An Interesting Article

It speaks to themes I have addressed on and off in this blog. Potentially a little insulting for members of my generation, but, if nothing else, the graphics are highly entertaining. Recommended reading for anyone between the ages of 18 and 30.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html

Patience, Portfolios, and Piles of Mush

I like quantifiable things. I like things that can be counted, recorded, and later analyzed. For example, the number of miles I have run or biked each day. My grocery reciepts. The times my athletes run in each cross country meet and their splits per mile. The balance of my bank account. My budgets on Mint. I make to-do lists for fun, even when I’m not busy---perhaps especially when I’m not busy---and checking them off brings me pleasure.

So why on earth, I’m beginning to ask myself---why did I chose to pursue writing, of all the fields available to me? Why did I pick the most unquantifiable of endeavors, the most elusive, the most resistant to to-do lists and check marks? Shouldn’t I have gone into statistics or accounting or engineering maybe, rather than this right-brain frustration?

I’m feeling this way because I’m in the process of applying to Master of Fine Arts programs, and, if you couldn’t tell, the portfolio-producing process has not been progressing as smoothly as I hoped. The plan is to produce two flawless and imaginative short stories by November. So far, after nearly three months of sincere effort, my brain has birthed only one pile of mush that may be breathing its last breath. I’m trying not to panic.

Unfortunately for me, when it comes to MFA programs in creative writing, numbers don’t matter. Most schools don’t require a GRE score. The ones that do just want to make sure you’re not stupid. Undergraduate GPAs… well, as long you passed everything, it shouldn’t be a problem. According to a book I have about the MFA application process, 90% of your application rests on the 35-40 page writing sample in your portfolio. In other words, it all comes down to whether or not some professor decides he or she likes my story. One person could dash my hopes on a whim, no matter what my GRE or GPA is.

This is not good news for a person who likes to quantify things.

There is no way to quantify a story. There is no way to know for sure how I stack up against the hundreds of other applicants, each jostling for just a few spots. No average LSAT score, no comparable GPA or recommended extracurriculars. I can’t objectively rate my writing on a scale of 1 to 10 and use that to decide which programs to apply to. I also can’t force my writing to get better, to become more creative, to shape itself into something beautiful and poignant. Time spent does not necessarily translate into quality achieved.

That’s just how writing is, and I better get used to it because I haven’t exactly left myself room for other pursuits. Writing requires a lot of patience---also not one of my natural strengths. “Have patience with the process,” I typed on a sticky note on my laptop desktop after reading it in Story, Robert McKee’s famous book on writing and plot. I have to remind myself of this frequently. Patience. Patience. Patience.

Patience with the process is not an easy thing, in writing or in any other area of life. I like quick results and check marks, and now that I’m a year out of college, I feel like the clock is ticking for me to start producing great things. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise when he was only 23 and W.H. Auden had his first book of poetry published at the same age! It’s a bit ridiculous to be comparing myself to these luminaries, I know, and to be feeling the pressures of time when I’m still a baby in the eyes of a lot of people, but it’s hard not to be frustrated with the slow progression of my writing. It’s hard not to wish for an easy way to quantify my skill level and detail the exact steps I need to take in order to increase it and produce something amazing.

I guess that’s why I’m attempting to go back to school, ultimately. To get better and to find out how to do that. But first I need to get in, and that may very well be the hardest part.

Cooking for One

I improvised a pear crisp today out of three pears, some oatmeal, butter, brown sugar, and a bit of cinnamon. It was pretty good, despite the fact that I didn’t use a recipe or measure anything. Good enough that I decided to make it my dinner.

Cooking for one is a rather motley and scattershot activity. When no one else is eating your meals, you can feel free to eat whatever strange (or easy) food strikes your fancy. Like pear crisp for dinner. Or beans from a can heated in the microwave. Or the egg and broccoli and black beans and tomato scramble thing I made yesterday because that was what I had in the fridge (the eggs turned kind of gray from the black beans, but it actually tasted fine).

It’s not that I don’t know how to cook. I do. At least, well enough not to totally embarrass myself in the kitchen. But sometimes I don’t always feel like putting in much effort or buying those non-essential things at the grocery store that would afford me a little more creativity. Maybe I’m just being lazy. Or cheap. I’ve definitely been accused of that one.

Living on my own again, I feel a little like I’m back in my college days, when I was on a ten-meal-a-week plan at the cafeteria and had about 15 additional dollars to spend on food. I was pretty good then at tracking down free meals---being on a sports team helped. But my non-cafeteria diet still consisted mainly of oatmeal, cheap wheat bread, peanut butter, and whatever cereal I stole from my parents’ house when I was home on break. I have a little more money than that to spend now, thank God, because I’ve only recently been able to bring myself to eat oatmeal again.

Still, it’s hard to summon up the motivation to make anything fancy when I know I’m the only one who is going to be eating it. And I sort of like having the freedom to make weird things and not have to subject anyone else to the risk or the malnutrition. Like improvised pear crisp for dinner.

On Changing the World

I read an article recently on theatlantic.com by Ron Fornier about the difference between my generation, the Millennials, and my parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers. The article focused mainly on the attitude of each generation toward politics and Washington, but a side comment caught my attention.

Fornier noted that Millennials---while often labeled as self-absorbed, egotistical, and entitled (and I’m not saying this isn’t true)---are actually more willing than previous generations to desire careers that further their community rather than their bank account. Millennials are more likely to volunteer, study abroad, and look beyond themselves when envisioning the ideal job. Growing up in a world that is more interconnected than ever, we are more likely to see global problems as our own.

As someone immersed in the culture of the Millennials, I have to say that I find this to be true, at least in my own circles of friends and acquaintances. I have no evidence to support that this desire to be world changers is more pronounced in my generation than in previous ones, as I have only been a 23-year-old in the year 2013 and not in 1973, but the words of my peers certainly suggest a longing for meaning and purpose in their career path.

While in college, we dream of working for non-profits and NGOs. We want to bring social justice to the red light districts of Bangkok, end hunger in Somalia, bring peace to Palestine, fight AIDS in South Africa. We want to be doctors, teachers, child-huggers, social workers, advocates for change. Our goals are lofty. So are our expectations.

The reason so many of us---us post-grad Millennials---are so frustrated, I think, is because there is almost always a lag after college graduation between intense passion and practical capacity. We want so badly to be doing something important and meaningful. But then we realize, to our dismay, that we aren’t actually helpful to anyone yet. We have a college degree but we have no skills, no experience.

We have only student loans and monotonous entry-level jobs (if we’re lucky). As we organize mind-numbing spreadsheets, file back-log data, and make coffee for our superiors, we wonder, how am I going to change the world doing this?

It is after this thought that many decide to go to grad school.

I don’t blame them.

Changing the world is a heck of a lot harder in practice than in theory, particularly, as I’m discovering, when you went to a liberal arts college and got a degree in English writing. I firmly believe that writing can change the world. I have less confidence now that my writing can do that. But I hold onto my passion to make a difference, to be a piece of the change, proudly, fiercely almost, because there is a part of me that worries I am one short step from apathy. One quick slide away from settling for something significantly less than my dreams.

It happens to people. I’ve seen it.

Somewhere along the way, life becomes about survival. We just need to put food in our mouths and a roof over our heads. We need an income. And let’s face it, most of us don’t have the luxury of being too picky about where that comes from. After a while, our dreams or passions fade. At first this bothers us. Then we don’t really care.

Somehow I---we, post-grads, everyone---need to find a new way of looking at what it means to “change the world” and how we can be a part of that. I purposefully won’t use the words “realistic middle ground” because all of them suggest to me compromise and an easy way out. But a little bit of reality and redefinition is required to prevent the majority of people from succombing to disappointment and defeat, I think. Me being one of them.

It is important to hold in tension a healthy fear of apathy and a passion for change with the humble understanding that I am just one person on this earth of 7 billion, living in a tiny window of time that will soon pass and be forgotten. As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his little book Leaf by Niggle, I’ll be lucky to paint even a single leaf in this giant tree of God’s.

That being said, I still want my one leaf to look amazing.

Life's a Canvas

The walls of my new basement bedroom are the whitest white. I don’t mind the color, given that my overhead lights have less wattage than a candle and my one window looks out at a recessed wood wall. White keeps the room from looking too dim. Or, at least less dim than it might otherwise.

But my room is big, the walls long, and I do not have adequate furniture or decor to prevent a certain blankness from affecting the overall feeling of the place. My few sparse pictures and posters seem more to call attention to the vast white spaces than to fill them. There is a particularly large, particularly empty stretch on the wall opposite my bed. I look at it at night before turning off my lamp and it yawns back at me.

When I moved, I brought a big blank canvas from my house and my box of paints to help fill this void. I haven’t done anything with them yet or decided what colors to use. I’m waiting for a sudden rush of inspiration.

I do that a lot in life, I think. Wait for the inspiration, the motivation, the right opportunity, to find me. I tend to put off decisions with the assumption that the right choice will somehow just creep into my mind when I’m not paying attention. A lot of the time, this works out ok for me. I’m good at being patient when it means not interrupting the status quo.

But I'm realizing that like my wall, my hopes for the future will remain a blank and unfulfilled reality unless I do something to invigorate them. Sometimes great opportunities fall into your lap with little or no effort on your part, but mostly that just happens in movies. Passivity gets me and my canvas nowhere. I can’t produce a work of art unless I actually pick up my brush and dip it in the paint.

Can you tell I’m feeling guilty about not spending very much time on my writing this month?

Leaving the Nest

A week and a half ago I moved out of my bedroom at my parents’ house for probably the last time. It sounds funny now to say that---“my parents’ house.” It’s no longer really mine. Now when I say “my house” I mean a different one, one in a quaint little neighborhood about 20 minutes west, occupied by myself and 3 other girls. Of course, this house doesn’t quite feel like home either yet. It feels more like being back in college.

The bedroom at my parents’ looks strange now that I’ve removed most of my things. All that made it homey and mine has been transported or packed away, leaving behind barren shelves and stretches of blank carpet. The blue walls are conspicuously bare and cold, studded with nails that hold no picture frames or posters. If I were my parents, I’d keep that bedroom door closed. It’s empty yet not totally clean, its existence speaking loudly of an absence.

Adult children are really not meant to live with their parents. This is what I’ve decided over the last 15 months, even though my experience at home was largely positive. It happens and sometimes it’s the right decision but only because other plans fall through or things don’t work out quite as we’d like them to. The return to the high school bedroom is rarely Option A. And yet so many of my peers are in this situation, happy or not happy, trying or not trying, to make the best of it. We lack money. We possess debt. We haven’t a clue where or when the next job will appear. We grit our teeth and bare it.

In this situation, parents and children who under normal circumstance get along fine often find themselves unable to connect. Possibly they fight. Not infrequently they live in an undercurrent of passive aggressive tension. Nobody is quite sure how this is supposed to work, how they’re supposed to act.

What role does the adult child play in the machine of the family? How entitled is she to her own schedule? Completely entitled, the parent might say. And yet the mother’s feelings are hurt when her daughter rarely comes home for dinner. Can the child freely make his own life choices? Of course, everyone agrees, and yet the son feels a latent guilt living under his father’s watchful eye. This guilt may later grow to resentment, though no one is at fault.
 

It’s not that we children don’t appreciate the free rent, the food, the minimal expenses, and I apologize that we often act as though we don’t. It’s that we regret that we need them. It’s that we are ashamed we cannot provide these things for ourselves. Or perhaps we can provide them, but then we feel ashamed that we can but still are not. We do not like having to tell people, “Yeah, I live with my parents.” There is usually a slight embarrassed silence after this statement, which we hurry to fill with some justification. “I’m just trying to save money to pay off loans,” or “I’m hoping to move within 6 months so I didn’t want to sign a lease,” or “I’m looking for a job.” The recipients of these statements nod respectfully. We hate this as well.

We acutely feel our lack of independence and so we compensate, asserting independence in whatever other way we can. Absenting the house for long periods of time. Spending time with friends in other apartments, other cities. Withholding information, perhaps not consciously, to keep some illusion of privacy and a separate life. Rebellion, thought to have run its course in high school, may return with an immature, embarrassed edge. We are not proud of ourselves.

It is difficult to move from the autonomy of college life back to the psuedo-autonomy of life at home. It is difficult to return to a state that has not been our reality since we were 17 or 18 and know how to incorporate 4+ years of independence into that routine. Cut us a little slack if it seems that our maturity level has dropped a few notches. We struggle to adjust. Restless, straining, and off-kilter, we feel at odds with our circumstances in some fundamental way.

Of course, despite all this, despite the fact that I know I am meant to grow up and grow out, despite my readiness to have a place of my own, it’s still a little hard to make that final break. That’s the paradox of this strange time of life. There cannot be a moving forward without a leaving behind.

My departure marks the first time my parents have less than three kids living at home since their third child was born in 1994. Two seems so empty, so quiet, compared to the chaos of five. It’s sad to realize that all the members of my family will never live under the same roof again. The nucleus is breaking up, the bedrooms emptying out. It’s a good thing---I enjoy seeing the different directions my siblings lives are taking---but it’s also a kind of loss.

“But you’ll have a bathroom all to yourself now!” I told my 13-year-old sister when she expressed some dismay that I would be leaving her to the unbuffered mercy of her older brother.

“Yeah,” she admitted, not looking me in the eye, “but you were the one who cleaned it.” This is as close as she’ll come to saying she’ll miss me. I’ll take what I can get. I’ll miss her too.

Today after cross country practice I returned to my parents’ house to welcome my younger brother home from a summer in California. While there, I sent a text to my older brother: “I’m at home.” “Which home?” he texted back. It’s a fair question; home is an ambiguous word now.

I guess this is just one more step into the real world, that harsh and exhilarating place that beckons us to partake of its tragedy and adventure. I’ve been living there already, of course. It just feels more official now.

Pretty as a Picture

I got a digital camera ahead of the curve. I was 12 years old and paid for it all myself with cash that I saved up from my allowance and the odd babysitting job. In the tech department of Sam’s Club, I picked out the highest quality point-and-shoot available at that time: a 5 mega-pixel box of silver plastic with 3x optical zoom and a tiny screen in the back. You couldn’t sell it for $25 now. But once upon a time, it was a magnificent piece of technology.

Eleven years later, it has never been easier for the average person to take professional-looking pictures. Even the tiny cameras on cell phones take photos of surprising clarity and color---with a plethora of filter options so they can appear appropriately aged or bright or grainy or dim. Partly because of this and partly because of networks like Facebook and Instagram, it has also never been easier to share them.

I don’t necessarily have anything against this ever-expanding phenomenon, this trend of increasingly beautiful pictures shared with an increasingly large audience, but I’d be lying if I said it couldn’t use a little critical reflection. Photography can be a dangerous artform because, though it is arguably the most realistic of the visual arts, it has the ability to present as truth something which is far from it. Its very realism deceives us.

I have a friend who uploads new photo albums to Facebook on a very regular basis. He is extremely well-traveled and also possesses a professional-grade camera. This combination of facts means that nearly all his pictures look like they’re straight out of a travel-adventure magazine or possibly an advertisement for happiness. “Me in front of the Taj Mahal.” “Me and my girlfriend in Manchu Pichu.” “Me feeding a baby zebra.” “Me eating sushi in Tokyo.” They’re beautiful and exotic.

And I can’t stand looking at them.

I’m not sure if this friend is intentionally trying to make us land-locked people jealous, but if so, he is succeeding. Comments under the album usually read something like, “You’re in New Zealand right now? Are you kidding me??? SO JEALOUS!” or “stop being so cool. seriously.” Written in jest...but not really.

Which makes me sure I’m not the only one with a Facebook friend (or friends) towards whom I feel this complicated combination of fascination and revulsion, awe and envy. I want to be him and yet...oh, how I despise him.

Nearly 15 months have passed since my college graduation, enough time, it seems, for most people to get their feet back under them if they were caught off guard by the sudden rush of unregulated, unprescribed real life. Cue the comparison game. We’re all feeling a little self-conscious these days, let’s be honest. Who is working at the coolest company?, we evaluate implicitly. Who is living in the most exciting city? Who is married or engaged or dating? Whose life looks the most romantic, the most adventurous, the most successful?

It is at this point that the art of photography fails us. It is at this point that the cool 1970s filter, the photobooth crop tool, and especially the delete button, assist us in manipulating, or being manipulated by, a world that is not real.

On Facebook, or any other social networking site, you can present to others any side of yourself that you desire. You can tailor your uploads, comments, posts, and settings to reflect whatever it is you decide is the best “you.” And, of course, you’re not the only one doing this---all your friends are too. But that side of the equation is easier to forget.

We know that photographs present us with a flat image, a mere split-second in time, but we often take them at face-value anyway.

Nothing illustrates this better than the wedding albums which have been popping up on Facebook left and right this summer. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for looking at them---even if I don’t know the girl. Artistic photography for the big day is much more important now than it ever was ten years ago, and many brides are willing to shell out big bucks for a professional photographer with an impressive portfolio. I don’t blame them---I doubt anyone regrets having high-quality pictures of such a special occasion. But the experience of clicking through a wedding album online has very little direct correlation to the experience of the actual wedding. This isn’t just the obvious difference between activity and passivity. It’s the difference between reality and idealized reality, fluid imperfection and frozen perfection. Because I think we can all agree that no picture is going to make it into the wedding album that doesn’t support a memory of flawless bliss and harmony.

Artistically focused close-ups of the flower arrangements. The bride’s sundrenched dress as it hangs expectantly in front of a window. Candid laughing grandmothers and dancing groomsmen. The “let’s have the whole bridal party jump in the air” kind of shot is no longer the limit and height of creativity. But despite the beauty of these pictures, we can’t deceive ourselves into thinking they represent something 100% real. People are rarely as happy as they look in pictures---which cannot capture things like headaches, self-consciousness, weariness, or the ill-fitting strapless bra which may really be at the forefront of your mind. No wedding is ever perfect, just like no marriage is, despite how it may appear in frozen retrospect.

I’m not advocating that we attempt to document things like frantic mothers-of the-bride, missing bow ties, uncomfortable jokes, family tension, or any of the other million things that can go wrong at weddings. But the disparity between the actual day and the albums that emerge from them serve as a good reminder that what we see in a photograph may not actually be what we get. The beauty of the bride in her pictures is no indication of how likely her marriage is to last.

Like a painter with a blank canvas, you can make your photos say almost anything you want. Remove from the frame the garbage in the street, the vendors selling cheap keychains made in China, the ragged beggars, the smell of sewer, and you can make your trip to Europe look as picturesque as a post card. Pull out your camera as your bus drives through a slum in Mexico and you might capture something truly heart-wrenching to share on your page; meanwhile your own heart remains decidedly unmoved. These things, the motives and feelings behind the photos, are something Facebook can’t show us.

We all have friends who manipulate the medium in this way, and we all, to a certain extent, are guilty of it ourselves. We post pictures of fancy lattes to advertise our high class. We strategically post, delete, tag, and untag until only the best of ourselves remain. We upload fat albums from all our adventures, pretending that its only for the purpose of “photo-sharing” with those who joined us. Or sometimes not even pretending. Because, whether we admit it or not, we want other people---even those we don’t know well---to click through our pictures, comment, “like,” and maybe even be a little jealous of all the fun we’re having. We like to feel validated in this way.

It’s definitely not something that is limited to the post-grad years, but sensitivity to such habits is perhaps increased during this time of branching out and settling down. Some find they have not landed quite where they hoped to be, and thus those pictures of their happy friend in San Francisco (who somehow manages to look so gorgeous in every picture, damn her) have a sinister, siren-like appeal. How do I measure up? we ask ourselves. What do people think when they look at my Facebook (or LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever)?

It comes down to a matter of self-consciousness vs. self-confidence. Are you secure enough to not post that picture of yourself that’s really cute? Are you satisfied enough with your own life to see past the veil of other people’s "perfect" realities?

Sometimes I find that I just have to say no to the mindless knowledge accumulation.

No, LinkedIn, I do not want to hear about Janie Jone’s new job.

No, friend from high school whom I barely know, I don’t need to see the pictures of your new loft apartment.

Nothing feeds discontentment like comparison, and nothing prompts comparison like an online diet drenched in other people's photographic lives.