Sometimes I get mad at the media for the way they depict my generation. Usually it annoys me because the articles I read are written by a bunch of middle-aged, talented yet out-of-touch journalists who look down from their perch and try to explain teenagers and people my age to the public. They write exposes about Facebook or AIM or cell phone use as if they themselves are insiders on both teams--they are "in" with the young generation but also peers of the middle-aged readers-- and so they can explain one to the other.
For the most part, I find that they can't. And usually when I read articles about my generation-- about kids who multi-task and spend money on iPods and play video games and use their cell phones a lot--I just want to scream at the paper, "You don't get it! Your lingo is wrong, your perspective is wrong! This is just all wrong!"
That is until today. Because today, I witnessed an anecdote that I had accused the paper of falsifying. I saw a peer do exactly what I thought was exagerrated in a recent article, and I looked around and realized it was going on everywhere.
The history class I'm taking this semester is taught by a great professorial mind-- one of the most famous historians on the Holocaust and Jewish history. And that's good-- I better be getting taught by a great mind like that, I'm paying obscene amounts of money to go to a prestigious school. And that's the thing: so is everyone else. People are paying lots of money to attend that very class and hear that very person speak. So, you can imagine how disgusted I was when I was distracted by a flashing of a computer screen during lecture today.
Okay, I know. We're in college-- lots of people bring computers to class to type notes, and if I wasn't so into lightening my load for the walk to school, I probably would too. But the flashing on the computer screen was not caused by someone furiously writing notes, it was caused by an IM, and the kid proceeded to drop his notes, stop listening to the lecture and type to his friend for the remaining 45 minutes.
To make it worse, the kid wasn't in the back of the room, he was in the front. So half the class could see him typing to his friend. In addition, the classroom is packed, there's not an empty seat in the house, with about 50-60 students in attendence, so the poor girl next to him frivolously writing notes also got to read and be distracted by his IM conversation, and everyone around him could read what he was writing.
In general, I'm a pretty big fan of my generation. I don't have a problem with cell phones, I love the internet and I think that AIM and Skype are really awesome ways to keep in touch with people. I also think that Facebook is cool if you don't let it rot your brain and if you're not a complete idiot (this can be left for development in a future post, because I have a lot to say about it).
The problem that I have with my generation and all the cool technological stuff that we have is that we've become really bad at prioritizing experience. Under no circumstance should a menial conversation with your friend trump listening to a brilliant historian (whose class your paying for, although that shouldn't even really matter) lecture about a topic that you claim to care about. Even text messaging during class, which is really common and which journalists have not really picked up on yet, which shows just HOW out of touch they often are, is a pretty disrespectful behavior that should be avoided.
The point is that with all this stimulation and media around, we forget that face-to-face communication is actually much more meaningful and important than gadgets and virtual communication. We've put everything on the same plane, so that talking to your friend during class online is the same as passing notes used to be, or even the same as actually listening to the professor talk. And that's scary, because it means that we could technically live in a little virtual bubble and not realize that we were missing human contact, body language and confrontational communication with immediate consequence. Maybe we'll be having virtual dinners with our children instead of sitting around the dining room table and engaging about our day.
Again, I'm still a fan of my generation and all the cool things we know how to use and have access too, but I think that there are also huge down sides when we abuse the access to that technology, when we become so absorbed in it that we become dependent on it and start to isolate ourselves from what's going on in the world directly around us. I mean, we pay money to watch the Holocaust professor speak for a reason-- if we didn't, we could just watch him online from our beds in our virtual bubbles.
I'm in an office for spring break and that doesn't feel weird to me.
I ran into an old friend a couple days ago. We crossed pathes in the local drug store-- I was on my way out and she was breezing in to pick up something. I was leaving for New York in the evening, she was coming back from Mexico or the Bahamas or Puerto Rico or some hot place that had caused her skin to brown slightly, that had allowed her hair to blonde even more from a natural sun bleach.
To be honest, the encounter was awkward, which was unfortunate because I really like that old friend. But I was on my way out of the store, I was in a rush to get my errands done, see my brother and head back to a city that makes my skin tingle, that isn't afraid to keep me up all night or challenge me to inch alittle closer to the edge. When I left the pharmacy, I thought that it was nice to see her, I felt a pang for what used to be, the friendships I used to have, and then I stepped on a train and walked out into my new life: the life where I don't go to Cancun for spring break, but sit in and office and make money and write about the past and read for the present and try to climb the solid ground that will lead me to the future where I fight for children dying of AIDS in Africa and write books about women's rights.
It's my spring break this week. Campus is empty, the office is empty, there are no lines at dining halls, the general student pulse is dull. And yet, the vast majority of my friends are in the city-- my friends are doing what I am doing. They are working and saving and flourishing here-- they are not naked in Cancun or wasted in Miami. And that's interesting for me; that's telling for me.
I don't wish to judge people. I don't wish to say that "spring breakers" are bad people or make bad decisions. My point is not that going on a trip like that is a bad choice. Hardly. It's actually a choice that a part of me wishes I had the capability to make. Perhaps unfortunately, I have not made that choice and I know that I never will. No-- I will do my drinking at Women's History Month Happy Hours and Karaoke parties on St. Marks. I'll spend my Saturdays talking philosophy on my roof under the guise of the Empire State Building and I will spend my spring break in an office, watching New York Times video clips about the genocide in Sudan and driving myself mad with my inability to do something just yet.
Maybe that makes me not fun. Maybe it ages me 10 years. Maybe it keeps me pale and away from the sun and just a little distant from people my own age, from other college students in America. But I'd like to think that one day I'll look back at my week in the office and be thankful for it-- thankful for the money or the time to catch up on work and writing. Or that someone will look back at my sober old-lady week and smile...or else just make fun of me.
We play on facebook because sometimes our imaginations get alittle to far ahead: They can’t get out of the spectrum of what used to be and so then what can be now. We get caught on the cycle of expectation, imagining the wonderful ways in which we’ve changed and grown. The way we must be so different now than we were before; unable to imagine sameness in the world which feels so vastly changed. So we look back, page through the people of our pasts to satisfy that urge, to prove that everyone must be the dramatic other whom we’ve created in our heads.
And we go back to find that shamefully, so many are exactly the same. So many have been stuck on the same gated path since the time we first met. How terrifying to imagine that path, how devastating to be oblivious to the road signs that spell your destiny all too clearly. How unfortunate that grandiose futures have caved for a just adaquate present.
There are certain things about New York that you can’t get anywhere else, basic things that you would ignore in other situations, but in New York, they make you smile. It’s almost magical the way it works, really, because as an outsider, before coming here, people dream of the special experience they will find here, and then it comes true. New York is important because it quivers with the possibility of what is yet to come, with the daily circulation of people as they weave through their patterns that have so ground down the city into a smooth arena where anyone and everyone performs.
Today was a New York day. Not because it was the first day that tingled like spring, but because it was the first day in a while when everyone could guiltlessly run through the streets with that little extra step that said “happy” is on the way. I love this city because as soon as it’s warm, people start blasting music out of their apartment windows at three o’clock in the afternoon. Girls start wearing open-toed heels. People leave their blinds up and give us a peep show into their lives past dark, probably weighing that they’d rather have the crisp breeze flowing in than their secrets kept hidden.
Perhaps everywhere on the east coast today, people felt warmth. People stopped and smiled because they thought they smelled spring. Well I smelled roasting nuts on the street corner, which still smell overpoweringly of sugary butter no matter what the weather. But people in New York felt possibility. The turning of a new season, the abandonment of the cold, is the symbol of our boundless possibility. The warmth means that our smooth stage will once more be filled with the realm of insanity that hides behind shaded windows. It is a reminder of our constantly rotating, twisting, changing lives. It is the feeling of collective smiles in a city where we’re all so very different.
Get tested, it's in fashion.
Take the test. Take control.
Knowing is beautiful.
Get educated, get involved, get tested, get treated.
When we teach health in New York City, we tell teenagers to get tested for HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Infections regularly. The world is filled with slogans and outcries over the importance of being tested, of knowing whether you carry HIV or not. Knowledge is power, afterall, isn't it? If you know you have HIV, you can get treated, get help, you won't get more people infected. Knowledge is power. Right?
Well, yes, knowledge is power. But knowledge is also pretty damn scary. It's easy to say a slogan, it's easy to see it on TV and to know everything about HIV, but it's a whole different ballgame when it's time to walk into a clinic, let them needle your arm and then walk back in a week later. It's empowering to know, but it's terrifying to hear your death sentence read out.
That's the thing about slogans and education: they can't take away the fear factor.
I've been thinking about this recently and sharing stories with fellow friends because I got tested last week. I didn't do it the way a lot of people do, I was pretty 100 percent sure my test was going to come up negative. But the doctor mentioned it and I figured, I might as well know. So, I did it before I could really think about it, and all of a sudden I was in the car on the way home and I realized that my life sentence was going to come in a few days.
That's what the slogans tend to leave out. They forget to mention that getting tested is quite an existential, eye-opening experience. Because getting tested makes you think: What would I do if I knew I had AIDS? What would I do if I knew I was going to die a premature death? What would I do if I knew I could have helped it?
I talked to a few friends about the issue in the days before my doctor called with the results. Educated, inspired, and careful guys, they admitted that even they were scared when they walked into the room to hear their verdict. And I was too. I was scared because even though everything in me was saying: There is no way you have HIV, everything in me was also envisioning a scenerio in which I did.
I didn't. I got a test back that said no, and I was really happy to hear that news. But my heart raced for the rest of the day, and I've been holding close the vision I created of my life with a death sentence looming close over my head.
The reality is that now I'm "empowered." I feel like I can relax for the first time since my car ride home, and I am now equipped with a greater understanding of myself and what's going on with my body. I'm able to rest easy now-- I know I'm healthy and I know I won't harm anyone else. But a lot of people walk into that room or dial that phone number and aren't so fortunate. For them, that moment of judgement is just the starting point of a life that's indescribably different from the one they had when they woke up. And that's what the slogans don't tell you: knowledge is empowering, but it's also catastrophic. Knowledge is empowering when you get a no, but it's also debilitating if you get a yes. And either way, it's quite humbling.
My point here isn't to dissuade people from getting tested. Obviously I would never advocate for that sort of thing and obviously I'm in favor of campaigns that encourage the population to empower themselves through an important blood test. Maybe my point here is that really we should all be walking through that lab room door, hold out our arms and watch our fate leak out. Maybe it's important that we all get a little scared, that we all step away from our lives that are full of "good decisions" or "lucky breaks" and realize how fundamentally reckless we can all be. Maybe it's a good thing for us to step up, show a little courage and have the guts to walk into the room, sit behind the desk or make the phone call and stare death straight in the eye.
Whether knowledge is power or not, I don't know. But what I do know is that self-examination might be able to change our lives just as much as the lab room judgement that we'll all face one day.
Someone reminded me today of who I used to be. I was reminded of middle school and high school-- the drama that surrounded the lunch table each day, the constant gossip that threaded us all together.
I thought about it while recalling confrontation, when thinking about how little I have it now compared to back then. I wonder what happened to make me calm down? When did I get so even-keeled?
I decided that it's all a sign of maturity, it's a sign that I've grown up. I can laugh about people who watch porn and go to strip clubs because it's just not worth my time to get mad. I'll put out the extra work to right people's wrongs because I'll fix it all before a fight would even be over. I'll take a deep breath and choose to turn my back before I unleash my language.
So great. Self-control comes with maturity as we learn to grapple with the everyday challenges we face: the more confrontation we've seen, the easier it is to prioritize it. The scary thing is, though, that it also means we're more socialized. I can control myself because I'm more and more a part of the norm. I succeed because I'm more and more like everyone else. Perhaps that's a good thing: this is what generations of Americans have found to work the best so I ought to stick to that model. And yet, it's also breeding a level of creativity out of the system. The more we become the norm, the less we're able to break free.
So today I'm priding mysef on my ability to control confrontation, to mask my anger, to get shit done. And yet it also scares me in very subtle, backward ways. I'm scared because my ability to control myself is also the ability to control myself out of existence, a way of molding myself to the standard of the society in which I'm fitting. So it's a catch-22: to succeed we must be socialized, and the thing about socializing, it makes us all the same.
