It’s a lot of fun to be a grownup. Don’t get me wrong, waking up at 5 every day to go to the grownup job is a pain. A SERIOUS pain sometimes. And yet, there are compensations. Driving where I want to go is awesome.

And another thing about being a grownup is free range socialization. My daughter spends her day with age-boxed children in pre- and soon to be elementary school. The education system sets it up that way.

I get to call a variety of people my peers, which I like. All ages. There is a wide playing field in grownup land.  To my surprise, I’ve been here for a while. And my jaded outlook now has some experience to give it depth.

When I was 21 (not experienced) I discovered I was part of a cohort, a generation called X. I was delighted that my learned reflexes were shared in kind by people my age. Everyone was annoyed by the Boomers. Ha! I am not wrong, other people looked at this world and came to the same conclusions.

That was a long time ago, so long that the kids behind me grew up to be my peers now too. The Millennials- what’s up with them?

The annoying thing about the Boomers is the phalanxy cause-driven unity. Causes and ideologies, whether political or business, the ‘this is how it’s done, and this is what we do’ message. Plus their sheer size. I really wish all the money hadn’t burned up in 2008 because maybe they would have retired already and freed up some JOBS.

These millennials who stay at home or get their parents to pay for their college…are you kidding me? For those of us who worked three jobs with as many roommates to get through college, this sounds soft. but okay. I can see that finding one job, let alone three, is a struggle right now.

This article showed me somehting I hadn’t seen behind the go-along-to-get-along smiles.  The Millennials don’t trust anybody:

” Millennials seem …to lack a sense of social trust. Only 19 percent say that generally speaking most people can be trusted, compared to 31 percent to 40 percent among older generations.”

Well. Maybe they are not so gullible after all. They have ratcheted up a notch. And yet, what are all of us supposed to do in a world where you can trust almost no one?
There have been periods in my life where trust is painfully scarce–trust famines.  I found myself in a circumstance, a situation, a relationship or a group where I could not trust the systems around me.

Of course I wanted to hit the eject button and get out. Not possible.

There are long-term consequences from trust famines. Dial the time machine back and we find the generation who lived through the depression. They will never forget the times when they system failed so completely. Grandmothers now who cannot throw away the plastic butter container–you never know when you might need it.

This group? still young. Still fighting. Tolkien said it in The Fellowship of the Ring (a quote tragically missing from Jackson’s movie). After Gandalf dies, the hobbits wail “There is no hope!”

Aragorn replies “We must do without hope.”

Yep. Because we must keep doing. The young adults, in this time, can feel how little the systems and the people running them are trustworthy. And yet we must go on. What else is there? Living must be done. At least we have enough butter dishes; and the butter that goes in them.

Something is missing though. Maybe these Millennials will give it a name and we can diagnose it to start to cure it.

She watches what I do, even when I’m not watching. It upsets her when I’m upset.

I have no desire to hide how I feel, and I also don’t want to upset her.

Here’s the thing: sometimes I cry when I’m happy. How to explain it to a five year old?

They say there are no tears in heaven. And yet I cry happy tears so often. SO often.

What’s up with that?

I have a theory. It’s the tension. It’s the lingering aftertaste of the memory of how things were once (recently? Long ago?) NOT beautiful and happy.

The half life of the hunger as we are now at a full table. I am at a full banquet, why did I once go without? How could both these things have happened?

so I am pulled taut and the tears spill over.

what if all the memory of lack in heaven is not painful? What if we see everything as making sense? what if the ironic tension is relieved

And so, when I find myself tearing up before my beautiful and curious daughter, I think “why remember the bad times? I can enjoy the right now thing and not need to cry. Here we are and let this fill my heart.”

I am not sure that covers the ground. i’m going to keep working on this theory.

At the park watching two older girls be mean to my girl. Their parents (newly met today) are bonding over their rejection of alcohol and ignoring their girls. Skinny redhead mom is regaling hipster hat dad with barfly stories.

It will be good for Veronica to learn to deal with mean girls.

It would be bad for me to grab the mean girls by their hair.

Hipster dad is doing push-ups while skinny barfly mom keeps talking “–I really have to learn to manage my anger.”

Two hour fifteen minutes to drive. big bottle of water and a box of orange tic tacs. 45 minutes in I am reaching for more tacs, have consumed all the water. Hour and a half in I have sprained my bladder, named my hunger headache Helga, and have taken my shoes off. Helga is my only company for the next hour.

Now? Munchkin practice. I did consume a nutrition shake and visit the bathroom before collecting the munchkin.

Helga was gracious and departed. Happy Friday!

Veronica said “why don’t you comb your hair every day ?”

“My hair is tangly”

“my hair is straight. My friend London’s hair is straight. You should have straight hair mommy.”

“I will think about that. Brush your teeth.”

well. Maybe

and maybe not.

But I’m writing.

I found this quote yesterday:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

 

 

THat’s from the author of Calvin and Hobbes. I am feeling prickly because i have a buncha things I feel that I *should* be doing and i am not doing it. STUFF keeps coming up. Except I maybe could find the time if it were reallly important. Instead I want to be crabby about everything.

Maybe a cup of coffee would help.

yes, i went straight back to everything upon returning from Yosemite.

Of course I did.

What I didn’t do was get a good night’s sleep.

So, the fog of tired drug me down. I was trying for the excitement, and instead I got the draggy-paws. Even the super sensitivity.

I come home from work (WoRK!) and Chris tells me:

“Just because it’s raining today doesn’t mean it will rain tomorrow.”

true. Just let the morning come

It’s coming anyway

Dickens, Orwell and Downton Abbey

On my Kindle, George Orwell’s essays have been waiting for me since Christmas. My husband takes the holiday very seriously and demands a list of presents I would enjoy. That’s a lot of pressure, and I am sometimes forced into hurried requests. I had a thought that I’d like to see how he stood up in changing times.

Animal Farm and 1984 are spectacular, but it wasn’t until I read Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in London and Paris that I really got to know this man.  He was a real person with his own adventures not merely a crafter of stories from the sidelines.

I figured his essays would bring me more of that guy.

These particular essays included one he titles: “Charles Dickens.”

oooh!

An author talking about another author? Yes, I want to read that one. Yes.

He begins his essay to address that other people have called Dickens Marxist. Orwell loves talking Dickens and political ideology, and delightfully examines Dickens’ characters for embryonic political leanings. He talks about the servants and how Dickens treats them:

“It was an age of enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient houses, when the slavey drudging fourteen hours a day in the basement kitchen was something too normal to be noticed.”

I cannot help but think of Downton Abbey. Isn’t the relationship between the servants and The Family at Downton such a perfect example of this? An army of servants is required to give the titled family the glorious lifestyle we admire and cannot stop watching.

Downton Abbey is a TV show. And it makes us think think think about what it was like at that time. The cook and her several helpers do slave away all day.

Orwell goes on to say:

“Without a high level of mechanical development, human equality is not practically possible.”

For Dickens, it was inevitable that there were cooks and footmen and butlers. In Downton Abbey, that life is coming into question 50 years later. The family clutches its pearls about the changes.

The servants are the ones who encounter the mechanical development.  The ladies’ maids get a sewing machine to help with the mending, and the cook is comically afraid of the electric toaster.

Think about this for a minute. The system of dependency that Dickens, and later Downton Abbey rely on means that toast means something else entirely than what we understand it.

If the food preparers were at the bottom of the basement, would a Dickens’ character even get a piece of hot toast? Probably never in his life!

I can have a piece of delicious hot toast anytime I want, and enjoy the lovely smell. That never happened in a world of separated servants. Some things must be done by oneself to really work.

So I think, what if the Family at Downton had the toaster up in their dining room? Maybe it would pop up right there, and they could enjoy it.

Different world. Here’s the problem with that:

How did they run electricity into the house at all? For a family estate, from god-knows-how-long-ago, I am pretty sure the walls are not the regularly placed two-by-four frames on a raised foundation.

I had to re-do the electricity on my 1950s house. It was incredibly easy, and now I can run the microwave and the air conditioner at the same time. Neither of those inventions was in houses when my house was built. But the ticky-tacky houses in my neighborhood allowed for the integration of things they couldn’t imagine. You know what else? I live in an area of greater human equality.

Back in the 1300s or whenever Downton Abbey was fictionally created, they didn’t look that far ahead. Their land and titles were part of the feudal system, which had supported them for a very long time.

In Dickens’ stories, like so many Victorian stories, social mobility is at the center. People are trying to better themselves. Money and virtue is key.

The Granthams were already at the top, and they found themselves on a melting iceberg. Other Victorian novels show up how the titled nobility have to marry moneyed nouveau riche to get the resources to keep their burdensome estates going.

The Granthams are all about that. “What are we to do?” The symbols of their status are the albatross around their necks. The transition is not easy.

Earlier in the essay Orwell says: “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow, and invariably disappointing.”

Have you noticed something? I see it. We are in the middle of a slow and disappointing progression right now. Call it the information age. Call it the fall of the commercial exploitation empire. Call it Catch 22.

Preservation is not what it used to be. Which institution needs to be abandoned for which idea to be preserved?

I am not certain that the idea has been born yet. Or, which idea of the many downy chicklings will grow into the one that takes flight with our collective hopes.  Orwell thought a lot about political ideas. They are seductive to be sure. I think a lot about electricity, roads and data flows. I had better feed all the chicks though.

They are sleeping. I am the morning person in the family

We haven’t been to a national park in 5 years. More than five years.

Going to get pizza at camp curry for dinner last night, I felt part of tradition. My mother and father came here as young people. Yosemite was recognized as a special park by Lincoln

This is a place of MY people. Campfires and hikes and admiring the beauty is what my people have done here.

Veronica said she wanted to see more waterfalls and big rocks when she woke up.

I think today I will override daddy’s rules and allow more off the path adventuring

two days. We are awake in our hotel stop on the way to yosemite.

She was super drowsy at first. THEN she wanted to have all our attention. She admired the orchards and teh horses and cows.

“I love farms!”

and she wished we were at Yosemite.

“Look at the train Veronica!’

Big train, carrying probably what the farms produced or needed.

“Maybe a train could take us to Yosemite…” she said slowly.

Good thinking.

No, we are not there yet.