comfortably numb
Jan. 22nd, 2001 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupNot really much to go on. I've been reading other peoples' livejournals and whatnot. It is a weird thing to realize the distance traveled since college. This is not meant in any bad way, just that in many ways when your life changes you don't really feel particularly different than you did before. The changes in your life take years to notice. When I was teaching high school I sometimes felt like I still was in high school, and so on.
So this is one of the differences. When I was in high school I had a whole periodization of my life history worked out. Much of it I didn't remember and only thought of as random images and anecdotes told to me by my parents.
0-4 don't remember anything; lived in Wales for 6 months; peed in the sink one night when I was asleep and confused and woke up to the sound of my brother screaming at the top of his lungs.
5-12 those weird years when you don't really know what's happening to you or why, just that the world is much crueler than it seems it should be. I go to school and Hebrew school and get made fun of a lot and don't really have many friends. My chief memories of these years are standing in a corner of the playground reciting Tom Lehrer lyrics to myself and being amused by that.
12-14 Junior High School. Enough said, really. Discover girls. They don't like me. (I am eternally grateful to the film Welcome to the Dollhouse for explaining exactly what it is like to be that kind of person in that kind of environment. No one would believe me if I really told them what my life was like then, and in high school.) I hang around with my friend Ken a lot, mostly because he has Legos and a Macintosh computer and we are the most picked on people in the school. Our friendship attenuates over the years until we hardly speak at all as we build this huge Lego city in his room. These days I speak to him maybe once a year. I think he once had something else in him, something artistic-- he wrote poetry once-- but now the businessman side of him, which was always strong and his way of shielding himself from being picked on, has won out completely.
14-16 High School I. Girls still not interested. I start having some friends I hang around with on a regular basis. I am a dork who hates the world but am finding some sort of identity that way. I go around with books on Communism and tell people I like Communism even though I have no idea what it is. Life is a blur. I hang out with these losers at the lunch room table. They are racists and assholes but they are the only ones who let me sit with them.
17-18 High School II. Meet first girls who will have something to do with me. One of my friends kills himself. I hang out with Frank a lot. Somewhere in all this everything in the previous years gets blurry and that is when I feel that things have turned a corner in my life. I imitate Frank and start keeping a journal and develop artistic pretensions. I criticize girls' clothing for some reason having to do with politics and cultural obsessions. I get angry at everything. I listen to Classic Rock music.
College had all these different phases. Many of them were keyed in to whatever soap opera girlfriend thing was going on at the time. Each felt "emplotted" as though I was moving toward something important.
The summer after college was the last time it felt like anything dramatic and "emplotted" happened to me. I had one last catastrophic relationship and hung out a lot and then went home and hung out and then moved to Washington for a job. And strangely enough nothing since then has had the same sense of crisis to it, even when I was living in situations that objectively were crises of the highest order. I have gotten married and bought a car and moved a house and gotten a job. But it's as though something has happened along the way that lets you know things will more or less return to the way they were before. And time seems to go more quickly. I look at stuff from 1995 and I think, that was yesterday. I can tell you that in 1991, 1985 felt like ancient history. So did 1989.
Anyway that is why when I read all these college student journals and the whole range of emotions that register there they seem familiar but oddly distant to me now. I don't really have the falling-out-and-making-up thing with friends anymore. My friends are mostly like me, cocooned with a Significant Other and prevented by inertia from caring much about anything outside the cocoon. There are some friendships that have atrophied without any big blowups, just me getting ticked off at being the only one doing anything to keep them going. And now even when there are insults to me (like the things my father-in-law says about Jews) I hardly care. I am unable to get upset about much of anything.
I used to think this was due to the anesthetic effect of my last girlfriend, whose fairly limited range of emotions and interests kept everything on an even keel of niceness and passive aggression. It also has to do with age and having a job routine. But now I think that it is just what life is when you largely get the things you want. That is why years ago everyone older was patronizing and indulgent when I got upset about things. It is impossible to care.
Every so often something happens to reopen the abyss, and the minor nature of them can be their most surprising aspect. I got a flat tire last week and felt utterly despondent about it for a while, as though life was invalidated by encountering one of its perils that lies all around. But it closes up again and you're back to sitting at home, reading, cleaning, eating dinner together, and it really all is OK.
It will all be OK.
So this is one of the differences. When I was in high school I had a whole periodization of my life history worked out. Much of it I didn't remember and only thought of as random images and anecdotes told to me by my parents.
0-4 don't remember anything; lived in Wales for 6 months; peed in the sink one night when I was asleep and confused and woke up to the sound of my brother screaming at the top of his lungs.
5-12 those weird years when you don't really know what's happening to you or why, just that the world is much crueler than it seems it should be. I go to school and Hebrew school and get made fun of a lot and don't really have many friends. My chief memories of these years are standing in a corner of the playground reciting Tom Lehrer lyrics to myself and being amused by that.
12-14 Junior High School. Enough said, really. Discover girls. They don't like me. (I am eternally grateful to the film Welcome to the Dollhouse for explaining exactly what it is like to be that kind of person in that kind of environment. No one would believe me if I really told them what my life was like then, and in high school.) I hang around with my friend Ken a lot, mostly because he has Legos and a Macintosh computer and we are the most picked on people in the school. Our friendship attenuates over the years until we hardly speak at all as we build this huge Lego city in his room. These days I speak to him maybe once a year. I think he once had something else in him, something artistic-- he wrote poetry once-- but now the businessman side of him, which was always strong and his way of shielding himself from being picked on, has won out completely.
14-16 High School I. Girls still not interested. I start having some friends I hang around with on a regular basis. I am a dork who hates the world but am finding some sort of identity that way. I go around with books on Communism and tell people I like Communism even though I have no idea what it is. Life is a blur. I hang out with these losers at the lunch room table. They are racists and assholes but they are the only ones who let me sit with them.
17-18 High School II. Meet first girls who will have something to do with me. One of my friends kills himself. I hang out with Frank a lot. Somewhere in all this everything in the previous years gets blurry and that is when I feel that things have turned a corner in my life. I imitate Frank and start keeping a journal and develop artistic pretensions. I criticize girls' clothing for some reason having to do with politics and cultural obsessions. I get angry at everything. I listen to Classic Rock music.
College had all these different phases. Many of them were keyed in to whatever soap opera girlfriend thing was going on at the time. Each felt "emplotted" as though I was moving toward something important.
The summer after college was the last time it felt like anything dramatic and "emplotted" happened to me. I had one last catastrophic relationship and hung out a lot and then went home and hung out and then moved to Washington for a job. And strangely enough nothing since then has had the same sense of crisis to it, even when I was living in situations that objectively were crises of the highest order. I have gotten married and bought a car and moved a house and gotten a job. But it's as though something has happened along the way that lets you know things will more or less return to the way they were before. And time seems to go more quickly. I look at stuff from 1995 and I think, that was yesterday. I can tell you that in 1991, 1985 felt like ancient history. So did 1989.
Anyway that is why when I read all these college student journals and the whole range of emotions that register there they seem familiar but oddly distant to me now. I don't really have the falling-out-and-making-up thing with friends anymore. My friends are mostly like me, cocooned with a Significant Other and prevented by inertia from caring much about anything outside the cocoon. There are some friendships that have atrophied without any big blowups, just me getting ticked off at being the only one doing anything to keep them going. And now even when there are insults to me (like the things my father-in-law says about Jews) I hardly care. I am unable to get upset about much of anything.
I used to think this was due to the anesthetic effect of my last girlfriend, whose fairly limited range of emotions and interests kept everything on an even keel of niceness and passive aggression. It also has to do with age and having a job routine. But now I think that it is just what life is when you largely get the things you want. That is why years ago everyone older was patronizing and indulgent when I got upset about things. It is impossible to care.
Every so often something happens to reopen the abyss, and the minor nature of them can be their most surprising aspect. I got a flat tire last week and felt utterly despondent about it for a while, as though life was invalidated by encountering one of its perils that lies all around. But it closes up again and you're back to sitting at home, reading, cleaning, eating dinner together, and it really all is OK.
It will all be OK.
denim skirts-- what was I thinking?
Date: 2001-01-23 06:33 am (UTC)