so my host seems to be having some sort of server issue with my site. my main page is functional, but any pages associated with this blog are MIA. this includes archives, comments, etc. I’m trying to work this out…please stay tuned.
UPDATE: yay! blog is working again! thanks powweb tech support.
as a rule, i no longer make resolutions. i have long term and short term goals, but these have no standing ties to the january 1 date. however, it is very hard to fight the urge to hold january 1 up as a “fresh start”. it’s just another day technically, like the one before, but we tend to place hope and optimism in it, that somehow this year will be better than the last. and i do always wish that – that every year should be better than the last, no matter how awesome or crappy the previous year was – but i don’t actually believe that january 1 has some magic power. that said, i did decide to use the new year as a starting point. not the 1st though. to be sure, this past weekend, i did not do any of the following:
what i did do was sit on the couch and play video games, read, watch old episodes of CSI on onDemand, and eat unhealthy food. oh, i did clean the bathroom and do laundry, but thats normal for any sunday.
however, today is monday. the first monday of 2011. and i feel the need to at least try to set some new short term goals for the next 12 months. i’ve decided to go excessively short. 30 day goals to be exact. so for the month of january, i’ve decided to go vegetarian. there are 2 exceptions to this. 1 – this weekend we will write off as an extension of december. and 2. i have some leftover steak in the fridge that needs to be eaten before it goes bad. its free-range, grass-fed steak, and its expensive, so its going to be eaten, goal or no goal.
feel free to note my inconsistencies, but wish me luck with my short term goals this year.
i read an article from 2008 today on adbusters that declares the “hipster” the end of western civilization.
“An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.”
i have to admit, i like hipster culture. i think its fun. and for a while, you could have called it the counter-culture, but then it quickly became mainstream. and because it became mainstream so quickly, the idea behind it was completely lost. without a message or a meaning, its nothing more than a fashion trend. so in a way, i agree with the author, if your counter-culture is being sold to you at the mall, you’ve reached a new low point. with this, i can understand the author’s disgust with the hipster. but i don’t think we should all be hipster hating, because whether you participate or not, hipster culture is a mirror on society. yeah, they recycle everything from beatnik to hippie, european with a hint of eastern, 60s modern mixed with 20s hobo. and yet, they are easily identifiable.
when you take that tidbit and you mix it with the huge amount of articles you see on the internet now about boomerang kids and the quarterlife crisis, you end up with a sad representation of a directionless generation. my opinion, and it is solely mine and you can disagree, is that the self-esteem movement of the late 70′s and 80′s, which has continued in various forms since then, has done us no favors. hipsters are (or at least were originally) kids who grew up with money. maybe not rich kids, but certainly not poor. a lot of them went to private school, and attended college on their parents buck. from the time they were born well into adulthood they have been force-fed the message that they could be anything and do anything with their life – regardless of how unrealistic their dreams were. all they had to do was believe in themselves. i appreciate the idea that we shouldn’t make kids feel like they can’t achieve their dreams, but there comes a point where you’ve gone a little off track. ask yourself this, if a 12 year old paraplegic girl said she wanted to be a ballerina when she grew up, how would you respond to that? i’m quite certain my elementary school teachers would have told her that she just needed to believe in herself, try really hard, not give up, and not let anyone tell her she couldn’t do it. its a nice idea. but what happens when that kid grows up feeling misled, betrayed, and disappointed? an exaggeration, yes, but you get the point. what you’ve got is a lot of people who grew up with that message, but when they reached adulthood, they looked around and said “i thought it would be different than this. aren’t i supposed to be a CEO, taking weekend cruises on my yacht, trying to figure out which charities to donate my money to? why am i not happy?”. and from there begins the search, the reaching back into the past, trying to reconnect with something that feels real, something with purpose, and direction. this is what hipster was born of. trying to reconnect with a romanticized idea of a bygone blue-collar america.
but…that said…yes, hipster has now become a mash of trendy fads, nothing more. and it is already fading out. people love to hate hipsters. they see hipster as a billboard for trendy, consumer, internet age sheep. if thats true, if the hipster counter-culture is now fading pop culture, then where is the true counter culture? have we reached a point where counter-culture is pop culture? where does that leave us?
i have never been the biggest fan of the holiday season. its not that i hate christmas specifically, or that im opposed to spending time with family in general, its more that christmas and the christmas season seems to bring out the worst in my family. i know that there are a great many people out there who truly love spending time with their family, and im happy for them. but on the opposite side of that is my family – we truly just do not like each other. i like my brother, most of the time. and occasionally i like a few other select family members, but for the most part i think we all agree that we really can’t stand one another. and yet, there is christmas. despite the fact that ignoring each other works perfectly well for the majority of the year, there is something about christmas that makes everyone feel like they should want to spend time together. so then the guilt sets in – i know im supposed to really want to see you and spend “quality time” together, but i really can’t stand you, but now i feel guilty because i don’t want to see you, so im going to force myself to see you. the hilarious part about this whole thing is that the other person feels exactly the same way. my question is, why do we feel like we have to like our family members? Theres nothing wrong with not liking some people you went to school with, or some of your coworkers, but for some reason we feel guilty when the person we can’t stand is a direct relative. i dont think theres anything wrong with agreeing that there isnt a single thing about each other that you find even relatively interesting. you agree to it, you move on, life is peachy. but when no one wants to say anything, and everyone shows up out of obligation, you end up with my family at christmas. but i go, every year, because i feel like i should. so next year – next year i’m thinking about telling everyone im going to mexico for christmas, to spend the holiday somewhere warm and sunny. i don’t actually need to go anywhere, i just need everyone to think i am gone, so that i can escape my own guilt. i know, i sound a little crazy, but trust me, you’d have to meet my family to understand why this is a perfectly logical response.
I am attempting tonight to use my HTC evo as a blogging tool. I downloaded the WordPress app and everything seems to be good, so maybe – just maybe- this post will actually appear on my site. Initial thoughts on smart phone blogging? It kinda sucks. It takes forever to type on this tiny, overly sensitive screen. I’d stick to tweeting and just tweeting. Unless you’re really really patient. Which I’m not. So….yeah.
Despite what my private christian education may have taught me, I imagine that darkness first gave birth to sound, not light. The idea of the world beginning with the smallest chirp of a cricket, a crippling blast of thunder, or some form of ancient poetry simply just sounds more romantic than some giant, unseen hand suddenly flipping on the sun. Can you imagine how bright and painful that must have been? No, I’d rather sit in darkness and listen to the crickets.
I will not attempt to make excuses for my absence. I simply had nothing to say. But I’m feeling slightly more vocal now. It could be that I have a birthday coming up soon. It could be that I am (finally) finishing up grad school this semester. Or it could also just be that my web hosting plan auto-renewed last month and the resulting bill reminded me that I still have a blog.
I will be updating my blog roll as well (another finally) and eliminating some of the dead links. It appears that I’m not the only person who fell off the face of the blogosphere.
Hello (again) World.
i have a cousin, ‘tucker’, who is about 7 years behind me in age. growing up, he was always the baby. my brother and his sister, who are very close in age, would always take off and leave him far behind, meaning i got stuck with him. at least, i always thought of it that way – getting stuck playing with the baby. but he adored me, and though i never understood it, i kind of liked it. we connected on some level. unfortunately, we lost touch during his annoying pre-teen years, while i was away at college and he was, well…an annoying pre-teen, but we reconnected and have grown closer since my graduation and his entrance into young adulthood.
this past weekend, my baby cousin left for MIT. despite all the issues i may have with some of his teenage choices, i will miss him terribly. i’d like to say that i will miss him for the next four years, but i know he will be going all the way for the phD, which means he’ll basically be in school for the majority of his young life. a baffling but admirable pursuit. i will definitely see him at various holidays and other family events, but i know he will not be “coming back home” like so many of my friends did after college. i am incredibly proud of the things he has accomplished so far and the things i know he will do in the coming years. i am also incredibly jealous of the experiences and opportunities that lie before him. i would love to be a freshman in college again.
but…at the same time, i also worry about him. i made some of the most dangerous, worst decisions of my life between the ages of 18 and 21. sometimes i marvel at the fact that i didn’t die or at least lose a limb or two while in college. i think sometimes that all the important things you learn in elementary school – the real basics – are completely lost the moment you step foot on a college campus. like, don’t stick objects, no matter how benign they may seem, into electrical outlets. or, in general, if you dont know where it has been, you probably shouldn’t put it in your mouth. also, plastic plates shouldn’t go in toaster ovens and power tools and cheap beer do not always mix well.
i know i could pass these bits of knowledge, along with some more serious lessons learned, on to tuck, but it would be wasted advice. just as all the advice that was offered to me my freshman year was quickly ignored. i also know that, as a young gay male, the potential that he could face even more difficult situations is high. i know he is entering college almost 10 years after my own entrance, and that things are much different now than they were then, and i am grateful for this, but things are not THAT different. i have seen some of my gay male friends have horrible things done to them and said about them that were simply malicious acts of hate by people who either did not understand or maybe understood just a little too well and felt the need to lash out because of it. i will never understand people who harbor this type of hatred, but i do fear the things they are capable of doing with it. i think of tuck as a little brother and i wish i could protect him; i wish that somehow explaining to him about my negative experiences might shield him from ones of his own. but they will not – they cannot. i can only hope that things go well for him and that he does the best he can with the things he has been given.
tucker – you will experience some of the most amazing times of your life in the next four (or six, or eight) years, and also some of the worst, but they will be your own unique experiences to take with you and learn from. they are experiences i can neither protect you from nor share with you. i wish you the very best and hope you find success in all your endeavors.
at 16, i wrote because i wanted to be heard. at 19, because i thought i was important. at 21, because i had a story to tell. at 24 i think i began to forget why i wrote at all.
i don’t write much anymore. all of these motivations having dissolved into something else.
as a freshman in college, one of my first assignments was to read the book bird by bird, by anne lamott. its a book on writing. i read the first 4 chapters or so, and maybe one in the middle and one at the end, and called it a day. i liked her writing, but i had more important things to do than homework assignments. i never sold that book back though, something about it made me want to keep it. i read it all the way through a few years later, after i had graduated. and then i read it again last week. i find that it comforts me. not because i harbor a secret desire to write a novel and i’m looking for pointers (i don’t, i’m not), but because it reminds me that, while my teenage ego-centric self-important phase is…mostly…over, i do in fact have a story to tell.
everyone does.
another self-portrait. im trying to get my moneys worth out of the camera. also, i dont know what to write about. if youre lucky, i’ll put up a self-portrait every week day. dont you feel lucky?
