Stepping right over a generation

IMG_4486I took umbrage to this on several levels.  One.  I think of Baby Boomers as giving birth to Generation X.  They would be too old by the time it came time to procreate the Millennials.  But I did the math and it seems that it’s those younger baby boomers (the ones who were born nearly two decades after WWII ended) who seem to have sired the millennial generation.  I never think of these people as Baby Boomers, having come so lately to the selfish party that is the Baby Boomer generation.

Two.  Really?  Is it one generation versus another?

Three.  Um, is this how it’s gonna be?  Generation X has to listen endlessly to how cool the Boomers are, and then pay for all the things they never got around to fully funding like social security?  And then we don’t even get a mention?  It’s like no one was born between 1964 and 1984.

Four. And now I’m annoyed by how much this whole thing annoys me.  Do we really have to have distinct generations?  Can’t we all just work together?  Answer: no.  Because the stupid Boomers need constant reinforcement as to how cool they are.

Five.  In the relief category, I’m glad I’m in a generation designation that I know how to spell.

Three sentence movie reviews: Tangerine

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One of the purposes of movies is to take the viewer to a world they don’t know and this movie did that for me, given that my life experience includes no contact with transgender prostitutes.  There were things that were hard to watch in this movie, but it’s brimming with so much force of life that it made the hard things easier.  Also, it makes Los Angeles look spectacular, colors popping and light flattering even in the rundown part of the city these characters inhabit.

Cost: $3.00
Where watched: Laurelhurst Theater with S. North.

http://www.impawards.com/2015/tangerine.html

Essay: On Popularity

I’ve been thinking about popularity lately.  Specifically of the high school kind.  I see the popularity class structure depicted over and over again in movies and books and I think they get it wrong.  Books have more nuance than movies, but still don’t hit the mark.

Popularity in movies and books is a straight line, with the least popular person or group at one end and a very clear person/group at the top.  Every character talks about how popular they are, where they stand on the line of popularity and what they need to do/not do to move up or down in line.  People say things like “she’s the most popular girl in school” or “he wasn’t very popular, but he started working out and moved up and now he’s prom king.

In a recent YA book I read, social order is a big theme of the book.  The protagonist is part of a quartet that includes the most popular girl, the girl that everyone is talking about.  At one point in the book one of the protagonist’s friends leaves the quartet, saying something to the effect of, “I’m leaving this, I’m going to fall so far that no one will know who I am, I’m out.”  And then she convinces the protagonist to come with her.  In the pages of the book the two of them do fall off the social radar of the school, so much so that when fortunes turn and the protagonist becomes popular again a year later, some people don’t even recognize her, even though she hasn’t undergone the classic movie technique of the transformative makeover.  I find this construct to be complete crap.

My school experience was very steady. I went to an elementary school that fed into the junior high school that fed into the high school.  There were no major boundary changes at any time and a large percentage of the people I went to elementary school with were sitting in the same group of nearly five hundred graduates in my high school class.  Here are my memories of how popularity worked.

In early elementary school we were all just there.  There were some smart kids and some not-so-smart kids and there were friend groups, but they weren’t drawn with firm lines and a lot of people played (this was before play dates, we just played) with other people.  Around third grade and definitely by fourth grade, some people started to become more cool than others.  In my mind, this happened when two girls moved to town and suddenly some of my friends were changing, doing things that were perceived as cooler.  These things usually happened at slumber parties I wasn’t invited to, which I was okay with, because I didn’t like the sound of what they were doing.  I can only remember the uncomfortable feeling and not the actions that made these girls cooler, though I suspect they were along the lines of prank phone calls.

From fourth through sixth grades, our elementary grade of 50 students in two classes had divided into cool and uncool kids.  I knew where I was (uncool) and I could tell you where everyone else was if you asked me, but—and this is the key to how popularity really worked—no one did ask me.  We didn’t talk about any of this, not with parents, not among ourselves, not with teachers.  Friendship groups had subtly shifted and no one said a thing.  In the movies, this would be depicted blatantly by two friends conversing: “Delilah has gotten much cooler than us.”  In books it would be depicted more subtly, perhaps a paragraph about the changes in Delilah ending with an observation that Delilah was cooler.  But in real life?  Certain people were spending more time with other people and certain people were being invited to parties while other people were not, but there was never a time to sit down and chat about it.  There was never a time when someone told me I wasn’t cool.  Instead there were a lot of regular reminders of how I wasn’t in the cool group.

Again, I don’t remember anything specific, it was just a feeling I had, perhaps brought on by days and months and years of asides and glances.  One too many comments about how many books I read or how I knew the right answers or what I was wearing.  The theme seemed to be “you are not like us” or “you don’t belong with us” but never was it, “we’re cooler than you.”

This was disconcerting.  I didn’t want to be part of the cool group—they made me uncomfortable—but I worried that all my friends would change over to the cool group and I would be alone.  With only about 25 girls to choose from, I had a friend group of probably five people, and losing too many of them would leave me with nothing.  I was also worried because my closest and oldest friend was very good friends with the cool group and I spent a lot of time worrying when she would stop being friends with me and choose them instead.  She turned out to be one of those kids who can float between all groups and we remained good friends through almost all of high school.  But I had no way of knowing that in fifth grade.

Also—and this is a key of my memories of popularity—I was doing the same thing.  There were people who were not cool people that I didn’t want to be part of my friend group and I made sure that didn’t happen, either by making the same kind of comments the cool kids were making to me, or I ignored them entirely.  I went to elementary school with a girl who would become a very close friend in junior high and high school and I don’t remember anything about her during elementary school, except thinking she was weird.  And I didn’t even think about her very often.  Keeping with the lack of conversation about popularity, the two of us have never discussed this.

People could join the cool group.  I remember a very nice girl seemed to make a decision to be cool and started hanging around with the group.  I watched as they weren’t very nice to her and it reinforced my belief that that group was not for me.  She stuck around though, and remained cool through junior high.  I don’t remember her at all in high school, though she graduated with me.

In junior high we flooded together with five other elementary schools who had presumably been going through the same changes we had. There was a brief period in seventh grade when elementary friendships fizzled and new friendships were formed and everyone found their group again. It was more of a free-for-all than the changeover from high school would be because for the first time we had an officially popular group.  No one told me who they were, I just knew. I still know, could pull out my seventh grade yearbook and tell you who was popular.

I also knew I was not part of that group.  Mostly I remember the popular boy who lived down the street and his attitude toward me at the bus stop.  There were only five of us waiting at my stop and it was awkward every morning. Make conversation?  Don’t make conversation? It seemed weird to not talk, but every time I joined in he would look at me and I would know he was thinking what a dork I was.  Interestingly, he still had this look at both the tenth and twentieth reunions.  My adult self thinks perhaps he was just squinty, but years of experience tells me that he still thinks he’s cooler than I am.

Again in junior high, I didn’t want to be popular.  I heard tales of things they did at parties and I didn’t want to do those things and so I had no reason to be popular.  And I had friends of my own.  It was touch-and-go in seventh grade.  I can recall hanging out with people I was not friends with during the rest of school.  But I had my oldest friend around and people rotated in and out until mid-eighth grade when I found the core of people I would spend the rest of junior high and high school with.

So for me, junior high and high school was all about the friend groups.  There were tons of different friend groups, one of which was the popular group, but many more groupings of three or more kids who hung out regularly.  The popular kids did their popular kid things and the rest of us did our things.  And people were friends and friendly to people who weren’t part of their groups.  I didn’t know everyone, but I had classes with people of all different groups, we talked, sometimes we did things.  There wasn’t a firm line drawn around my group of friends, and I didn’t forget the names of people I had in classes.  There were popular people I enjoyed spending time with in class, even though we would never talk outside of class.

Our junior high and another one fed into my high school and there was another rearranging of groups, less dramatic than the junior high one, but with 500 people in a class it’s reasonable that people spun away.  I talked to people at my reunions who I spent a lot of time with in junior high and have no high school memories of.  But I didn’t forget them.  I still knew who they were.  In high school there would also be small shifts at the beginning of every school year when the new class of people arrived and people from different grades made their way into friendship group.

So popularity wasn’t some straight line from uncoolest person to coolest person.  There was a group who was popular and everyone knew it, and then there was a web of other groups who were not popular and probably—like me—didn’t care that they weren’t popular as long as they had friends.

I can recall one friend blowing my mind with the observation about a popular girl.  “What makes her popular?” she asked.  “No one likes her except her friends.”  This was a true statement.  No one could stand this girl.  Unlike some popular people who were nice, this girl was not nice and not friendly.  My friend continued, “I have friends who like me, so does that make me popular?”  It did not and we both knew it, but I was left with a different view of the popular people.

It would be interesting to have people from high school sort people into the groups that they remember. I want to see what kind of groups the people in the popular group would make.  Do they see themselves as popular?  Would they pretend not to be, because popular people are mostly depicted as assholes in popular culture?  One of the most popular people in our class recently directed a movie in which a character very much like herself was portrayed as being very uncool, not popular.  Does she really not see herself as popular when the rest of us do?

Popularity in my school experience was much like my experience of the American class system.  We don’t talk about money in the U. S. of A. and how much we make.  But most of us have sorted ourselves into friend groups of similar income amounts and educational levels and I can make some guesses as to how much money people make every year.  People who make a lot of money are often depicted as popular/successful, even though—like a certain person in my class—no one really likes them.  Some people might be aspiring to a different income level/popularity and paying for more things with credit cards than cash, because they want into that higher group.  Just like school, they might not be saying that overtly, but we can all see it.  Not that we’d ever say anything about it.

p.s.
An aside that I couldn’t jam into this essay. I recommend Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek by Maya Van Wagenen which examines a current-day eighth grader’s quest to become more popular using a book from the 1950s.  Aside from being a great marker of contemporary adolescence, Van Wagenen really digs into what makes someone popular.  Her conclusions are interesting.  http://mayavanwagenen.com/

New building coming soon to the Pearl District.

This is the half-block north of the block where my school is located, right across the street from the Pearl Bakery.  And changes are afoot.

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This building is going to be tall, it looks like 11 stories at it’s highest.  The building across the street is three, maybe four stories.  It looks like a half-block of parking (which is what is going on right now) will also disappear.

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To give some perspective, here’s the corner of the block from the perspective of the new building.  In the center background, you can see the six-story apartment/dorm building that was built where Powell’s Technical Books used to be.  This corner has a three story building (on the left) the two-story parking garage building, the two story building across the street you can’t see in this picture and then eventually an 11-story building.  I guess we shall see how it all looks.

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Three sentence movie reviews: Ricki & the Flash

ricki_and_the_flash

 

This movie suffered (through no fault of its own) from overexposure because I saw the preview too many times.  But given it was Diablo Cody, I went anyway, because I’m always interested in her characters.  As usual, she wasn’t really into us liking Ricki, which I was okay with, and I also enjoyed how there wasn’t really a villain in the story, just people trying their best to navigate through things as best they could.

Cost: $4.70 due to Fandango gift card from Jan
Where watched: Regal Lloyd Center with Kelly (birthday present part I)

http://www.impawards.com/2015/ricki_and_the_flash.html

Essay: Advice Column

Note:  I’ve been wanting to write more essays, but haven’t really had anything burbling to the surface to write about.  But now Poets & Writers will send me a weekly creative nonfiction prompt every Thursday and so I’m angling to use that as a weekly springboard for a short essay.  It might not be every week, especially as school gears up, but I’ll do my best.

Think of a situation from your past when you were unsure of what to do and wished for someone’s advice or opinion. Describe the scenario and ask specific questions about your next course of action, as if you were posing the issue to an advice columnist. Then, write an essay in the form of an advice column response to yourself. Analyze the situation objectively–cite relevant anecdotes, examples, or hypothetical outcomes–and share words of guidance, insight, and encouragement with your past self.

Dear Advice Columnist,

I’m 23.  I’m a week into a graduate school program in something I think I might like to do for work.  I graduated college a year ago—finished school in three and a half years—and have been working while waiting for the next stage of my life to begin.

The thing is, I like the job I have now.  I like the people, I like the work.  I’m good at school, but the thought of more hours in the library turns my stomach.  I can make myself do it, but should I?  If I go full time, I’ll be done in two years, have a dual degree and can get on with my life.  But something in me wants to chuck the grad school thing and just keep going to work every day.  Advice?

Sincerely,
One Path Seems Much More Attractive.

Dear OPSMMA,

Your signature says it all.  I suspect your hesitancy has to do with the fact that the more attractive path isn’t the one you are supposed to be walking on.  Or the one you think you aren’t supposed to be walking on.  So let’s go through things objectively.  On one hand, we have the graduate school path, which will possibly lead you to work that you might like to do.  I’m betting that work pays more than the job you have now and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your theoretical work will pay more than you make now.

On the other hand, we have the job you have now that you really like. I can tell it’s something that you are qualified for based on your undergraduate degree, or possibly your high school diploma.  You wouldn’t be the first person to finish school and pick up work that looks a lot like the stuff you did to get through school.  I don’t know if it is something you will always like, if it’s something that you can add new challenges to, if it’s the kind of work that will always be available to you.

You also don’t seem very excited about graduate school.  And I believe you when you say that you can power through and do the work because someone who shaves off a semester of college knows how to get work done.

But you don’t want to do the work.  Not right now.  Maybe you’re still worn out from undergrad, maybe you are having fun in your paid work, maybe you never really wanted to do whatever this graduate school program is training you to do.

Here’s what I know.  Graduate school will always be there.  Sure, it’s convenient to go now, when your options are probably pretty wide open, you’re used to the school stuff and you have all of the getting-into-the-program stuff behind you.  As you get older all of those things get harder.  But right now you’ve got a job you like to go to where both the people and the work are stimulating.

You can try for a middle path, maybe see if you can shift your work around to accommodate a half-schedule and a class or two per semester for your program.  You can see if you can reduce your work schedule to minuscule, just to keep a toe in the fun, while you power through your graduate program.

But if you are more of a singularly focused person, go with the job for now.  Maybe try to keep some options open in the grad school direction, volunteering, what have you.  Or maybe decide that your job now is what you want now and do that job.

Whatever your choice, make your decision and be happy with it.  Maybe skipping graduate school isn’t the path you planned, but it might be the path you choose.  So go with that path and be thankful for all the things it will bring to you.  If it ever starts looking less attractive, do what you have to do to find a new path, by either doing that graduate school thing, or something else that looks interesting.

English philosopher John Lennon once told us that life is what happens when you are making other plans.  I think your life is happening right now.  Make your decision and go for it.

Good luck,
Random Advice Columnist.

Three sentence movie reviews: Two Night Stand

two_night_stand

Looking up the big-eyed girl from Crazy, Stupid, Love, I noticed she’d done a movie with another guy I adore, Miles Teller and I HAD to watch it, with the force of someone who is on her third week of vacation and has pretty much let everything go.  So I did and I loved it, not just because of the two leads, but because I’ve never seen depicted in a movie two characters talk frankly about sex and what and doesn’t work for them.  As a romantic comedy it was inventive and overall sweet in that good way, so I heartily enjoyed this film.

Cost: $3.99 from Google Play.  (Yes, I was so desperate, I rented it through the internet! The library didn’t have it, it was too hot to walk to the video store, so I paid money to sit at my computer and watch this film.)
Where watched: at home.

poster from:  http://www.impawards.com/2014/two_night_stand.html
I’m not sure what they did to Miles Teller’s face in this poster but it is Not Good.