with me or play hide-and-seek in Central Park (I’m still accepting applications, though), I will spend that energy encouraging people to reconnect with their own whimsical impulses. When is the last time you daydreamed something that wasn’t related to money, power or love/sex? Or gave yourself permission to act unabashedly and impetuously silly, without the cover of alcohol or having to entertain small children? When did the definition of fun get so narrow as to only include “age-appropriate” peer-sanctioned activities?  Would you even know adventure if it bit you?

What does the bolder, braver, giddier, riskier you look like? How does he/she live? How do you get there from here?

And yes, if you’re reading this and fuming about the fact that I’m not taking into account people who face legitimate limitations on their freedom of movement (both literal and financial, familial, etc.) and thinking about the fact that you’ve been in a wheelchair since 16, so how the hell are you supposed to climb a $#%^ tree and JMH should just shut up with her ableist bourgeois privilege already, please know that I’m not here to provide you with a laundry list of 14 whimsical things everyone needs to do before they die. Frankly, that isn’t my style. Can’t climb a tree? Scared of heights? Fine. What I’m advocating is getting in touch with your primal, innocent imagination, allowing yourself to dream in technicolor and to start chipping away at the purely intellectual barriers and objections to living out these silly vignettes in whatever form they might take. Maybe that does involves waking up at 6:30 AM to go swing on the swing set at the park across the street or maybe it involves drafting fanciful plans to give your home office a complete steampunk makeover. The substance doesn’t matter, the act of prying your mind open to the possibilities is what counts, getting comfortable with the consideration of yourself as something other than acutely self-conscious and aware of being watched and judged at all times. It comes down to easing off the throttle of your “but what will the world think?” impulse control and allowing yourself to muse about what you would do and how you would behave if no one was watching, ever. What does the bolder, braver, giddier, riskier you look like? How does he/she live? How do you get there from here?

Carpe diem is scalable. Infinitely scalable. Start with your own imagination if you’ve let it fall into disuse. Start testing its boundaries. Toss it the keys and try to get comfortable in the passenger seat (don’t forget to buckle up, though). Manifestation can come later. There are plenty of (literal and figurative) trees and swing sets to go around.

I’m curious as to what weighs most heavily on your minds and the aspects of your lives in which you’d like a little cosmic fairy godmothering. Please feel free to add your own response if none of those on offer fit the bill.

I write a lot about going after what it is you want, not hamstringing yourself with insecurity, doubt or manufactured worst case scenarios. But what if you don’t have a sweet clue about what it is you want? What exactly are you supposed to do then?

Photo by Robert Scarth

Let’s start at the very beginning (I’ve heard that it’s a very good place to start). If you don’t know what you do want from life, you can at least try to figure out what you don’t want and what won’t make you happy. It’s a little bit of deduction meets a dash of Occam’s Razor, wherein you keep identifying and rejecting what you determine you don’t want (via trial and error) until you’ve exhausted all possibilities and all the that remains must thus be what you do want. Destiny by default. Replace passion with process of elimination. After all, isn’t that how Michelangelo wound up chipping away at the marble to reveal David (or apocrypha would have you believe)? I kid, but not really.

Yes, this wisdom flies in the face of romantic notions of having a calling (get bent, Max Weber) or being a born whatever (actor, singer, sanitation engineer), but the point is to stave off the paralysis of indecision that being in your twenties and not having a solid trajectory can give rise to (Okay, so you don’t know what you want? Let’s start with what you don’t want and work backwards!) and to get out of the mindset that you should both know and be well on your way to your fulfilling your one true purpose by the time you graduate high school.

More than likely, these do-not-want moments will take you by surprise. You will test out an idea or be faced with an opportunity that seems fist-pumpingly appealing at first glance, only to realize, when push comes to shove, that it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it just leaves you cold, or has downsides that you didn’t anticipate or maybe your stomach actually starts to hurt at the thought of  going back to school for graphic design or relocating to Alaska for that sweet research gig you beat out 120 other applicants just to get an interview for. Listen to these cues, cross this path off your list and proceed to figuring out what the next likeliest option will be.  Forget about saving face. Cut your losses and chalk it up to a learning experience and not a reflection on your judgment. Don’t try to convince yourself that you can learn to like it/him/her/Februarys in Anchorage. Going down with the ship by committing to a career/relationship/life that you’ve realized isn’t what you want (even if you don’t know what that is) isn’t noble and it doesn’t build character. It simply throws up another road block along the path to finding what does feel right. And really, don’t you want to get there as soon as possible?

A few months ago, a younger friend asked me what growing up was like, what it felt like to be an adult. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but no doubt it was something facetious and possibly flippant (and most likely I was hanging out in my pajamas when I read her email – that seems like a safe bet). I had actually forgotten about this conversation until I was out for a walk last night and Landslide came on my mp3 player. Whenever I hear it, I always think about the fact that Stevie Nicks was a mere 26 when she wrote it and the precociousness of singing about handling the seasons of your life and children getting older, etc. at that age. But man, she really nailed it, didn’t she? The song has aged beautifully (notwithstanding the fact that it’s butchered at least twice a season by blankly smiling 18 year-old American Idol contestants) and to hear current-day Stevie Nicks sing it in her worn-through voice just drives that poignant point home.

Image by ahisgett

All of this being a long way of justifying the fact that I’m going to be equally precocious and finally get around to answering the aforementioned question, potential eye-rolling from my future fifty-year old self be damned. Couldn’t be any more cringe-worthy than having sung back up for Taylor Swift at the Grammys (Sorry, Stevie, but that was beneath you).

Susan Lucci, Stevie Nicks, And The Sum Total Of My Wisdom On Growing Up

Because there isn’t a destination, it really is all about the journey

My mother has been a fan of All My Children since before I was  born and I grew up with the characters. Now,  I only ever see an episode of it when I’m home visiting once or twice a year. I remember remarking to her at Christmas that I couldn’t believe that character A was now in love with character B, his former mother-in-law. But to my mother, who watches the show daily, this didn’t seem like a leap at all. She was privy to all of the months of plot progress and groundwork that led up to this and so it made a certain sense to her as a viewer (actually, the mother-in-law in question was THE Erica Kane, so that should have been all of the explanation I needed). Growing up  happens in the same way. You don’t suddenly wake up one day (if ever) with a burning, out-of-the-blue desire to get your cholesterol tested and to outfit yourself in pleated Dockers. Growing up is an incremental (and in some cases, glacial) process of adjusting, shifting, reorienting and tweaking that ultimately gets you to a place where you’re okay with you. You can take stock and realize that, yeah, this will do. You eventually stop caring to ask whether you’re there yet (how about now?) and realize where you are and who you are is good enough or has all of the component parts to be good enough if you care to organize them in the best order and/or apply a little elbow grease. And you eventually reach the point where you feel ready to take all of the energy that you’ve spent scouring every dark recess of your psyche (buffing it to a shine? looking for cracks? trying to find your lost contact?) and channel it outward. You start to wonder just what would happen if you took yourself and the way you are as a given and started applying all of that formerly self-analytical power to something other than your own navel.

You realize that being universally liked ain’t gonna happen (unless you’re Betty White)

You stop clenching your fists, holding your breath and approaching every interaction with that goal. You put your best self forward (or sometimes you just settle for not being a total misanthrope) and let the chips fall where they may. Being understood becomes more important. Do you get where I’m coming from? Grasp my point? Can I do the same for you? Okay, then we’re in business. Anything else is a bonus that we come to appreciate the rarity of only when we realize how truly serendipitous finding a simpatico someone is.

You start working with what you’ve got vs. trying to figure out how to upgrade or replace it

You can strip things down to the studs, but the foundation isn’t going anywhere. You can only ever be a healthier, saner, kinder, stronger version of yourself, that same self you were born with x number of years ago. You can’t make yourself taller and smarter and able to run an Olympic 100 M in 9.78 seconds. You can spend a lot of time wishing for these things, but they aren’t going to happen. Your lot is your lot and pining for someone else’s is, to my mind, a criminal waste of precious time (that only gets more precious as you age – Think about being 40 or 50 and still looking over your shoulder or worse, over someone else’s). As you grow up, you’re (ideally)  increasingly able to frankly and compassionately assess the hand you were dealt and figure out how best to play it.  Beats pouting because you’d rather be at the roulette table instead.

You figure out that ruining your life is hard work

You can make poor choices, choices that hurt you, that devastate others, that lead to consequences and repercussions, but short of one that results in your immediate death (don’t touch downed power lines, y’all!), there is always something, no matter how small or insignificant by others’ standards, to salvage from the ashes. Maybe it’s as intangible as your personal dignity, your ability to sleep at night, but until you ultimately draw your last breath, you have the opportunity to save something. Destroying any and all possibilities for redemption is a hard slog, you have to commit to it 100%, you have to devote your all over the next 50 or 60 years to squashing every possibility for betterment or peace of mind. That takes dedication. Isn’t it easier to simply acknowledge that one poor choice or even a string of them doesn’t define you entirely? As you age, you come to realize that very few decisions are black and white/all or nothing calls, no matter how monumental they might feel in the moment.

You accept that life isn’t a pissing contest

Easier said than done, yes? It’s not about reaching some untouchably Zen place where you never feel the stab of envy or jealousy again. It’s about realizing that happiness isn’t rationed. Someone else’s good fortune doesn’t mean that there’s less out there for you. It’s about realizing that what you truly long for is mostly likely your own  idiosyncratic version of happily ever after, not simply the ability to slip into someone else’s shoes and appropriate theirs. And it’s about realizing the futility of wanting something simply because you believe you’re supposed to want it or you’ve been conditioned to want it. If I had to sum up my overarching goal with Gen Meh, it would be to encourage people (my peers) to do the (sometimes unpleasant) work of stripping away all the woulds/coulds/shoulds to discover their personal convictions and then to have the courage to defend and pursue these convictions unreservedly. That’s why I’m here, folks. Well, that and landing a sweet book deal, obviously.

Don’t ever get involved with Lindsay Buckingham or Adam Chandler

Speaks for itself.

Today, I was thinking about a conversation with a friend that took place a couple of months ago. I asked about her job and she remarked that she could see herself staying there for the rest of her career and being fine with it. I remember being completely taken aback. This wasn’t a reflection on her job, but a reaction to the oddity of hearing someone my age speak about the long term. Twenty or thirty years might as well be to infinity and beyond for most of Generation Meh.

Photo by ronnie44052

We talk about the future, but it’s in vague, nebulous terms – buying a house someday, starting a business, paying off our student loans. It’s not so much concrete plans as an acknowledgment that time will continue to march on and some stuff will obviously happen in the interim between the all-too-vivid now and the yet-to-be-determined then. In a way, it’s comforting. There’s always the possibility of improvement, a change in fortunes, a rising tide to lift all boats. Maybe even soon. Soon-ish? Someday?  Being relatively young, believing in better times ahead (at least at the level of the individual, best to take an ostrich-like approach to collective fate) is still plausible. After all, we were promised robot butlers, weren’t we?

But as much as the idea of the eventual comforts us, investing in it lets us off the hook in the here and now. There was a neon sign on the Tex Mex restaurant near my old office – Free Beer Tomorrow. But the weak joke is on the patrons, of course – that mythical tomorrow never comes and the drinks are never free. It’s just a string of todays that lead us further into the future that we believe will be better than the present but aren’t actually taking steps to create.

And yet, things are pretty tenuous without that American Dream infrastructure, aren’t they? Sure, there’s the tantalizing freedom of being able to collapse the tent, pack up your wares and move on, move out, move up at a (figurative) moment’s notice, but there’s also the worry that, without roots, a stiff wind could upend everything and you’d never find all the pieces or be able to put them together in the right order again.

So, for the moment, Gen Meh has set up camp in our individual way stations. While we haven’t figured out the future, we also haven’t committed to the present. We know that now is not enough. Now will not suffice for the next 20, 30, 60 years. But we haven’t gotten much further than that. One foot in the present, one in the future and both eyes on the clock. And that’s where the fear creeps in. It reminds me of a (misinterpreted) conversation I had with someone once upon a time. I mentioned not wanting to just let time pass, to eventually find myself staring down the barrel of 30 and not be able to account for the years that got me there. I’m no proponent of five-year plans and scheduled existences, but I understand the nagging fear of becoming a Rip Van Winkle in your own life, the fear that if you don’t or can’t get square with the here and now, to assign it some (any?) intention, endow it with a greater purpose, that you might very well wake up one day to realize that you’re in a hot air balloon drifting three hundred yards over a Kansas wheat field with no recollection of  having untied the cord or thrown the anchor out.

Oh my, how did that happen? is a pretty poor substitute for carpe diem, isn’t it?