PICTURE IT: Halloween 1990. My mother and I had been planning my costume for months. I was going to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz — I had the blue-and-white-checked dress, the frilly ankle socks, the picnic basket, the stuffed Toto, and, best of all, handmade ruby red slippers. We had hunted for the perfect heels and spray-painted them red, then my mom spent most of the month of October using the hot glue gun to individually place each red sequin in beautiful rows on my magical shoes. They. were. PERFECT. It was the first year I wasn’t wearing a hand-me-down costume and I couldn’t wait for October 31st.
When Halloween arrived, it snowed.
Not just a little snow — enough snow to require a coat that hid any sign that I was Dorothy, save for my ruby red slippers. And then, sequin by red sequin, the snow took this part of my costume away, too, leaving a trail of Halloween magic behind me.
The situation made me wonder for the millionth time why we so often “sweat the small stuff”. Sure, it sucks to get to the airport and realize you forgot something important, but there are ways to handle the situation, and staying calm is your best bet for handling it and not completely melting down in a taxi cab. My older brother, the middle child and forever the voice of reason, often talks me down during mini emergencies that feel like big emergencies. He has a series of question he makes me ask myself and I urge you to try the same:
Thought Catalog is founded on the belief that “every thought is relevant” and that “anyone can use Thought Catalog to articulate their ideas and stories to the world,” with “no one excluded from the conversation.” Which is not entirely true — Thought Catalog has a submission process and it’s not a free platform. Thought Catalog does not have to publish anything they do not want to. They do have a selection process and it is not a free-for-all, though it has certainly read like one in the last few years. Nowadays, Thought Catalog seems to mirror much of our society: whoever shouts the loudest, or has the most controversial thing to say, or tends to be the most strident about expressing their views… well, guess who’s there, waiting in the digital wings to publish them and reap the traffic rewards? Thought Catalog chose to publish McInnes and McInnes used them to get very loud with his views.
So, are Gavin McInnes’ First Amendment rights being violated?
THE FIRST TIME I can remember hearing Stevie Nicks: I’m five or six, sitting on the brown carpet in my parents’ living room listening to a Fleetwood Mac record.
Her voice sounded different than the music I was used to—The Beatles, The Supremes, Raffi—and I stopped whatever I was doing to listen. Like any ’80s kid, it was a small moment in time between episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and being sent outside to play, but it’s one that stuck with me.
It took over a decade for me to come back to that hauntingly husky voice in the same time-stopping way again. Somehow, I had never heard Landslide and when I did it was just the song my recently dumped 17-year-old self needed: “Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart rise above?” Teaaaars. Tears and release and this… landslide that was my life.
Now that another decade has passed, I still find magic in Stevie’s voice and words when my love life hits the fan.
ACCORDING to Merriam-Webster, a selfie is “an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.”According to me, it’s insane that the word selfie is defined in the dictionary.
We’ve all taken selfies, though; even an adorable crested black macaque monkey hijacked a photographer’s camera in 2011 at a small national park north of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, bared his huge front teeth into a smile, and took a selfie. But the crested black macaque is very rare and critically endangered, so it has a good reason.
My latest for Lady Clever. And in case you haven't seen the macaque monkey selfie:
The Millennial generation is the product of a discrepancy between accessibility and attainability. Anyone can send an email, but the responses are few, and the jobs are even further and far between.
How we got this way is rather simple.
It took a decade or two of indoctrination, of someone telling us that the world was ours, followed by the painful realization that reading Tweets were as close to big wide world domination as many of us would get. Ours would be a second-hand success. Most of us were left to fake it or blame the odds and cede to apathy. Delusions of entitlement headed off work ethic at the pass, and a narrowing spectrum of life experience and a contrary exposure to idealistic extremes left our senses dull.
Technology shoulders some of this responsibility (as does globalization, a weak economy that’s seeing the number of young adults making less than $25,000 increase by six million, and Sean Rad), but technology, for all its 0s and 1s has done something interesting, and slightly ironic: it has turned us into sentimentalists that lack the ability to see, or be lead to the truth. It has made us nostalgic for a history that’s not ours, and as a result denies us the future we desire.
It’s why we say things like: “I miss real photographs,” while simultaneously Instagramming, or Tweet, “I like the smell of books.” We’re stockpiling nostalgia, visions that never really belonged to (most) of us in the first place. We’re hoarding the image in our head without the means or the actual desire to put in the hard work to accomplish it. We’re busy surfing the internet wave, but never stop to realize that the wave is wet or that it’s pulled us under, or when, more often than not, we’ve missed the crest all together.
We don’t appear to want to shoulder any responsibility– like the fact that we refuse to read the fine print, and then collectively uproar that a conglomerate didn’t provide us with the magnifying glass. We’re a bit French (aie) in that manner. And when someone questions our abilities, we get pretty tetchy.
We want everything, while understanding the value of nothing. We accept everyone while having sympathy for no one. We see the man on the side of the road, but we aren’t going to be the one to stop. We jump in the fire and take a piss on it all at once. Tristan Walker may have succeeded, deservedly so, but for most of us this will not be the case.
We have to be willing to get out from behind the computer. We have to not only pay attention, but be willing to engage. We need unsentimental efficiency to disarm our nostalgia.
Arianna is my editor at Lady Clever. She is also one of my favorite writers.
Last year I forgot it was the Fourth of July. I went to dinner with a group of people in Barcelona and one man at the table asked me, “Why was there someone running around naked wrapped in an American flag in the park today? You Americans are so weird!” and I laughed before realizing, and explaining, that it was our independence day. In response, a table of ten sang their best Spanish-accented rendition of America’s National Anthem for me. No judgement, just an understanding that I might be missing home a little bit. We all know what it means to be from somewhere, and to be away from it, too.
My latest for Lady Clever.
I have bomb pops in the fridge and sparklers for the night. Happy Fourth of July from outside of the country once again.
