Neither Here Nor There

My old cell phone was slim, durable, and bare bones basic.  It didn’t take pics or double as a computer.  It had a calendar, but I rarely referred to it.  It would have woken me up or reminded me of appointments, but I never asked it to.   It displayed the date and time, sent and received calls, left me a record of both, and took voice messages.  It was a good phone.  I liked it lots.

Problem was, it wouldn’t text.  Nine years ago, when I got it, I didn’t care about texting.  Now the research is in (though some refute it, much as global warming was long touted as a “myth,” particularly by those who profit by it).  Studies from Sweden, Australia and Israel that examined cumulative, long-term effects of cell phone use were unambiguous in their results.  The studies convinced the scientists working in the field, anyway.  They don’t put cell phones to their ears; neurosurgeons use speaker-phones and ear-jacks.

Granted, the risk is tiny for us thick-headed adults who purchased cell phones late in life and only occasionally use them (as opposed to thin-skulled youth with still-forming brains who wear their phones as accessories and use them constantly).  But what matter the odds if you’re that one-in-a-million with a long-shot brain tumor?  Cancer statistics are crap.  It’s 50/50.  Either you get it or you don’t.  And if you want to hedge your bets, don’t ingest foods that are known to cause the disease, wear sunscreen, filter your water, and minimize the amount of time your cell phone’s antenna channels pulsed microwaves into your head.

Right.  So I swapped out my old cell phone for a new one, one that can text.  Feeling the pressure to choose on-the-spot from a computer screen displaying row upon row of cell phone pics, I vetoed a couple (too clunky-looking, too many bells and whistles), and took a chance on a slim model with a simple keypad and a snazzy, martial arts name–Katana.  When it arrived (oh-so promptly–the phone company’s eager to be of service, as long as “service” means you’ll be using your phone more often to do more things), I breathed a sigh of relief.  It would do nicely.  Trim, sleek, classy, it suited my personality–or suited the personality I like to imagine is mine.

Now I had a phone that was “me,” the next order of business was more personalization.  I recorded a personal message, selected personal settings.  Red background or blue?  Icons in tile format or list?  I picked a noise for incoming calls from the world at large, another for calls from my near and dear, snagged a unique screen saver with the built-in camera.  Yes, indeed, my phone was way cool.  I started showing it off, “Check out my new cell!”

That was my mistake.  Insulated, on my own, maybe I’d have been content to wallow in my little pool of personalized design elements, color choices and selected sounds.  But splashing about with others, comparing our phones’ features and our trés amusing screen greetings, viewing slide-shows, chuckling at the musical bastardizations that ostensibly reflect our interests or senses of humor… hollow pleasures, all.  We chose from a pre-packaged array of cookie-cutter options, then deliberated over superficial variations, convinced that they represented qualitative differences, and now we’re patting ourselves on the back for expressing ourselves with creativity and style.

It’s not the cookie-cutter part that bothers me.  I could argue that a Romanian folk-costume is as cookie-cutter as a cell phone.  I could even argue that the commonality of cell phones is an agent of social cohesion, just as the common threads of embroidered Balkan blouses create tangible cultural bonds.  But the subtle variations in an ethnic shirt’s hand-stitched patterns reflect an individual’s skills, patience, and imagination.  A custom ring tone reflects an individual preference.  It’s commercialism at its triumphant worst:  dazzled by bling, we’ve confused pride in our personal achievements with pride in our personal taste.

“Do I look all right?” Lenina asked.  Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar….

Green corduroy shorts and white viscose-woolen stockings turned down below the knee….

A green-and-white jockey cap shaded Lenina’s eyes; her shoes were bright green and highly polished….

And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of contraceptives….

“Perfect!” cried Fanny enthusiastically.

I’m so glad I’m a Beta.

[Quote from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 1932.]

When I launched my website, I not only invited visitors; I invited comment.

I received congrats from distant relations, pats on the back from long lost friends, general shows of support, conspiratorial winks, exclamations of surprise, and a few pithy observations.  The latter mostly noted what I’d neglected to mention or given short shrift — husband, dog, theatre, dancing, editing, music, motherhood…

One noted what I’d dared to include.  My age.

I once entertained the notion that when baby boomers start claiming social security, the sheer weight of our numbers must tip the scales, divesting “old age” of its exclusively pejorative connotations and restoring it some respect.

But the mythos of youth is too pervasive, and the trials of aging too real.  Objectively, it sucks to be young in a world that’s warming, to be starting from scratch when the economy’s plummeting, to be facing so unpromising a future.  But in a commercial, consumer culture where “youth” is sold with every product advertised, the young are inherently rich and the old inescapably poor.  What though a 73-year-old Jack Palance can do one-arm push-ups for the cameras, what though octogenarian Maya Angelou is teaching a class at Wake Forest, composing poetry for the Summer Olympics, working on a collection of essays and hosting a weekly radio show, the achievements of a few exceptional elderly are only notable because an elder has accomplished them.  They’ll hardly serve to persuade an age-phobic society that growing old is nothing to fear.

Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon;
It is not strength, but weakness; not desire,
But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent,
In which some living sparks we still discern,
Enough to warm, but not enough to burn.

Time weakens our bodies, softens our minds, dulls our senses, pierces our hearts with sorrows.  And the one advantage it confers — the wisdom of experience — is utterly devalued by a popular culture that first bought the folly-of-youth illusion that what age teaches isn’t worth learning, and now sells that fiction as fact.

The comment that sparked this tirade, by the way, was entirely complimentary.  Because I was “… willing to tell all and sundry the year you were born!” I was lauded as a woman of great courage.

I’ve had my courageous moments, I suppose.  This wasn’t one of them.

I didn’t reveal my age as a political gesture, an act of social rebellion, an expression of spiritual belief.  I wasn’t making a statement.  I wasn’t taking a stand.   I didn’t bravely emblazon my birth-year on the masthead of my bio in defiance of ageist prejudice and cultural taboo.  The date is there because I’m that out of touch with the way things work, with how things are done.  It’s a measure of how far from the mainstream I’ve drifted.

So.  Now I’ve been reminded how the world works, do I edit my bio to match my chronologically ambiguous résumé?  Or do I leave the ancient, damning digits where they are, knowing that my work may and likely will be judged or dismissed because I am no longer young?

An easy choice.  Crones need not bow to the Hierophant.  The heavens may be brightest when the sun’s at her zenith, but they’re more colorful when she sets.

[excerpt from "Morituri Salutamus" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1875]

A clump of changes dropped out of the clear blue last August and hit the ground running.  By November they’d hit the wall.  Midwinter storms left friends and family out in the cold, sorting through the wrack of illness, unemployment, and divorce.  It was a mini-diaspora in February, people scattering to the four corners, breaking up the clan.  May was crash-and-burn time, bacchanalian death and destruction, a limb-from-limb affair.

It’s been a series of pile-ups.

Maybe you and I haven’t been jotting down our appointments on the same calendar–but tell me you haven’t had this same year.  Tell me you didn’t lose someone, leave someone, break something beyond repair.  Tell me nothing’s really changed.

Just don’t tell me how educational it’s been.  If good lessons justify bad experiences in your universe, fine.  In mine, learning happens no matter what; “good” or “bad” has fuck-all to do with it.  And don’t go tying that last thought-thread to the concept of boundless Buddhist equanimity, either.  I’m hardly one to point the way.  I’m just pointing out that changes are scary, coming and going.

It’s scary peering over the cliff into the abyss of the unknown, it’s scary taking the leap.  Or maybe fate pushed you over the edge.  Maybe you were in free fall before you got a chance to pray for wings, or cast the omens, or say goodbye to the world you left behind.

Days pass, months go by.  The year turns.  If you survive the pile-ups, if you manage to climb from the wreckage and thread through the debris, eventually you find yourself at the edge of another cliff–only this time you’re peering into the abyss of the familiar.

Coming home is as unnerving as going away; it’s just as far to fall.

We’re not afraid that those who knew us then won’t recognize or accept us for who we are now.  We’re afraid that we won’t recognize them.  We’re afraid we won’t be able to accept what once we took for granted.

[Credit where credit’s due; I lifted this post’s title from You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe]

The pressure is palpable–to make it good, to make it sing.  To make it incisive.  Profound.  Droll.  Relevant.  Succinct.  To make it personal, universal, and surprising.

Expectations are running high.  Writer + Blog = Something Worth Reading

I can do the math.  I just can’t reconcile the Blog half of the equation. 

So it’s not going to be that “must-read” political commentary.  It’s not going to be that wildly entertaining travelogue.  It’s not going to be that intimate, illuminating spiritual journey, or that real-time romp, or that dazzling display of wit and wisdom.  I’ve read brilliant blogs.  I’ve liked them lots.  I’m just not sure I want to write one.  If I do, I’m not sure I can.

I aim for brilliance in my writing.  In my other writing.  Not here.  Here’s where I write without taking aim.  And if my words make it to insightful and provocative or bog down in obvious and mundane; if they hit the mark or fall short of it; if they satisfy the great expectations or bitterly disappoint…

Well, that’s neither here nor there.