What Happened?

"At 36, the world is our oyster.  By 44, we’re trapped inside the oyster, gasping for air." - Jacquelyn James

How did I get here?

I think my memory after the age of around 13 is reasonably good.  My preteen memory is a disaster, consisting of a scattered group of semi-organized snapshots and movie shorts.  I remember the sand box in the back yard, I remember finding flash bulbs at the base of the Mexican pyramids, I remember walking with the old lady who always walked her dogs by our house - first Tosse, then Erie (or maybe it was the other way around).  I even have one very early memory, from before I was two years old, of eating in our kitchen while my younger sister was being born.  I probably remember the more tragic events better, or at least more vividly.
After about the age of 13, my memory comes close to approaching a more linear narrative.  But I'm sure there are some very serious flaws.  I recognize that the same events visualized by different people, especially siblings, will be remembered differently.  Both memories will be both wrong and right.
So if memories can be imprecise, is it also possible to have them be completely fabricated?  Almost certainly.

I often wonder how memory works.  How in the organic chemical goo between my ears are memories stored.  Anytime I try to read what is known about this, I get technical answers that, even as a chemist, I don't understand and I think the authors don't either, or I get rehashed:  Short term memory is stored in the frontal lobe, long term memory in the hippocampus.  I guess I really do not like biochemistry now any better than I did in college.

Buy the Ticket and Take the Ride
Jerry: "What did you wanna be?" (when you grew up)
Elaine: "I don't remember , but it certainly wasn't this."

What happens to life goals as we get older?  Our youngest life goals are ludicrous, but the most aspirational.  Becoming a superhero or a princess isn't going to happen, but those are some of the loftiest goals that anyone will ever have.
Things change as we get a little older to something slightly more realistic - cowboy (whatever that is and probably still unrealistic), fireman, principal, race car driver.  If we could all just stick to those goals, there would be a lot less paper pushing bureaucrats and middle managers.  Still, there is a phenomenal amount of us who end up as faceless people doing jobs that, frankly, blend into obscurity.
All this makes this commercial from monster.com appear very funny, when in reality it is scary and absolutely tragic.

As years go by faster, the older I get, the goals change too.  Adolescent goals of "being the boss" or "become and astronaut" seem to evolve into "getting a job in the pharmaceutical industry" or "working in a technology job."  The reality is more likely "working in an office" - a nameless, faceless office where Friday afternoon is anticipated by noon on Monday.
Maybe the problem of demoralized expectations littering the floor lies in their origin in employment.  Little kids get asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  We don't ask them, "Who do you want to be when you grow up?"  That may be because it can be too painful of a question to ask internally.  A waiter at a chain restaurant can always aspire to start his own business.  A person who is financially successful, but is really an asshole, will probably always be an asshole.
And time does seem to pass that much quicker with each year - something I've only recently begun to understand.  At the age of eight, one year is 12% of life, and summer seems to stretch on endlessly.  At 44, one year is just over 2% of life so far; that year goes by much quicker than the eight-year-old's summer.  At 15 years of age, almost everything is new.  Every year older makes it harder to experience anything novel.

Life IS good.  But I'm not sure this is the ride I paid the price of the ticket for...

Thoughts for the Next Year
Tim Kreider wrote something recently in the way that only Tim Kreider can.  There is a small quote in this that resonates deeply:
"...the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose."
This might be tough to stomach, but is probably true.  I'm here (we're all here) because of every decision that has been made, both the good and bad.  Some of this is out of personal control, but much of it isn't.  It is a pretty good place, but it is hard not to compare it to some mythical idealized state.  Sitzfleisch.

David Brooks talks about this but not loudly.  He whispers it.  Instead of worrying about whether a tin pot shines or is dented and faded, what is the interesting story, that ends up with a dented and faded tin pot?

As another year has gone by, my hope is that I define myself less and less by what my employment happens to be.
What is important should be what I've done, even things which might seem trivial.

So what will I be when I grow up?  I don't know.

But...
I am a person who loves travel, prefers the company of dogs, loves being outside and living in a rural area, enjoys riding bikes and long contemplative dog walks as well as learning through reading and writing...

Douglas Coupland's Generation X

I resisted reading this book for a long time.  I may have even unfairly disliked it before I picked it up.  There are several reviews of the book which are quite negative, but that alone isn't a reason not to read it since everything has at least some bad reviews.  A bar of gold could probably be offered for free on amazon.com and someone would complain that it was too yellow.
The content of some of the reviews was more troubling.  That and the idea that this book, and the author, was somehow supposed to be speaking for Generation X - a group I fall in the middle of.  This was not the apparent goal of Douglas Coupland, but a role that seems to have been handed to him.  The author was born in 1961, putting him outside of the window of Generation X, or on the raggedy edge between Boomers and Gen-Xers depending on the definition one wants to use.  It is troubling that Mr. Coupland has become "the voice of a generation" he didn't belong to - this is supposed to be a novel, not a documentary.
Perhaps more than anything, I've waited too long to read this, as I may have had different eyes at the age of 22 than I do in 2015.  I wonder if the same situation could be encountered by someone who was a teen in the 1950's, but waited until the late 1970's to read On the Road by Jack Kerouac?

The book is also set in Los Angeles, which is a world away from anything approaching real life.  This is a little unfortunate, since the author is Canadian and hadn't lived in LA very long before writing it.  I actually think the book would have been more interesting if it was set in Toronto.  There is subplot for the book in New York and the last thing the world needs are more books set in LA and NY.  At least a minor portion of the book takes place elsewhere.
While the LA experience probably does not approximate that of most Gen-Xers, I was in Palm Springs for several weeks of the summer before the book was published in 1991.  I was only supposed to go to California and drive a car back, but one thing led to another, as can happen if one is lucky enough as a late teen.  This doesn't bring me closer to the stories of the book, but it actually did help with context.  What I remember most about those weeks, was the absolute dichotomy of the area.  I was staying in a large house in the shadow of Bob Hope's Palm Springs house, while also spending time in a small, poorer, working town called Banning.  This dichotomy is touched on in the book, especially in relation to consumerism and its rejection that the main characters espouse.
Going through some old pictures recently, I've been struggling to envision what my world would possibly have looked like 10 or 15 years ago - or now - if some seemingly minor choices had gone differently in the early 1990's.  Unquestionably, things could be vastly different due to some decisions at the time which seemed minor and almost arbitrary.  But history can only be rewritten once there is a victor.

The book revolves around three main characters, Andy (narrator), Dag and Claire.  A synopsis can be found elsewhere so I won't rehash it here, but the important thing to note is that there really isn't a plot to the book.  This in and of itself is not a good or bad characteristic for a book.  A plot can help push a book along.  Generation X is a very quick read and the book is more about character development than anything else; generic characters to represent a generation.  The lack of a plot does make sense in the context of a book set in the 1980's - there is no plot or narrative that can be distilled from the decade that birthed sport motorcycles, Miami Vice was on TV, Reagan was president, The Breakfast Club was filmed, and big hair bands ruled.

In 2015, the book reads like a conversation with an old acquaintance, possibly a conversation where two people have grown in totally different directions in the ensuing decades.  There are awkward pauses and the discussion is somewhat forced.  The stilted nature of the book isn't totally off putting at times since it allows thoughts to go back to a time of Sony Walkmans, family portraits with awful plastic backgrounds, large shopping malls, and Yuppies.  Do families still take formal portraits anymore?  Is there a 2015 synonym for Yuppies?  The book is completely devoid of cell phones and the internet, let alone Facebook, making the lack of a plot that much more enjoyable.
I wish I had read this book shortly after the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  Ready Player One isn't a terribly memorable book, but in some ways speaks to and about Generation X in a totally different way than Douglas Coupland's book.  When video games were huge wooden boxes that required quarters, who didn't want all that wasted money and skill to go to saving the earth?

Spoiler Alert!
The book ends with an odd bit about a "cocaine white egret" and a burned farm field with some mentally retarded children.  It is too bad that Mr. Coupland didn't start with this descriptive bird as it may have made him eligible for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  Despite reading and rereading the ending a few times, it feels like a complete non-sequitur.  I have yet to see any explanation of the ending that I think actually makes sense with the rest of the book.  So if the 1980's didn't have a plot, as the book does not, maybe a nonsense ending out of nowhere is appropriate?  I ... found it lacking.
End Spoiler Alert!

Beyond the end of the text of the book are a series of statistics without context.  They seem to want to imply that Gen-X is screwed compared to the Boomers and the Silent Generation.  But few people I know actually lived these statistics, and then it was most often by choice.  Again, LA is not real life.  Looking at the statistics now, they look frightfully similar to what could be compiled about Millennials right now.
And maybe that is the point - the book rails against consumerism throughout the pages, just as Millennials now attempt to do, stating emphatically that, "Advertising doesn't work on me."  Yet ... once Generation X figured out how to sell to Generation X and Millennials are figuring out how to easily sell to Millennials, "consumerism" really isn't going anywhere.  This is despite every generation since World War II vilifying their parents and arguing consumerism's last gasping breath.  Even the subtitle can be transported between generations, Tales for and Accelerated Culture - "Everything happens so much faster now!" opines the Millennial.

Perhaps what really needs to be understood and taken from the book is that while we can recognize collective deviance in others, deviance is much harder to see in the generational mirror.

"You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you.  You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you.  It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence.  And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied." - Douglas Coupland

Road Trips and the Return to Work

I recently got back from vacation.  It was a (motorcycle) road trip to somewhere tropical.  Late summer/early fall isn't the typical time to go to these places, but the down season is the best time to travel.  Things are cheaper, hotels more empty, roads less crowded, less kids - there is no down side.

I've toured through 49 states and there have been innumerable stops in towns of all shapes, locations and sizes.  My preference is for moderately small towns.  The really small towns rarely have hotels, or at least don't have a couple hotels and restaurants to choose from.  Bigger cities have very little to offer other than higher prices and maybe ... maybe something more interesting to do.  Smaller areas might require more searching, but the reward is unique sites or discovering hidden jewels.  Historic oddities are everywhere.

One of the things I like about road trips are the longer term connections it creates to places I've been.  Even if it is just a short stop for a meal.  These connections can be tenuous at best, but it makes things more personal when I hear about them, often years later.
Flooding in Minot, North Dakota?  I've been there.
Monkey loose in Valdosta, Georgia?  I've been there.
Wildfire in Lolo, Idaho?  I've been there.
Flash floods in Hilldale, Utah?  I've been there.
Yoga and Beer in Farmington, New Mexico?  I've been there.

Some of these things are not necessarily pleasant, but hearing about these events is more real having been there, even if only briefly.  Hearing about these things also brings back memories of the trip.
A meal in a small cafe in Minot while returning home from Alaska.
Overnight in Valdosta, staying a a great motel, which had questionable reviews, and with a surprisingly good sushi place within walking distance.
Lolo pass has to be one of my favorite motorcycle roads and nearby Missoula a granola paradise.
Being leered at while looking for a restaurant in Hilldale - I guess I asked for that one.
Nice conversation with a cashier in a Farmington convenience store while buying soda and Zingers.

Having driven through areas others avoid also brings serendipity.  Northern Nebraska is extremely pretty.  Situated near the black hills and the badlands, it has some character of both in areas without the dreaded RV traffic.  The vacation paradise of Florida, is surprisingly plain outside of the overcrowded coastal beaches.  I still enjoyed it though.

I was able to mentally break away from work on my recent trip.  The week before was somewhat slow, which made this easier.  There have definitely been vacations where thoughts frequently and painfully returned to work.  I have one candid picture from 2012 which was taken when I am both mentally and physically completely removed form the humdrum of day-in, day-out.  It is probably one of my favorite pictures of me.

But the day before returning to work after the recent tropical vacation was one of near dread.  I could almost see the bureaucratic pettiness of work on the horizon and as I watched reruns of Castle, which would normally sequence the end of a weekend; the end of vacation was imminent.

I've been back at work for a full week and it wasn't too bad.  A few issues piled up and a few unreasonable demands were waiting.  Still, it is amazing how many crises were resolved without any of my involvement.  Manufacturing problems does seem to be a way for some people to justify employment.

I haven't effectively used very much vacation this year.  I've got several more days I have to take before December 31, with more to be carried over to 2016 - and if I ever lose any of it, I'll know my life has gone to a place I don't approve.
That ... will not happen.

Ontario, Oregon?  I've been there.