So I was sitting here on my couch thinking, and it occurred to me that the computer was sitting next to me and there were no children playing Minecraft on it, so maybe I should write!
Naturally, I have nothing pressing I want to talk about, but I did read several of my last posts. I remembered the time I read Ishmael and got completely bummed out because of it. I remembered the time I went off my meds, which wasn’t a bad thing until I got all stressed out again [back on the antidepressant for now.]
The thing that struck me, though [that always strikes me when I read something I’ve written] is that I don’t suck as a writer. I mean, I’m sitting there re-reading something that I don’t really remember the words to, so it’s like reading someone else’s writing…and it doesn’t suck!
Yay me!
The kids and I caught up on Glee episodes tonight. They talked a lot about Finn, so I cried several times. I have doubts that I’ll ever be able to watch the first four seasons again. It doesn’t make sense, but Glee started about the time we moved down to take care of J. So it’s been with me through some of the most difficult years of my life.
For whatever reason, the damn show struck a chord [har har] and we’ve been hooked since episode 2 or 3 where Curt taught the football players how to dance to Beyonce.
All that’s to say, the kids of Glee [and by extension, the actors] are part of my life, so when Cory Monteith died last year, it hit me almost as hard as if I’d lost someone I knew in real life. And the show hasn’t been the same without him. Somehow, he was the glue that held the show together, and things just aren’t the same. We tried to watch some of the first season a while back, and I just couldn’t do it.
Which is stupid, but there you go.
I read an article tonight about how Generation X is really the Henson Generation [or the Muppet Generation, or the Sesame Street Generation] basically, we grew up watching the original Sesame Street and it affected our entire generation.
I get it. As much as I’d like to think otherwise, TV is a huge part of life for me. Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were morning staples. And I used to fight to watch The Muppet Show when it was on. And when I’d go visit my grandma, I’d watch Fraggle Rock at her house because she had cable.
And then there’s Labrynth. And The Dark Crystal. And Kermit. Oh, how I love Kermit. He was such a sweet, gentle soul, and I always felt like he deserved someone better than Miss Piggy. She was such a bitch! The irony is, I kinda married Kermit [but less green] and I suspect I might be a little bit Miss Piggy [minus the nose and tail].
But I love that my generation is making the transition into middle age, even though I still feel like I’m trying to grow into my body. I mean damn. I’m 40 years old and the mother of three kids [two of whom are teenagers, for crying out loud!] but I’m still figuring out who I am and ‘what I wanna be when I grow up’.
I read something the other day about Gen Xers and it kinda hit home for me. It was something about how we mistrust authority, but we have families and kids and stuff, so we’re involved with them, and we’ve more or less rejected the ‘me’ generation’s preoccupation with stuff and McMansions.
I get that. We’re leaning toward a simpler life, both because we’re suspicious of anything our parents did, but also because we’re the first generation to do worse than our parents. Damn Boomers fucked up the world [thanks, asshole Koch Brothers] and we’re the first generation to inherit the mess.
Here’s hoping we can get it headed in a better direction.
It’s weird to realize that my generation is starting to take over from the Boomers now. The last of the GIs are gone [or in their 90s] and the Boomers are entering old age. I find myself resenting them a little. Turns out us Xers only make up about 50 million people in the US [or so] and the Boomers and Millennials are both about twice our size. But I think I’m pissed because they’re the generation that gave us Bush 2, Rumsfield, and the Kochs [among others], and dude.
They suck.
I worry about our future. About the world we’re going to leave our kids. And I’m really frustrated that there isn’t much I can do to change things. I’m a blue drop in a vast red ocean, but even more pathetic than that, I’m a housewife in the Midwest with no influence over anybody. Well, except my kids. But they’re amazing in spite of me. 😉
So yeah. It’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m getting sleepy and I feel like I never had a point but that it doesn’t matter a lot.
I read something today that a 22 year old girl wrote for her graduation from college. She’d gone to Yale and won all these writing awards for fiction and nonfiction and play writing, and she was worried that she was never going to do anything.
And I looked at her life, how she learned to sail on the East Coast. How she went to Yale and graduated with honors, and I thought, if that 22 year old girl, who had already won a shit ton of awards for her talent, was worried about not leaving anything of value behind, then two things: 1. Even a privileged, award-winning writer worries about ‘doing something’ [leaving the world better than we came in, as Henson would say] with her life, but
2. I’m 40. My life is half over [if I’m lucky]. And as shallow as it is to say so out loud, what are the chances that now, at the halfway mark, I’m going to make something of myself? I’ve always had this weird secret dream of being famous for something [something not humiliating or evil, so that leaves out reality TV and serial murder, and not necessarily in that order] but so much of that depends on luck. And I’m a housewife in the Midwest. I’m not what you’d call lucky. [*that does NOT mean I don’t have a wonderful family].
so yeah.
The thing I read about Gen Xers is that we kinda had a hard time with deciding what we wanted to be [except we appear to be good at the family thing] because we all believed we could be anything… decision overload, maybe? and now we’re learning to deal with the fact that some options are closed to us. There are some things we can’t be.
Which sounds goofy as all hell, but I related to it. There are a lot of things I never wanted to be that I also couldn’t be, but what if there are things I’d like to be but can’t because now it’s too late?
How do I narrow that down? And what if I’m only ever a housewife? Am I going to be okay with that?
I mean rationally, I know that being a wife and mom is nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m actually pretty damn good at it [crazy, right?] but somehow it doesn’t feel like enough.
So is that because my cultural indoctrination says it isn’t enough, or is it because there’s something I was called to do but I missed it because I was too fucked up to figure it out?
That’s the question for the night, I guess. Fun times, eh?
If I Ruled the World 