by Meghan Daum
I told him that the bestselling author was a genius. She’d earned her $2,500 by preparing not a single syllable of original material. And the audience loved her for it.
“Plus, they called me a romantic,” I said.
“Well, you are one, kind of,” he said. “Just look at this stupid light fixture.”
* * *
Is being authentic the same as being romantic? Is it a form of being romantic? My assumption has always been that the two are diametrically opposed. If romance connotes a certain indulgence of attractive falsehoods, authenticity is about indulging only the truth, embracing what’s in front of you, working with what you have. And since authenticity has long been a major interest of mine, since it’s what I’m about, I figured romance just wasn’t part of my constitution. I thought lines like “the human heart is pretty pie chart resistant” were coming from a place of stony pragmatism rather than the foolishness of the sixth floor of the Husband Store.
But perhaps I was mistaken about myself. I may have spent a good deal of my life avoiding, if not downright fleeing from, the prospect of long-term commitment, but I did chase after experiences and also the stories I could tell about them. In some ways that’s an utterly unromantic impulse, a sort of “thinking person’s” guide to using people and then discarding them when their novelties have worn off. But maybe in other ways it’s almost the epitome of romance—or at least the epitome of something a romantic would do. What is more dreamily reckless, after all, than dating people in part for their plotlines—the ones they bring with them and the ones we take with us when we leave? What is more fanciful than wondering, if only for the sake of perversity and if only for a fleeting moment, if a destitute mountain man or a malapropism-prone airline pilot could be the One? What is more hopeful than mistakenly thinking that a bunch of senior citizens in Nebraska want a tutorial on Simone de Beauvoir or that lonely singles need a lecture about respecting the timeline they’ve been given?
Not much that I can think of. Of course, these are also the sorts of things that can lead to riding in the backseat of your own car. Though, let’s face it, a little time back there never hurt anyone. The view is different and you just might learn something.
NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE
My husband has been known to reminisce about his college years, often saying that the friendships he had then were deeper than any since, that his highs were higher, his disappointments more shattering, his convictions more deeply felt. Last year I finally made good on my promise (possibly it was a threat) to have us sit down and watch The Big Chill, the iconic 1983 movie about a group of old college friends grappling with the fact that they are no longer impassioned students but adult participants in late twentieth-century capitalism. I expected it to be painfully dated but found it to have held up far better than I’d imagined. The Big Chill, of course, is the godmother of thirtysomething, the television series about the exact same types of people worrying about the exact same things. Together they more or less defined the image of the “yuppie,” a label that now feels musty and lazy but remains a template for the concept of socioeconomic upward mobility as an active, conscious gesture.
Though I was only thirteen when The Big Chill was released and therefore mainly interested in the soundtrack, which featured Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” (known to my peers and me as “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog”), thirtysomething premiered on network television the fall of my senior year in high school, a time when my primary interest was sloughing off the residue of youth and becoming a grown-up as quickly as possible. Thirtysomething, true to its title, was about adults. It was about two married couples, Hope and Michael and Nancy and Elliot, and also about a handful of single people who were portrayed as some combination of earnest and quirky but were usually looked down upon as immature and neurotic. The married adults with kids on the show were engaged in the “juggling act” (a national pastime in the ’80s) of raising young children and advancing their careers and in one case restoring their charming Craftsman house. The single ones were interesting and impassioned but also possessed of some flaw—workaholism, insecurity, authority issues—that made them their “own worst enemies.” Many frequently wore sweatshirts bearing the names of their colleges and, like The Big Chill characters, often wondered aloud what had happened to their younger, more hopeful selves. Because it was a television show they were all great-looking and dressed really well, though because it was the late 1980s many of the sweaters had ugly geometric patterns and the women’s suits had huge shoulder pads.
Most of us have unconscious disbeliefs about our lives, facts that we accept at face value but that still cause us to gasp just a little when they pass through our minds at certain angles. Mine are these: that my mother is dead, that the Vatican actually had it in itself to select a pope like Pope Francis, and that I am now older than the characters on thirtysomething. That last one is especially upending. How is it that the people who were, for me, the very embodiment of adulthood, who, with their dinner parties and marital spats and career angst represented the place in life I’d like to get to but surely never will, are on average six to eight years my junior? How did I get to be middle-aged without actually growing up?
Luckily, even some of the most confounding questions have soothingly prosaic answers. On the subject of growing up, or feeling that you have succeeded in doing so, I’m pretty sure the consensus is that it’s an illusion. Probably no one ever really feels grown-up, except for certain high school math teachers or members of Congress. I suspect that most members of AARP go around feeling in many ways just as confused and fraudulent as most middle school students. You might even be able to make a case that not feeling grown-up is a sign that you actually are, much as worrying that you’re crazy supposedly means you’re not.
My husband gave The Big Chill a B minus. He said he would have given it a C minus if not for Meg Tilly, who spent most of the movie in a leotard and tights, contorting her exceptionally lithe body into positions not possible for most human anatomies. He said the film struck him as a bunch of old people complaining.
“The characters are younger than we are,” I said.
“No they’re not,” my husband said.
“Yes they are,” I said. “They’re supposed to have graduated from the University of Michigan fifteen years earlier.”
“So?”
“We graduated twenty-one years ago.”
* * *
My husband is nostalgic for his college days. I, on the other hand, spent most of college waiting for it to be over so I could move to the city and work at an entry-level office job. Believe me, I know how lame that sounds. Among my greatest sources of opprobrium and regret is that I managed to have such a mediocre time at a place that is pretty much custom designed for delivering the best years of your life. I’d like to say that I wasn’t the same person back then that I later became and now am. But the truth is that I was the exact same person. I was more myself then than at any other time in my life. I was an extreme version of myself. Everything I’ve always felt I felt more intensely. Everything I’ve always wanted, I wanted more. Everything I currently dislike, I downright hated back then. People who think I’m judgmental, impatient, and obsessed with real estate now should have seen me in college. I was bored by many of my classmates and irked by the contrived mischief and floundering sexual intrigues of dormitory life. I couldn’t wait to get out and rent my own apartment, preferably one in a grand Edwardian building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In that sense, I guess my college experience was just as intense as my husband’s. I just view that intensity negatively rather than nostalgically, which perhaps is its own form of nostalgia.
A little game I like to play is to look back on various critical junctures in my life and imagine what advice my older self might dispense to my younger self. The way I picture it, my younger self will be going about her business and my older self will suddenly appear out of nowhere, like a goon sent in to settle a debt. I always imagine my older
self grabbing my younger self by the collar or even shoving her in some manner. At first, Younger Self is frightened and irritated (Older Self speaks harshly to her) but a feeling of calm quickly sets in over the encounter. Younger Self sits there rapt, as though receiving the wisdom of Yoda or of some musician she idolizes, such as Joni Mitchell. But Older Self is no Yoda. Older Self is stern and sharp. Older Self has adopted the emphatic, no-nonsense speaking style of formidable women with whom she worked in countless New York City offices before deciding she never again wanted to work anywhere but her own home (a place where, over the years, she has lost a certain amount of people skills and has been known to begin conversations as though slamming a cleaver into a side of raw beef). Older Self begins her sentences with “Listen” and “Look.” She says, “Listen, what you’re into right now isn’t working for you.” She says, “Look, do yourself a favor and get out of this situation right now. All of it. The whole situation. Leave this college. Forget about this boy you’re sleeping with but not actually dating. Stop pretending you did the reading for your Chaucer seminar when you didn’t and never will.”
To which Younger Self will ask, “Okay, then what should I do?” And of course Older Self has no answer, because Older Self did not leave the college, did not drop the boy, did not stop pretending to have read Chaucer. And the cumulative effect of all those failures (or missed opportunities, blown chances, fuckups, whatever) is sitting right here, administering a tongue-lashing to her younger self (which is to say herself) about actions or inactions that were never going to be anything other than what they were. And at that point the younger and older selves merge into some kind of floating blob of unfortunate yet inevitable life choices, at which point I stop the little game and nudge my mind back into real time and try to think about other things, such as what I might have for dinner that night or what might happen when I die. Such is the pendulum of my post-forty thoughts.
* * *
Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, my generation was the cohort people were interested in. It had been dubbed Generation X, thanks to a novel of the same name by a later-born boomer named Douglas Coupland. As a term, it was sexy. It sold magazines and launched MTV’s Real World franchise, which, as I write this, is in its twenty-ninth season, though I’ve missed the last twenty-six of them. But by the mid-aughts, Generation X was a passing thought, a low-budget indie movie sandwiched between two blockbusters known as the baby boomers and the children of the baby boomers, who are known as the millennials. By most counts there are something like 78 million boomers and 76 million millennials. There are 51 million Gen Xers. As a demographic, we’re a minor player. No one cares all that much about our spending habits or voting patterns. Chapter four of Coupland’s novel is entitled “I Am Not a Target Market.” How right he was.
The default posture of Generation X has always been to trash the boomers. The boomers were yuppie sellouts, sanctimonious blowhards, fair-weather hippies who joined the establishment as soon as they realized the upsides to having health insurance and retirement accounts (see: backstories of Big Chill characters and Hope and Michael et al.). They did tons of drugs and had tons of sex and then left us to trudge through the AIDS and crack epidemics they left in their wake. If you were a young writer in the 1990s, as I was, you could find a steady stream of magazine work composing irony-laden rants about how much the boomers had screwed over the Xers—economically, culturally, sexually-transmitted-diseasedly, et cetera. In the span of a few years, I wrote no fewer than fifteen articles that were essentially some variation on “broken homes ruined our belief in marriage, MTV ruined our attention spans, and AIDS ruined our sex lives. Our world and the baby boomers’ world are many galaxies apart.”
Twenty years later, I see that this is utterly untrue. Generation Xers and baby boomers have nearly everything in common. At least, just about everything that means anything, like reading actual books or enjoying face-to-face contact with friends and not necessarily wanting to watch a movie on a three-and-a-half-inch screen. The vagaries of the digital revolution mean that I have more in common with people twenty years my senior than I do with people seven years my junior. Some of my best friends are baby boomers. Far fewer are millennials.
In 1994, the anchors of NBC’s Today Show had an off-air conversation that would become as powerful a lens as any through which to view the vast gulf between those who came of age before the Internet era and those who’ve never known anything else. It took place with cameras rolling, presumably during a commercial break or prerecorded segment, and resurfaced in the form of a YouTube video seventeen years later. The video shows the anchors Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, and Elizabeth Vargas responding to Gumbel’s confusion over how to narrate a title card that reads “[email protected].”
The transcript (picture Couric with asymmetrical haircut and in dowdy cardigan; picture Vargas looking oddly like the mom from The Cosby Show; picture Gumbel looking, as ever, like an impatient driver just cut off in traffic) is as follows:
Gumbel: I wasn’t prepared to translate that. As I was doing that little tease. That little mark with the “a” and the ring around it?
Vargas: “At”?
Gumbel: See, that’s what I said.
Vargas: Um-hmm.
Gumbel: Katie said she thought it was “about.”
Couric: Yeah. Or “around.”
Vargas: Oh.
Gumbel: But I’d never heard it said [out loud].
Couric: Yeah.
Gumbel: I’d seen the mark but never heard it said and then it sounded stupid when I said it. Violence at nbcge com. I mean …
Couric: Well, Allison should know—
Gumbel: What is Internet, anyway?
Couric: Internet is that massive computer network.
Vargas: Right.
Couric: The one that’s becoming really big now.
Gumbel: What do you mean, it’s big? How do you mean? Do you write to it? Like mail?
Couric: No, a lot of people use it … I guess they can communicate with NBC, writers and producers. [Calling to someone offscreen] Allison, can you explain what Internet is?
Gumbel: No, she can’t say anything in ten seconds or less.
Vargas: Uh-oh! Allison will be in the studio shortly.
Couric: What does it mean?
Male voice offscreen: It’s a giant computer network made up of, uh … started from—
Gumbel: Oh, I thought you were going to tell us what this [makes @ symbol with finger] means.
Vargas: It’s like a computer billboard.
Male voice offscreen: It’s a computer billboard.
Vargas: Right.
Male voice offscreen: It has several universities that are all joined together.
Vargas: Right.
Gumbel: And others can access it?
Male voice offscreen: And it’s getting bigger and bigger all the time.
Vargas: Right.
Gumbel: Just great.
Vargas: It came in really handy during the quake. A lot of people, that’s how they were communicating out to tell family and loved ones they were okay because all the phone lines were down.
Gumbel: I was telling Katie the other—
Couric: But you don’t need a phone line to operate Internet?
Vargas: No. No, apparently not.
I was twenty-four when this conversation took place, a full-grown adult by most measures. The exchange, while quaint and amusing, doesn’t surprise me or seem strange in any way. That’s because even though various incipient forms of digital communication had by then been going on for decades, I, like most people, was similarly ignorant about “Internet.” Like Katie Couric, I was a creature of telephone landlines. Like Bryant Gumbel, who, unless I’m mistaken, appears to be rolling his eyes when he deems these rapid advancements “just great,” I was, if not suspicious of technology, at least left a bit cold by it. Couric and Gumbel, both bona fide boomers, are fourteen years and twenty-two years older than I am, respectively. But as a Gen X
er, my sensibility is more closely aligned with theirs than with that of a lot of people born just five or six years after me. That’s because the digital revolution has installed a sense of “before” and “after” that’s as palpable as any war, any catastrophe, maybe even any coming and going of a messiah. And any millennial can see that any Gen Xer, no matter how tech savvy or early adaptive, belongs to the group of those who came before.
* * *
A thirteen-year-old I know has a habit of phoning people repeatedly and hanging up when no one answers. Thanks to caller ID, he does not understand the concept of leaving a message. “You can see that I called you,” he says to me. “That’s how you know to call me back.” I tell him that seeing that someone phoned isn’t enough, that we need to know what they want and where and when to return the call. I tell him that leaving phone messages is an important skill and that, if he likes, he can practice by leaving some for me. He looks at me like I’m suggesting he learn how to operate a cotton gin. To try to explain to a thirteen-year-old the importance of leaving a callback number is essentially to bathe yourself in a sepia tint. You might as well be an old-timey portrait in a Ken Burns documentary, fading in and out between stock photos of drum-cylinder printing presses while Patricia Clarkson reads from your letters. By the time this boy is twenty, there may well be no more voice mail. By the time he is thirty there may be no more desktop computers. By the time he is forty, scientists may have learned how to reprogram human biology to turn off genes that cause aging and disease. By then I will be seventy. It will be too late to turn off my genes. It will be too late for a lot of things. Maybe not to travel or to try, again, to read Chaucer but definitely too late to assume any role that’s preceded by the word young. It’s already too late for that. Any traces of precocity I ever had are long forgotten. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I’d die young. Everything else, I’m doing middle-aged.
