Generation Meh

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  • Being Sally Field*

    Psst…did I mention exclusive Facebook-only content? Consider it mentioned.

    If you’re into that sort of thing, Generation Meh now has a nifty Facebook page. This baby is brand new, so feel free to get in on the ground floor with your liking.  I often have things to post that don’t merit a full discussion here, but are also too long or involved for Twitter, so Facebook will now be home to all of the brain dumpage that I’ve previously been bottling up. You will be edified and I’ll be (slightly) less repressed. That’s what I call a win-win!

    *It makes me sad how few of you will probably get the reference. Also, old.

  • Entitled To An Audience: Your Life In Three Acts

    I remember telling a friend years ago that she lived life as it were a movie and she were the star and the rest of the world were just extras inserted to fill in the background of a given scene (I’ve become a much better friend since those days, obviously). I was reminded of this conversation when I read this piece about the popularity of Eat, Pray, Love style pitches to literary agents. It seems everyone wants to land a fat advance to document their voyage of self-discovery, Bali or bust, y’all.

    But it isn’t just aspiring writers who believe that they have an audience-friendly story to tell. We all subscribe to this mindset to some degree. And strictly speaking, we all do have life stories, it’s just that the vast majority of them aren’t the stuff of bestsellers or blockbusters. That doesn’t stop popular culture from encouraging us to believe otherwise, of course. Reality tv (one day you’re just another nameless party girl and the next, you’re Snooki, America’s sweetheart), social media (you can have 150 000 Twitter followers hanging on your every tweet and still grocery shop in anonymity) and the logic of personal branding convince us we’ve all got something to tell or sell. Elevator pitches, Messageboard rants, talk radio, Craigslist Missed Connections, a hundred and one outlets to share your triumphs, tragedies and insights with the world and the eau de narcissism in the air that convinces you that such sharing really is caring.

    I’m as guilty as the next person, bien sur. I’ve just figured out that most of my stories aren’t that interesting. Do you really care about how I came this close to having a sniveling, toddler-worthy meltdown in the middle of the children’s section of Barnes & Noble five minutes before closing because I couldn’t find a copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear and because they were playing Tiffany over the PA and because I haven’t slept in six months? Probably not. Doesn’t stop me from stockpiling or mentally transcribing anecdotes such as this, though.

    And framing our lives as narratives isn’t just the result of human ego. We’re also attempting to  assign meaning and purpose and gravity. We want to believe that we’re getting smarter or stronger or making better decisions, that there’s something relatable, enviable, teachable,  something poignant that can be culled and offered up from our experiences. Something bigger than just one little person and their own private pain and individual epiphanies. There has to be be. It happened and it matters. We matter. Here are the Facebook photo albums, the blog, the book and the MTV series to prove it, to prove us.

  • Be Happier By Being Happier

    Nope. The title isn’t a typo. So, I haven’t been in the best mood lately. Just scuff your foot in the dirt bummed out more or less. Heave a big sigh and throw your bag on the chair instead of hanging it up because the world is mean, so why should you bother with niceties? down.  But I don’t have the time or energy to be bummed out. I’ve had writing to churn out, several important meetings for which  I needed to be in decent form (cross your fingers in my direction, kiddos), a panel presentation on social media to deliver, etc. The option to sit around brooding was, well, not an option.


    Photo by Brad & Ying

    There are times when you want to get to the root of what’s eating you (aphids?) and there are other times when you just need to get going, stick a bookmark in and plan to come back to it later when time allows. So what helps you shake off your slump and re-energize? My prescription is pretty simple. What makes you happy when you’re doing it? Okay, got that in mind? Start doing more of it. Don’t worry about fixing the blues (there will be time for that), focus on increasing the happy and then, like a vampire, feed off those good vibes and use them to get you out the door to tackle your to-dos. It doesn’t have to be what makes you happy in the grand, philosophical sense (actually, it’s better if it isn’t; creating more world peace would be kind of a headache), just the everyday I AM HAVING FUN RIGHT NOW happy. Is it playing with your dog? Stop reading this and take him to the park. Then come back and finish reading. Maybe it’s knitting? Start cranking out scarves and don’t stop until you feel all warm and fuzzy Zen. In my case, it’s new ideas and new projects and sweating out my frustration, so I started sending emails, throwing around possibilities, brainstorming my brains out. Oh, and going to the gym seven days a week.

    And you know what? It was the equivalent of an emotional Red Bull. The temporary high I got from reveling in my favorite activities gave me the burst of intellectual energy I needed to bang out my presentation and to put my best foot forward when schmoozing. And that’s really all I was asking for in the moment.

    Sometimes, you need open heart surgery and sometimes, you can get by with a band-aid. It ain’t perfect, but life goes on and often you have to go on (the best way you can) with it.

  • So You Think You Know Beauty Gender Norms?

    Despite my own documented inadequacies in the moving-in-time-with-music arena, I can’t resist the summer guilty pleasure that is FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance? Actually, the fact that I’ve had the idea for a post about the show’s illustration of social gender norms on my mind for a couple of weeks now clearly takes SYTYCD? out of the realm of bubble gum entertainment and into valuable research, yes?  Or so I tell myself as I pout about the impossibility of ever executing a perfect jete in this lifetime.

    The show  has undergone multiple format and judging changes this year, but the most interesting part of the season for me has been the gender disparity, the recalibrations this has prompted and the subtle but important object lesson about masculine behavioral norms that’s been evident in the voting. The female dancers were picked off quite quickly (Lauren being the one holdout), but this isn’t particularly surprising. Although, with fewer finalists this year, the drop-off seemed more dramatic and has made for some interesting choreographic challenges as it relates to developing guy/guy routines that are intended to be firmly heterosexual at all costs (to varying degrees of success). The popular assumption when it comes to reality shows involving audience voting is that it’s young female viewers who hold the sway and that said young female viewers largely prefer attractive male contestants to ones from their own cohort. The results don’t always bear this out, but the trope persists. In the case of SYTYCD?, front runner Kent seems almost as if he were custom-manufactured in a lab (the same one that produced Justin Bieber perhaps) to appeal to young female voters in just the right way – cute, but not too cute, wide-eyed, from a wholesome small-town family, respectful of the judges and tooth-achingly earnest.

    While Kent’s popularity surprised no one (thankfully, he’s a decent dancer), the judges seemed downright baffled by the inability of other male contestants to find a similar following. When early fave Billy was eventually dismissed, judge Nigel Lythgoe (he doubles as the show’s executive producer) speculated that America never warmed up to his “androgyny,” as if he were a dancing David Bowie and not simply a very talented but not overtly masculine performer of which the show has had legions over its seven season run. The judging panel was more stymied by the failure of contestant Robert to catch on with the audience. A great dancer, ridiculously handsome by any conventional standard and seemingly a hard worker and generally nice guy. How was this not a recipe for success? And yet, Robert ended up in the bottom three for weeks on end, leaving the judges scratching their heads at why America wasn’t voting for the hot guy with the right moves.

    Eventually, their lavish and obvious praise paid off and Robert managed to pick up steam with the voting public*, but, by then, I’d had the source of the audience disconnect pegged for weeks. Robert wasn’t playing his part. He wasn’t  treating his good looks with the self-awareness and gravity that we expect from men of his level of attractiveness, straight or gay. Instead of comporting himself in a manner that acknowledged his genetic good fortune, he acted like your goofy 12 year-old brother who forgot to take his Ritalin and this both confused and annoyed America. It’s obvious that he knows he’s possessed of a matinee idol appearance and takes some care in his grooming and presentation, so why the hell won’t he just man up and get with the script? Good-looking men aren’t supposed to duck the power that their looks afford them, they’re supposed to inhabit it, embrace it, if not wield it as a tool of outright social assertiveness (George Clooney is a total pro at this). To do otherwise, isn’t simply flouting convention (for that we can look to Brad Pitt’s penchant for hobo beards or Joaquin Phoenix’s penchant for hobo everything), it marks the perpetrator as one who  lacks canniness, shrewdness, a mature sense of how the world is and the ambition to use all of his assets to conquer it. And who’s gonna vote for that?

    Of course, it’s exactly the opposite for women. If men assert, women must signal. You learn to embody or approximate the traits that encapsulate heterosexual female beauty at this moment (always subject to change, bien sur)  and wait for that tag to be bestowed on you for a job well done.  It’s not only perfectly acceptable for a woman to be seemingly unaware of her beauty, it’s actually the societal preference. Recently, someone told me I was cute and not only was I cute, but that the cutest thing about me was that I had no idea how cute I really was. In essence, I was being lauded for not only conforming to a socially acceptable standard of attractiveness, but, more importantly, for appearing to be ignorant of this standard and my conformity to it. Exactly what doesn’t fly for the menfolk. And if you are rewarded for ignorance (in that it adds to your demure allure), you are punished for knowingness, both when it comes to beauty and to the assertion of other power traits (intelligence for example). I could (and did in the first draft) go into a long-winded discussion around the media treatment of Angelina Jolie and Hillary Clinton as typical of this paradigm, but in the interests of brevity, just name-dropping them more or less allows you to connect those dots for yourself.

    Bottom line? Whether it relates to beauty, brains or a host of other traits, men are aware, while women are oblivious (but not so oblivious that they don’t make an effort!). And both are punished for defying convention and refusing to play their parts, in the form of reality show vote tallies or otherwise.

    *This coincided with host Cat Deeley mentioning that he was celebrating a birthday that week and would be turning 20. Once America figured out that this guy had been  just 19 throughout the majority of the competition (despite looking a heckuva lot older), I think they were more inclined to cut him some slack on not yet having fully grasped the implicit lessons around the bearing and knowingness that masculine beauty demands.

  • I F*&$% Refuse to Grow Up

    Today’s installment of the American Dream Essay Series comes to us from Brittany Shoot. I “met” Brittany through the comments section of my Bitch blog, but I’m pretty sure there was no swearing involved.

    A couple of years ago, I wrote my master’s thesis on young people’s ethical right to privacy online. I was absorbed in Millennial theory for months, but it didn’t hit me that I was a full-fledged member of Gen Y until I realized I no longer cared what adults thought of me. An adult myself by then — if you consider 25 an adult, which by our increasingly confusing standards, you may not — I suddenly stopped worrying about whether people older than me approved of my apparently very adult decisions; examples may include moving abroad, getting married, having kids, or having one’s tubes tied. In this context, the decision at hand didn’t matter so much as my complete autonomy, the joyous feeling of being unburdened by adult expectations and a world in which there was supposed to be one proper course to follow. For the first time in my life, without a nagging suspicion that I would later be denied entry into some boring club for middle-aged conformists, I decided I was done. I might get older, but I didn’t need their approval to move forward.

    Photo by 917press

    Only later did I realize that even though — or perhaps because — I don’t tend to consider the judgment of those ten years (or more) my senior, I’m completely ill prepared for the niceties that comprise adult relationships. I swear like a sailor, if not a 15-year-old boy, and I generally blurt out whatever’s on my mind. I’m not trying to be rude or make everyone uncomfortable. I don’t need to seek out space in which to act on my weird tendencies; I’m frankly a little weary of being the freak at the party and just want to be myself, without too much hoopla surrounding it, if it can be helped. But I also don’t want to be so old and stuffy that I can’t be myself. I equate adulthood with growing into an intolerable beast of a person more concerned about making the bed than world news. I’d rather speak several languages than fuss over thank you cards. I’d rather do what I love for meager pay than be tied to a soulless desk job, from where I can watch my (and your) youth fade away.

    Perhaps it makes sense, then, that I am the non-adult in seemingly every social interaction I have. People look at me with bewildered amusement at first-time gatherings and wonder why my unshaven legs, thrift store wardrobe, and frank admission that I don’t make much money right now doesn’t make me blush or stammer uncomfortably. If anything, they’re the ones who become uncomfortable. What they don’t realize is that their yardstick simply doesn’t measure my standards for adulthood. For example, my partner and I are actively childfree and plan to always be so, which automatically removes us from some of the so-called “adult” discussions about how people have matured and feel complete — though they’re often also interrupted when they have to go do parental things. My partner and I also both work jobs about which we are deeply passionate but for which we are still underpaid. In other words, we opted for the alternate American Dream — in part because my partner isn’t even an American citizen — in a time when this is becoming increasingly normal; yet we have yet to meet anyone else, besides the friends we already have, for whom this is the norm. Instead, we meet thirtysomethings who work jobs they tolerate for an end goal we don’t understand. I don’t question it to their faces because what if they don’t know what the goal is? Is it my job to deconstruct their reality? And am I responsible for assisting in the restoration if I cause the demolition?

    A friend in her fifties recently told me that I’m the artist in the family because I feel so compelled to act based on emotion. It felt like a compliment in the sense that I’d just classify myself as a woman-child. In comparison with my friend’s life, my house is messy, my schedule is hectic, and my manners are only on display when necessary. She begins sentences with “Forgive me for saying so but…” whereas I lob curses left and right, no apology offered. She’s an unlikely pal for someone like me, but we click because we both seek a wider world in which we can find meaning in what we do. And, she may be a full-fledged adult by now, but she doesn’t care if I forget to buy curtains and wander around naked, or don’t unpack for three months after a move. It isn’t her life. It’s mine.

    -Brittany Shoot

    Brittany Shoot is a freelance writer, editor, and critic currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Sometimes she writes essays about her supposedly scandalous adult decisions under a pseudonym.

  • The One Part Of The Secret That Sucked Marginally Less Than The Rest Of It

    A former coworker once forced me to read The Secret. Believe it or not, I am occasionally reluctant to hurt people’s feelings, so when she came into my office singing the book’s praises, I tried to listen with an open mind. She told me how she had declared her intention to meet a man a by a certain date and, wouldn’t you know, the Universe sent her one a few days before the deadline. I refrained from speculating that she subconsciously felt the deadline looming and latched onto the first Mr. OMG Right Now who passed by in order to justify her faith in the book, because I’m not a totally terrible person. Long story short, she gave me her copy to borrow over a long weekend and I agreed to read it, which I did because A) all a girl’s got in this world is her word (especially after her looks fade) and B) I assumed there would be a quiz on the contents.

    Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

    Y’all know me well enough by now to guess that I didn’t end up being a fan of thinking your way to abundance. Actually, after my coworker left the organization and we fell out of touch, I more or less forgot about The Secret.  I was reminded of it, however, a couple of weeks ago when Brazen Careerist featured a blog post by someone touting the merits of the book’s philosophy, then again during a recent spate of solicited advice giving and finally during a discussion of this article on the effects of social relationships on life span at one of my internet haunts. The reason The Secret came to mind was the  applicability in these conversations of the one idea in the book (and a throwaway one at that) that I felt had any merit  –  the need to create the context that supports what you want your life to be like. The advice isn’t unique to The Secret, of course. Every list of diet tips ever no doubt exhorts you to keep only “healthy” food in your kitchen to avoid the “temptation” to gorge on Cheetos or order takeout Thai from the comfort of your couch. And certainly The Secret took it to a weirdly unsettling extreme ( I vaguely remember a woman who only slept on one side of her bed and emptied out one side of her closet as a signal to the Universe that she was ready for it to send her her proverbial other half – creepy).

    But the idea that your immediate surroundings and routines should support your goals and desires instead of opposing them is a solid one. I might desperately want a dog, but if I live on the 26th floor of a pet-free highrise smack in the middle of Manhattan, well, that isn’t exactly a Fido-friendly lifestyle is it? Or if you’d dearly love to be coupled up, but work 16-hour days and spent your weekends restoring furniture in your basement all alone, is it any wonder that you’re single? If all you want in life is to be the next Meryl Streep, would you settle for crossing your fingers and hoping that Scorsese might stop by to catch you in a Des Moines dinner theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and whisk you off to Hollywood to star next to Leonardo DiCaprio in a prime piece of Oscar bait? No, you would not. And if you did/do, you’re hopelessly naive and probably going to end up on the casting couch of a sleazy pseudo “agent” who doubles as a muffler salesman. I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

    Your actions have to match your intentions, or you’re not going to get any closer to what you want. Willing it to happen won’t work. Ditto, pining, sighing, daydreaming, cutting out little pictures and sticking them on a board or confining yourself to one side of the bed (What about people whose beds are so small they don’t have sides? What about them, writers of The Secret?). You don’t have to get all slick and finger-gunned out (and as a champion of the organic, I would advise against that anyway), but you do have to get your head in the game and give a little in order to get. Few of us are in a position that employers, prospective paramours, elite colleges and Hollywood directors are politely lining up at our doors to recruit us into awesomeness (Luckily, we’re not besieged with skeevy muffler salesmen, either). We have to at least meet ’em halfway (which isn’t Des Moines, btw) by focusing on the factors in our lives that are within our control and that we can change to better reflect our wants. And it can start with baby steps. Maybe it’s volunteering at an animal shelter to get a taste for whether you have the temperament for pet ownership. Maybe it’s scouring the internet for other like-minded locals interested in restoring vintage furniture to hang out with on the weekends and getting away from the solitary varnish fumes. Maybe it’s realizing that being a transgendered aspiring urban planner means that you may have to move away from where you grew up in rural Kentucky in order to access a fuller scope of opportunities.

    Bottom line? If you’re longing for something other than your current reality, you’ve gotta make the way you live support the way you want to live. And there’s no secret to that.

  • Questions To Ask Yourself When Contemplating Quitting

    I knew it wasn’t my scene as soon as I drew back the tent flap and saw a dozen spandex-clad people jogging through a circuit that involved turning two somersaults in the middle and then bounding to your feet to skip three turns of double-dutch.  That’s what I get for being five minutes late, I suppose. I joined the single file circuit and gamely attempted my first forward roll since second grade gym class.  Much more successful than skipping, where the rope whacked me in the head repeatedly before I managed to clear the requisite number of jumps.

    Photo by OneFlameintheFire

    The rest of circus camp didn’t go much more smoothly. I hit myself in the face with a juggling ball and felt my blood pressure skyrocket when I couldn’t even manage to consecutively catch two #$%^@ little bean bag things with any regularity.  And then there were the silks, which involve climbing and hanging off a giant scarf suspended from the ceiling. I made it three feet off the ground and hung there limply while the instructor quizzed me on how I manage to get my bangs so smooth and straight in this humidity (I refrained from telling her that they’re real and spectacular – no straightening iron here). All frustration and no fun. There are more palatable ways to spend those scarce summer nights (in theory only, people).

    When I got home, I emailed the registrar and politely requested a refund. Yeah, I quit. Ya wanna make something of it? I said recently that most of our lives are devoted to trying to figure out how to be in the world and negotiating fine lines is a significant part of that. The line between giving it your all and rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, between aborting an unsuccessful mission and taking your ball and going home as soon as things momentarily stop going your way, between being generous with the benefit of the doubt and being a grade A sucker. You get the drift. Figuring out when to throw in the towel on a relationship/activity/behavior/belief that fails to meet your needs falls into this category. While only you can decide this for yourself (and making that judgment call gets easier with practice), here are a few handy dandy questions that I ask myself when deciding whether to tough something out or cut my losses:

    What would happen if I quit?

    Widespread shunning, being pelted with tomatoes in the town square or having to relocate your primary residence to a van down by the river are unlikely prospects, but what about feeling like a failure? Having more free time? Reducing stress? Having to engage in confrontation? Be honest and exhaustive and look at both the positive and negative consequences of walking away, with an eye to evaluating just how likely they are to happen, how significant they could be and, in the case of downsides, what, if anything, you could do to mitigate their effects.

    Is this activity/relationship/behavior helping me to be who I want to be or to get where I want to go?

    This is the big one and it has nothing to do with building your personal brand. It’s about asking yourself what you want your life to look and feel like and evaluating whether the activities and relationships in question support these values or work against them. For example, writing/pontificating/boring the internet with my minutiae makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and important. This blog helps me to do that. Sometimes, I have nothing to say or I would rather be doing 106 other things (frolicking through the park in a frilly dress with a dachshund by my side comes to mind) than sitting in front of my laptop, but because I have a very clear understanding of where this activity fits into my life and my world domination plans, I suck it up and power through the dry spells.

    It’s also important not to get caught in the trap of evaluating an activity based on whether or not you excel at it. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it if you loathe the prospect and just because you’re at the bottom of the class in another area, it doesn’t mean it should be scrapped if you’re having a blast. You can be an absolutely abysmal basketball player and still live for Thursday night pick-up games or you can be Midwestern Pharmaceutical Sales Rep of the Year for four years running and still dread the thought of getting up for work every morning. Take proficiency out of the equation and focus on how you feel when participating.

    If you ask yourself this question and the answer is no (This friendship makes me feel like an unpaid shrink. Running is giving me shin splints and making me hate exercise and I’m more interested in capoeira anyway, etc.), letting go doesn’t make you a quitter. Nope,  it makes you savvy enough to understand that our time and energy resources are limited and should be spent on those activities and individuals that are in line with our values and make us feel good about ourselves in the long-term, with the understanding that there will always be short-term bumps in the road.

    What could I be doing instead?

    If you quit doing or being X, what  would you then have resources to tackle in its place? Is the potential alternative more attractive than what you’d be giving up? The alternative doesn’t even have to be bigger and better (Well, if I quit the genealogical society, I could devote my Monday nights to reading to blind orphans), it just has to be more valuable to you (see Q2). And yes, free time and unearmarked space to simply breathe and/or sit on your porch sipping sweet tea totally counts.

  • The Write Stuff: Talking Career Coaching With Steph Auteri

    A few weeks ago, I put out the call on Twitter for folks interested in career/life coaching and/or personal development who’d be willing to participate in digital kaffeeklatsches here on GenMeh*. Steph Auteri was one of the first to raise her hand to volunteer. Brave woman. Recently, she and I had a little chat about her coaching services for writers, her freelance exploits and the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach to digital privacy doesn’t cut it. Also, we mention the S word (oh my!) and a few of the jargon-y terms that set my blood boiling. The resulting confab** is below.

    http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13663688&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

    Steph Auteri talks career coaching and sex blogging from Generation Meh on Vimeo.

    *If that’s you, or you just want me to ask you obnoxious or awkward questions on camera (I have an inexhaustible supply!), you should let me know.

    ** My video editing skills will get better as the series goes along. Maybe.

  • The Waiting Game

    Today’s American Dream guest essay (submissions always welcome)  is courtesy of Jessica Balmer. And guess what? JESSICA ISN’T EVEN AMERICAN! Is your mind blown by the universality of this concept yet?

    Get ready. Get set…

    Often I feel that this point in my life is equivalent to standing at the edge of a precipice waiting to jump (in a good way, not an imminent death way), or milling about at the starting line, before getting into the blocks, or standing and stretching outside of the car before getting in and settling down for a long drive; the jump or race or drive representing my real life.

    Photo by h.koppdelaney

    Everything I’ve done so far seems preparatory for the real life that I will start living any day now. I did high school, undergrad, interning, working a bit, grad school, working a little more. In other words I’ve done a fair share of stuff a.k.a. living, but I think of said stuff as laying the ground work for the life that will start once I get a real career and a real home and start growing my family for real and traveling (more) and so on. The expression life is not a dress rehearsal comes to mind. Yes, life is not a dress rehearsal, but this part of my life is…or at least that’s what it feels like.

    I’ve read accounts of people claiming that at age 60, 70, 90, they feel the same as they did at 15, 20, 25. They are acting at grown-up life, their skin forming a shell of maturity around the brain and heart and general being of the person they were in their youth. Perhaps this is what I’m tapping into.

    I keep expecting a switch to flip and rocket me into feeling like a bona fide adult, where I’ll look around and meet the eyes of other adults and nod, knowingly. Yes, I’m an adult too, yes. Dinner parties, bills and work, you know. Yes. White wine and real estate, of course. I assume that that’s just how it happens.* My parents were kids. Then they were adults. I feel young, directionless, and semi-capable, but one day I will feel mature, on-course and fully capable, responsible in fact for the lives and/or careers of others. One day.

    In the meantime, I feel like my life and the lives of my friends occupy this weird state of limbo, of not-real-life-ness. We’re getting ready, all of us, to start. The real stuff (kids, homes, etc.) is on the horizon, maybe a few years away. But I also think, and maybe know but deny, that that’s definitely not true and that this is life and it is real and we have more than started. That this is how adults/grown-ups/grandparents think and feel about their own lives and selves. Maybe there’s more of a sense of accomplishment, an acknowledgment of time passed and  life lived and maturity/experience achieved for older folks, but it too is coupled with a feeling of youth and pretending and uncertainty.

    We, my friends and I, have careers and bills and plans, and accomplishments; some have homes and others, on the periphery of my friendships, even have kids. But when I turn my gaze navel-wards, I don’t see my specific circumstance as being comparable—even though for all intents and purposes, and measured by all standards, it is.

    Maybe it’s because I have no mapped plan for the future. I hear that people make five and ten year plans. That is something people do, right? Maybe if I envisioned my life at 30 and 35 I would have a blueprint that would make my life-measurement more tangible. Maybe with those plans I would start seeing my accomplishments as steps on a ladder, evidence of my stick-to-it-ive-ness, rather than flukes. Maybe I would grow into a more sturdy and mature person on all fronts, complete with home and kin and career and Chardonnay.

    Maybe without a plan, events just seem to happen, by chance or coincidence rather than effort or exertion, and so don’t count (at least for me) as much or at all. Maybe that’s why I feel like everything up to this point has been composed of stuff-that-happened to me rather than a real life that’s been governed by me. Maybe these are the revelations that will set me on a path and inspire me to create a plan. Maybe all I need is a change of perspective. Maybe.

    Or maybe I’ll just keep waiting for my switch to flip. And maybe that’s life.

    * And clearly I assume that that’s how adults think and interact with other adults.

    -Jessica Balmer

    Jessica Balmer is a freelance writer and the Reviews Editor for Shameless magazine. Her writing has been published in Bitch, TROT, The London Free Press, VOICE, and the forthcoming anthology Becoming Feminists, among others. She has an MA in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research and a BA in Media, Information, and Technoculture & Women’s Studies from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include feminism(s) and/in pop culture, with a particular focus on women’s contributions to culture jamming. She blogs at You Discussed Me and is perpetually waiting to grow up.

  • Happy Birthday, Babies!

    GenMeh celebrates its first birthday today! An entire year of pep talks and pedantry under my belt, who could have predicted it?

    So, in the interests of self-indulgence, I made a little video* to mark the occasion (it’s out of sync for the first 20 seconds only). I respectfully request that you ignore the bags under my eyes; sleep and I have been on the outs for months now.  Also, I should clarify that gluten-free vegan cupcakes are ordinarily delicious. Full blame goes to my baking prowess in this case.

    And yes, if you were expecting the stern ghost of Susan B. Anthony and are instead smitten with my wholesome chirpiness, you should totally let me know.

    http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13494309&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

    Happy Birthday, GenMeh! from Generation Meh on Vimeo.

    *First and only take and no script. That’s how I roll.