I am trying not to be meddlesome. Truly, I am. It is difficult and I’ve probably overstepped already. Me, my magic wand and the horse I rode in on. I am always digging in people’s heads. Compiling dossiers of facts and feelings that I rifle through and mentally update each time we talk. Climbing all over you like you’re a jungle gym. Working my emotional alchemy to come up with what I feel is just the right elixir to heal what ails. Maybe I tell you what I’ve figured out and maybe I don’t.
It’s probably better if I don’t.
I repeat my mantra about never adopting strays. I remind myself that I’m not in the market for interpersonal fixer-upper projects. And yet, a few words would solve this. If you thought about it like that. But what if you just… Hold still while I fix your collar. I bite my tongue. The impulse to advise, to cheerlead, to tinker, to grab you by the shoulders and tell you about the whole damn world full of Technicolor potential and tie-dyed possibility and don’t you want to LIVE already? comes from a good place, but it isn’t my place. Not these days. I remind myself that no one here knows about my secret life of internet prescriptivism. Nobody asks, maybe nobody even wonders. And, of course, I don’t volunteer, because there’s no way to tell it that doesn’t start with, “Once upon a time, I was someone neat…”
Instead, I just watch out of the corner of my eye and when you turn away, I tuck my little file back in the drawer until next time.
I was a lousy freelancer.
At least in spirit.
I can really only write well when it comes from the gut, when I feel something for the words and what they represent. The rest always felt, at best, slightly whorish and, at worst, like donating blood that would never be transfused. No wonder I spent so much of 2010 sleepless.
It’s not that I am a Gen Y expert or envisioned a bright career as a youth culture talking head (what would happen when I found my first gray hair or wrinkle?), it was just what was on my mind at the time, so I wrote about it. And wrote about it some more. And kept writing about it until other stuff intruded and took over my thoughts until there was no room left for the Millennials.
I want to tell stories again. Not the stories I’ve been telling all along, but new ones. Ones I’m living or feeling or even pretend ones I’m thinking up on my morning commute while listening to Gillian Welch. Stories that don’t always have an object lesson, a point, a punchline. Stories that I’m working out on the page as I write. Those kind of stories. That’s what’s on the menu these days. It seems disingenuous to offer up anything else, really. And I am okay with this.
Coworker’s birthday at a local pub. I am overdressed. Low-key by city standards, but too done-up for here. Enough so that I’m offered a gin and tonic while everyone else at the table has beer. I decline. We talk work and foreign language pronunciations and how we came to be here. Either you were born here and you’re gonna die here or you needed a job. Those are really your only choices. I feel like I have to justify my reasoning. It’s not permanent. It just happened. Yeah, I miss X, Y and god yes, Z (where X, Y and Z could be any combination of people, amenities or foods that are now a million miles away). I say it with a smile, aware of the thin line between displaced ingenue and graceless snob.
Coworker decides we should all switch places so the transplants and locals can mingle. We gamely oblige, simply shifting down a seat and taking our conversations with us. He seems satisfied. I snag a strawberry from the top of the birthday cake as I button up my coat for the long walk to the car. Coworker thanks me for being there. On Monday, he will apologize for the tipsy slip of the tongue where he called me his wife. I will laugh it off and tell him that his subconscious recognizes that, in this context, I am one hell of a catch. And I will know that my graceless snob is showing again.
A Friday night fete. I end up trapped at the kitchen table with new colleagues who want to get philosophical and chummy. Very chummy. I am sober. Very sober. And I am the only woman left. Things get awkward. I wait until a broken wine glass provides a convenient distraction and I run out the door, beelining for my car. I arrive home still wearing a whistle around my neck. I am not comfortable without at least one wingman, I know this. And yet, I pushed it.
That’s what a good sport would do.
On Sunday, I go snowshoeing for the first time. Snowshoeing across a frozen lake, to be exact. The wind is cold and it steals my breath and makes my good ear hurt. I huff and puff to keep pace. I cringe at each groan beneath my feet. I don’t fear much, but I fear ice. Slipping, falling, breaking into brittle little pieces. And yet, I pushed it.
That’s what a good sport would do.
I suppose I should come right out and announce the conclusion that I’ve been slowly drawing (but in pencil so I can erase it if need be) in my head for that last couple of months – this generational analysis thing is so dead. The Gen Y/Millennial media monopolization and fascination is the deadest horse that ever died. It’s old, it’s stale, it’s played out and anything that was worth saying, or dissecting or counterpointing has already been said, dissected and counterpointed. There’s only so much rehashing, repurposing, reimagining you can do before you’d happily pay yourself and everyone else to STFU about the topic forever and ever amen.
And I’m not just saying this because I feel as if I’m 105 lately. No, I’m just tired of reading, responding to, writing about the same tired things and looking at and interpreting things through the same purgatorial young adults lens. Adult being the key word here. We’re all adults, or on our way to being them. Maybe “adult” doesn’t look the same as it did 20 or 30 years ago or will look 20 or 30 years hence, but really, who cares? Do you really, truly care about isolating the root causes of general values trends among your peers? What do you plan to do with that knowledge? Will it help you get a job? Sleep better at night? Whiten your teeth? No. It’s static. Interesting static by times, but at the micro-level of you and I as individuals getting through a day at a time, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot of anything and should be treated accordingly. I feel the same way about the social media industry and all of its attendant statistics and self-aggrandizing. Who cares? Who needs to care? Only people who make their money from these statistics and self-aggrandizing. Did people pay this much attention to the advent and evolution of the microwave?
We unnecessarily complicate things a lot of the time, give them more complexity, more shades of gray than they actually have or need to have. Maybe it makes us feel important as we ponder and mull or when we dither, when we tell ourselves things are much too convoluted to permit a snap judgment or rushed choice.
I think this is one of those times and the discussion of Gen Y/Millennial culture is one of those things.
It’s done, folks. I expect someone or some outlet with clout to make the very same announcement (heavy on the blasé) in a few month, at which time I’ll obviously be ready with the appropriate I Told You So.
