Living In The Great Depression
I have pearls on.We will have ‘artifacts’ on our shelves and walls for people to ask us where ‘we’ got and we’ll say it came from when ‘we went’ somewhere far away, ‘when we were in [exotic place].’ Is this real does anyone actually do that or is this what TV has told me my life ought to be like, I really don’t know, shit.
Shit. You know, maybe I could almost see myself in some like suburb like the one I grew up in and once would have put myself at great bodily risk to escape. When I was young and lived in a suburb had it been possible for the ‘circus to come to town’ I would have ‘run away with the circus’ [the circus is now a corporate affair that sort of horrifies me with its perversion of innocence now, it’s totally a ‘real job’ now, there are no mystical gypsies to lure special little girls away from their humdrum lives by placing the ‘fire of questioning’ in them or whatever the old trope is].
It’s hard to live. Maybe we’re just big fucking babies about it, or maybe so many things have been made easier by technology that the things that aren’t are more obvious: how the fuck is it that I live in a city like New York and the act of doing laundry still involves pushing a cart full of my sheets and underthings up a craggy, unplowed sidewalk in the snow three blocks to a Laundromat where I have to know enough Spanish to ask the lady there for change for the machines and then fuck I forgot my detergent and hell no I am not doing this today I’m spending the laundry money on Bloody Marys and that is that.
Anyway, I am not getting married and moving to Park Slope because all the men I know are in this boat with me; we determinedly have dug into these cities like bugs under the great banner of We’re Going To Fucking Accomplish Something Great, damn it, and we’re fucking tired. When you’re exhausted of feeling angry with yourself for being too exhausted to do your laundry or to do anything but sleep off the hangover that you induced by anxiously swimming to the bottom of several glasses – because it’s hard to talk to people when you’re all so disoriented and tired, or even because you did nothing but stay home and experience a sudden attack of ‘what the fuck am I here for’ and drink because you weren’t sure – when you’re suffering that kind of exhaustion even if you do meet someone you kind of like or might want to ‘date’, even the fucking stupid shit like ‘when is it okay to text them back’ or ‘what night am I going to be free to like go on a date’ or ‘could I picture us having a joint bank account’ is too much to fucking deal with and so you just don’t do it.
I can’t even believe I’m writing this. Like all the rest of us I’m supposed to become a Great Writer, damn it, and here I am writing an article about ‘boo hoo growing up is hard, I am a plagued 20-something.’ I mean, rationally, when I’m not panicking in front of Microsoft Word, I feel very fine about ‘the new adulthood.’ I mean, I don’t really have any sympathy for people who didn’t have a plan, who bankrupted their parents to get an education and now are calmly standing behind the counter in a coffee shop waiting to be told what to do, waiting for the world to discover how brilliant they are and suddenly make it all easy.
But in general I am okay with the idea of social and gender roles changing, that we are ‘marrying later’ or ‘doing things in a different order’ or that what the old dudes are calling ‘extended adolescence’ is increasingly common. It just sucks that that means we don’t really have a template to follow for what our lives are supposed to be like. If we accept that our roles and milestones are going to be malleable and possibly unprecedented the future becomes this huge, terrifying expanse of time and the only thing we know for sure about it is that it’s passing.
Like last night was Sunday night and I was watching My So Called Life and feeling like my weekend had not been long enough – no, actually, wait, it was Monday night, I had Monday off for a holiday that I entirely wasted by feeling entitled to stay in bed posting surly Facebook updates. But anyway, in the episode Angela Chase said she hates Sunday nights in part because she’s lying in front of the TV with “that creepy ‘60 Minutes’ watch that sounds like your whole life ticking away”.
I was like ‘I totally relate.’ And then I was like ‘Angela Chase is fifteen.’ That was literally half my life ago, pretty much. I was like ‘FML.’
My Grandpa loves to send email forwards. He’s like 85 years old and his computer must be riddled with viruses because all of the ‘Subj:Fw: Fw: Fw: LOOK AT THIS!!!1’ things he sends us on a regular basis. Like five of them a day. But last night he sent me this – it’s a full-color Denver Post photoset from the Great Depression.
In the late 1930s ‘Depression’ like, meant something, not the way we casually use it today [as an excuse for why we don’t do things, as an excuse to sell prescriptions, and occasionally as a valid psychiatric diagnosis]. I looked at the photos and except for the institutional racism I thought that it might be pretty sweet to live there. You didn’t think about if you ‘should’ work or have babies or do anything. You just did it because otherwise you didn’t eat. It was apparently one of the darkest times in recent American history.
And yet it didn’t look that bad, somehow. I feel a pang when I look. There is a picture of a ‘homesteader’ named Jack Whinery. He’s really handsome. I’d rather do that kind of ‘whinery’ than the kind I’m doing here, you know?
He has two daughters that look like Dakota and Elle fanning and one that looks like Napoleon Dynamite, poor thing. They all look blighted by misery and strain. Like, the wife is absolutely fucking stricken. Look at her eyes. And yet for some reason I felt jealous of them. I could have been the wife of a man like that, maybe. I think it could have been very relieving and I don’t know how to feel about that.