In which I sink to my lowest point and mock the elderly

I guess I have your regular string of fears for a quasi-[ex]professional young person. I can lay claim to the obvious ones, fear of economic demise, creative failure, getting the cubicle version of bedsores and the like. But I have a unique cultural paranoia to throw into the mix, one which occurred to me last night as I attempted to do yoga (!). I’m rather afraid of becoming a hippie.

And the real cincher is that I like hippies! I have plenty of friends who are, or who convincingly imitate, hippies. Your stereotypical hippie, in my estimation, believes in these things: peace, love, recreational use of the ‘softer’ drugs, and nature. What’s not to love about all that? As a nearly confirmed pacifist I can think of little in their ideology that is off-putting. Sure, there are some hippies that could use a shower, but the same can be said about most children and practically all of the elderly, regardless of whether they are metaphorical draft-dodgers.

To leave off making fun of the elderly (a level I thought that I would never sink to), I will return to the tale of my yoga experience. I have been considering yoga as a possible countermeasure to stress for some time, but was deterred by the mental image the practice provoked. Alarmingly, this image was not of some bare-chested hippie on a cleanly mowed lawn, but rather of your average soccer mom or Uggs-girl, clad in black work out pants and with a yoga mat swinging casually over their arm.

These yoga mats have the same alienating quality that portfolio folders give to art students; these items provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment that those of us without props can’t exude. But unlike art students, these yoga ladies did not impress me. Instead I began to see yoga mats as a yuppie identifier, a sort of hyper-visible fondness for Jack Johnson.

“Yuppies,” I would think, laughing to myself. “Yuppies and their silly fitness.”

But recent discussions about yoga with various parties dissuaded me from this imagery so I decided to give it a go. I will spare you all of the gory details about my lack of balance, strength, and coordination, and get straight to the point of interest (should one indeed exist). Last night around eleven, alone in my front room, I was almost too embarrassed to try to sense any “energy” moving through my body. Because in my small and provincial mind, this was too hippie-like for a sensible, anti-spiritual person like myself.

Scope this dated reference out: In describing this, I feel like Robin Williams in Hook, when he can’t eat the imaginary food because he is a stodgy lawyer who doesn’t believe in imagination. This is, as a matter of pure trivia, my favorite scene from that movie owing to the complete ridiculousness of the food when it does appear. When dinner is left to the imagination, it would appear that the result is merely colored goo.

Blogette

Even though I delight in recording completely irrelevant thoughts on this here blog-tastic chunk of the internet, I must comment on something pressing and immediate in my daily life. Tomorrow is my last day of work at the only employment that I have ever quit for the pure jollies of it. Having previously always waited for the ghost of a sensible reason before giving notice, I must say this is an entirely new experience and an altogether uncomfortable one.

Just as the last of my collegiate companions are finally making good at respectable employments, I get the notion into my head that I must thwart the reasonable comforts of my salaried position and take to the fabled open road of unemployment to achieve Personal Content. To this ridiculous end I can only offer my own overly sensitive sense of god-awful romantic ideals as reasoning.

So see you later, career-oriented lifestyle. See you later also, success-induced shopping sprees and work-induced surly demeanor.

Ode to rapidly undulating checkered backgrounds

As a firm Beatles enthusiast, I feel secure in saying that I am quite tired of the (somewhat unnecessay, I should think) attempt at Beatles revival. The illusion is almost enough to make you forget that some of the best parts of Beatlemania (off of the top of my head I will offer go-go boots, a discrete outlet for socially and sexually repressed young women, the complete set of four living band members) are not part of this newfangled craze.

I am, of course, talking about the release of the Rock Band tribute/version devoted to The Beatles. The media frenzy surrounding the release of the game last week was not surprising, considering that if combined two of the essentials of pop culture: good music and video games that ape and misconstrue the process of creating that music.

A disclaimer is probably required to dissuade rumors about my general grumpiness and preaching. I am not remotely suggesting that the music of The Beatles is unworthy of the tribute, a claim that I can make with all of the assurance of a person wearing an oversized "Let it Be" sweatshirt.

My history with The Beatles is long, and fittingly, sappy. My high school years, dubbed by many as the best four years of their lives, would in my case be better branded the Fab Four years of my life. Every morning I climbed into my Chevy Blazer (color: faded black) armed with ample angst and five homemade CDs labeled in sloppy cursive, "Beatles, misc." Driving the two-lane country roads to school each morning I rocked out without abandon, belting out lyrics that I would have found sentimental coming from anyone else. My younger sister, an altogether hipper person than I, quailed before my boundless nostalgia.

As a teenager I liked to pretend that listening to The Beatles was something cutting edge and unique, conveniently forgetting the predominance of "classic rock" in my childhood and my mother's adolescent longing for Paul.

As an adult (albeit one who is required by her living situation to keep her gaudy Beatles alarm clock in the more remote areas of the house due to conflicting ideas of taste) I'm willing to acknowledge that The Beatles do not belong exclusively to me. I am not, however, quite ready to acknowledge Beatles Rock Band.

I know, I know; all people everywhere love Rock Band. And nearly as universally, people everywhere love The Beatles. And so it is fitting that the two worlds should collide. I'm just not sure that it should be as large a production as is being made of it.

There are several reasons for my unease. The first is a selfish and outlandish point, so I will tuck it away quickly and with as little fanfare as possible. In plain English it reads thus: I am so tired of people playing Rock Band in bars.

A few weeks ago, on the eve of the Beatles Rock Band release, my boyfriend and I were walking past a bar in a college town, one which I remembered as being rather hip (read: cover charge). That evening, however, we paused on the sidewalk not to watch well-dressed college students mingling on the patio, but to listen to the terrible rendition of "Tax Man" being belted out by two completely sloshed frat boys in graphic tees.

"Wow," my boyfriend deadpanned for the benefit of the crowd gathering on the street. "A Beatles concert."

While I'm ready to admit that drunken karaoke is an important part of bar culture, there is something that doesn't sit well with me about the growing presence of Rock Band terminals in drinking establishments. Perhaps it is that people are more desensistized by the familiar R.B. set up, and therefore encouraged to strut their stuff. Or perhaps it is that I associate bars with adult activities (drinking) and games that are either a little dangerous (darts), or lend themselves to phallic punning (billiards). Video games (for my most inflammatory statement yet) seem more fitting in places with lots of kiddies, like movie theater arcades or pizza parlor lobbies. But I promised little fanfare on this point, so I will move on.

My second protest with the chaos surrounding the release of Beatles Rock Band is the implication that the purchasing of the game with be in tribute to The Beatles, a new venue for appreciating those familiar tunes. Although this is probably true economically, I take some issue with the spirit of the statement. It seems to me that the very set-up of R.B. is not intended to encourage the individual appreciation of music for music's sake. Rock Band instead creates a realm (and a scoring system) in which people can quantify their ability to "appreciate" a song (at levels beginner, medium, or hard) and then compare their appreciation with that of their friends.

And, to extend my rising sense of drama, I would go as far to suggest that playing Rock Band is not a tribute to any band or artist lauded (as The Beatles are) as being revolutionary. Perhaps I am overly sentimental, but it seems to me a more fitting tribute to the creative process is a creative process, or rather, something more creative than following dashing colored lights that never change with repeated plays of the same song. Go on and buy the game; it's all the same to me. But just don't do dashing around feeling too noble about it.

My final point is a small one and takes issue with the much-anticipated graphics of the game. I've seen of some videos of footage on Youtube, and they do seem slick as hell. Maybe a little too slick. When I think The Beatles, I think line drawings, pastel colors and rapidly undulating checkered backgrounds. But perhaps that is just me.

Image provided below for those who have forgotten what pastels are like:

I use so many hyphens when I'm sleepy

Writing from the perch of sleeplessness at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, I am appalled at my lack of interesting commentary. If I ever had this scenario outlined to me (as people are apt to outline blogging scenarios in casual conversation) I would have assumed that I had a juicy, nerve-wracking reason for being awake at such an hour and would be thus amply supplied with blogging materials. Unfortunately, I just cannot sleep.

This is shocking to peeps of my acquaintance, surely, because I have never been one to have trouble sleeping. Usually I am far too fond of sleeping. Not that I am one of those marathon sleepers (I’m usually up around 9 on the weekends), but rather one of those people who is irreparably bitchy when I don’t get the daily recommended dosage of snoozes. But getting that sleep was never a problem for me before approx. 1.5 years ago, after which the cycle of job searching and (ironically) the subsequent employment encouraged my natural anxiousness to encroach upon my scheduled sleep-time.

And so I am awake. And I am thinking about Gossip Girl. And that’s rather depressing.

Why is a rational person like me thinking about Gossip Girl? It so happens that just before going to sleep last night I watched an episode of the show. (It was my first, but maybe a season finale? I don’t know; I streamed it online.) I watched the show out of a morbid curiosity provoked by my mother discussing over dinner how scary (actual death-scary, not just this-is-our-culture-scary) teen vampire shows can be.

As she spoke it occurred to me that I had never seen any of these supposedly over-sexed teen dramas. In the three years since I’ve had a TV, I have rarely had occasion to regret my sparse and selective internet streaming habits…except when I realize that I am missing something excruciatingly bad.

I hate to miss bad things: I relish bad movies, bad TV programs, bad haircuts, bad tattoos, and especially bad personal anecdotes. In light of this, I decided that I needed to investigate this new generation of crap TV. And because I am about 2 years behind the cultural learning curve, I decided to watch Gossip Girl.

With the exception of the voice-over, the show didn’t differ from the teen dramas of my youth enough to scandalize me. The conflicts and goals were fairly similar (poetic break-down of social castes, overemphasis on graduation as an epic event, sexual fraternization between shockingly attractive teenagers who are hella, hella, hella in love). But there was one similarity that I was surprised to see made the cut: parental subplots.

If I may wax indignant on the subject of hour-long teen dramas, I must say that this is their most abhorrent feature. While I am trying to focus on the boyfriend stealing and substance abuse of these rich and attractive teens, the action keeps being interrupted by the romantic and financial intrigues of their rich and far-less attractive parents. Is this done to fill in the hour? Or do people actually enjoy these plodding subplots about the parents of adolescent lovers becoming lovers (substitute becoming an alcoholic, going bankrupt, or getting the capital ‘D,’ Divorce) themselves?

Come on, the CW, I don’t care about these people. They aren’t in high school and thus their lives aren’t relevant to mine.

Some things would be better as Victorian flatware

My main purse-bag is starting to get an awfully funky smell and my tactic for procrastination (a clever combination of denial and hastily delving into its depths with breath held and eyes averted) is beginning to wear on even my supremely passive nerves. I will ascent that a small oddness of aroma can give something character (i.e., my dog), but the dread “mu-“s of the odor world (‘musty,’ and worse yet, ‘musky’) I make it my business to avoid.

A brief, and I assure you cranky, aside for those maternal eyes who in reading this take it upon themselves to question my commitment to hygiene and cleanliness. I have indeed subjected this bag (an oversized red-white cloth number with a pattern more suited to melodramatic Victorian flatware) to the rigors of my washing machine many times. And while at first this treatment restored my bag to its usual glory, recent washings have done little more than worry the seams.

Having defended my cleanliness, I must admit that I am not particularly surprised by the downward spiral of this particular bag. It is heavily abused daily as a receptacle of essential survival items: car keys, sandwiches, bedraggled wallet, mobile phone, S.S.S. (Small Softcover Salinger), thermos of tea in the winter and off-brand soda in the summer, snooty notebook bound in faux-leather, and several dozen pink pens lifted from my old job, each one advising women over 40 to get an annual mammogram. On top of stuffing the bag with the aforementioned smelly junk, I further debase it by chucking it unceremoniously into the back of my messy car or onto the shifty linoleum of restaurants and coffee shops. In short: If ever a satchel deserved to smell a little off, it is this one.

It does not escape me that the only logical, perhaps the only sanitary, solution here is to disregard the bag for another. But as my perception of logic is always hindered by a judgment-clouding excess of sentiment, I am somewhat disinclined to undertake this solution.

This bag and I have been through a lot together. I toured a few small corners of Europe carrying that bag stuffed to the seams with a nalgene, camera, umbrella, a couple of prairie-themed American novels, and everything that I deemed too valuable to leave in a hostel with the tagline “Hangovers Included”).

The bag has carried my lunches into two separate jobs and one ramshackle internship. Hundreds of sandwiches have been squashed within its generous embrace. The bag has seen me through my hummus in a Ziploc phase, my “white bread is practically wheat bread” phase, and, most recently, a misguided decaf Pepsi phase.

The longer I go on the more acutely aware I become of the strangeness of this post. And so I will close here, hoping to leave you with a feeling of suspense regarding the fate of my bag and my increasingly musty aroma.