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These Are Things I Think About
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A few nights ago, I was hanging out with my friend Al, discussing my impending move from Philadelphia to LA to pursue my dreams of TV writing and stand-up comedy. Al was praising my dedication to making these dreams a reality.
"I was thinking about it today," he said. "I don't have what you have." "You mean a vagina?" I said, because I'm physically incapable of having a conversation without saying something sarcastic every other sentence. "No," said Al. "I couldn't think of the word for it, but it's like, when you want something and you put in the work to get it. Like, when you just make yourself do something, even if it's hard or you don't really want to." "...Discipline?" I ventured. "Yeah! That's the word I couldn't think of! Discipline!" "Thank you," I gasped when I finally scraped myself up off the sidewalk, because I had fallen down from laughing so hard, "but honestly, I'm not that disciplined. Not as much as I should be." "No, no, no, you are," Al insisted. "Look at what you do, you go to open mics all the time, you're always writing and trying out new stuff, you built a website, you're moving to LA because that's where you need to be to do what you want to do. What do I do? I don't do shit. I'm fucking lazy." I pointed out that I, too, can be lazy, and actually would love to give in to that laziness more, were it not for the constant, nagging voice in my head that tells me I'm a piece-of-shit loser who is doomed to failure because I'd rather lay in bed watching Seinfeld reruns I've seen 85 times before than write a blog, work on a script or apply for jobs. I argued that, for someone like me who, to quote Angelica Schuyler by way of Lin Manual Miranda, has never been satisfied, the thought of being free from the constant stress of ambition seems pretty goddamn delightful, and should not be dismissed so easily. The conversation did put some things into perspective for me, namely that everything is relative. Although I try very hard not to compare myself to others, but it's inevitable. I look at my friends who hustle the fuck out of their artistic endeavors, and have the successes and opportunities to show for it, and I feel like a total sloth, except more useless because I'm not even as cute as a sloth. And yet, there are many people in my life who, like Al, admire my initiative and discipline. Their support means the world to me, but also makes me feel like a bit of a fraud, because I can guarantee that 99% of the time, I would rather be sleeping. I love sleeping. I am the Beyonce of sleeping. I slay slumber like Bey slays Coachella, and I'm pretty sure if I found a way to monetize sleeping, I'd change my name to Rip Van Winkle and peace out for twenty years. So why fight it? Surely the world wouldn't care if I hung up my mic, closed down my blog, and became one with my couch. Because the 1% of me that doesn't want to go on a permanent vacation is a stubborn motherfucker who insists that I do something more with the limited time I've been given on this Earth, and loudly reminds me that, after all of the whining, agonizing and suffering of actually doing work, the outcome is usually worth it. If that's discipline, she's got her work cut out for her, but she's putting up a hell of a fight. Maybe now she has another tool in her arsenal, as I realize that discipline, like so many other things in this world, is relative. To the world, I may be a lazy fuck, but to a lazy fuck, I may be an ambitious, overachieving rock star. And that's encouragement I'll take any day. I'm the kind of person who enjoys revisiting books, movies, TV shows and other media over and over. Re-reading a favorite book can feel like catching up with an old friend - it's familiar and comforting, something you can count on in an ever-uncertain world. Re-watching a movie or TV show means I can catch subtle clues I may have missed the first time. And it's always interesting and enlightening to experience media from a more evolved, educated point of view.
I say all this as explanation for why I was so excited this weekend when I discovered that Pearl Harbor is available on Netflix. Pearl Harbor, for those of you who were not 16-year-old white suburban girls in 2001, is director Michael Bay's take on the December 7, 1941 surprise attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor that led to the United States' entry into World War II. I don't embarrass easily, so I have no shame in admitting that I was obsessed with this movie, although not as obsessed as 13-year-old Kristen was with Titanic. Apparently I'm a real sucker for melodramatic love triangles set against the backdrop of nautical disasters. A quick refresher: The love triangle at the center of Pearl Harbor is between Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett), who are lifelong best friends and U.S. Army Air Force pilots, and Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), a Navy nurse. Rafe and Evelyn have been dating for a few weeks when Rafe volunteers to go to England to fight in the Battle of Britain. Evelyn and Danny are stationed in Pearl Harbor when they receive word that Rafe's plan was shot down and he's presumed dead. In their grief, Danny and Evelyn start hooking up, but then - surprise! - Rafe returns, having been stuck in Nazi-occupied France for several months. Then - bigger surprise! - the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service shows up and bombs the bejeezus out of Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath of the attack, Danny and Rafe volunteer for a dangerous retaliation mission to Tokyo, but before they leave, Evelyn confesses to Rafe that she's pregnant with Danny's child. The mission goes awry, and Danny ends up getting killed. Rafe returns and (after presumably serving in the Air Force during WWII) marries Evelyn, raises Danny's son as his own, and they live happily ever after. Before this weekend, I hadn't watched Pearl Harbor in at least 15 years, which apparently is enough time to forget what a hot mess this movie actually is. Over the course of the film's three-hour running time, I had a lot of strong reactions, which inspired this "Re-visit Review" blog post. Maybe it'll become a regular feature of "These Are Things I Think About." Or maybe I'll never do it again. I can do whatever I want - it's my blog! Let's jump in! Hot Takes
In-Depth Analysis
Are you on Facebook? Are you or someone you love between the ages of 29-39? If so, it's likely that this week, in between National Coming Out Day stories (yay!) and reports out of Georgia about the possible disenfranchisement of roughly 53,000 mostly Black voters (are you fucking kidding me???), you saw the following Twitter thread: Several of my Facebook friends reposted this thread, with their own affirmations about how they related to the sentiments in these posts. Curious, I read the Tweets, and, unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts. Full disclosure: although the phrase has kind of been wiped from contemporary terminology, I consider myself more of a "Xennial" than a "Millennial." I was born in 1985; I very clearly remember life before the Internet, cell phones, and 800 TV channels which are somehow all showing commercials at the same time. I think this coming-of-age in an analog world is a key line of demarcation between true Millennials and whatever the hell my generation is called, but I'm not here to debate that. I just wanted to be honest that I don't necessarily identify with the terminology that this poster used. However, I did identify with several other things in these Tweets. Time is both stretched and collapsed. Hell yeah. Somehow it's October, even though yesterday it was March, and yet last week might have been a year or two ago. Is there an age when I can no longer where skinny jeans? I wonder that too, even though I'm wearing skinny jeans right now, and the button digging into my lower belly makes me question why I'm so keen to keep wearing them. It really doesn't help that we're approaching middle age in an (sic) deeply toxic economic system, with a global future very much in doubt, and our parents won't stop fucking us over. Have truer words ever been spoken? But even that's not what I really want to write about here. These posts posit that people my age, and the poster's age, feel unmoored and in a state of arrested development because so many of us are not hitting the socially constructed benchmarks that signify adulthood - marriage, parenting, home ownership, job stability. And that may be true. I've had many conversations with many friends about this very topic. If we haven't hit X, Y, and Z benchmarks, can we be considered adults? we ask. Until I buy a house, get married and have a kid, my parents won't really see me as an adult, we lament. But this Twitter thread made me consider a new question - what if we just need new benchmarks? After all, who decided on these benchmarks in the first place? Who gets to say what makes someone an adult? People older than we are? I'm not about to demonize an entire generation, but I think we can all agree that the Baby Boomers have screwed the pooch on a lot of issues, so I'm inclined to say "fuck 'em" when they try to define adulthood and decide whether or not that label applies to me. Psychology Today offers several definitions of the world "adult," including the one that seems to form the basis for the Tweets: "There is the post-World War II definition: someone who is married, has children, and, if male, supporting his family, and, if female, caring for her family." Well, a lot has changed since World War II (hell, a lot has changed since 2015, when that article was written). The American Dream has started to look more and more like the American Nightmare to my generation, largely through no fault of our own, and we have every right to be angry, frustrated, anxious and sad about the present and the future. Those feelings are palpable in these posts, and I can empathize with people whose life goals include being married, having kids, and owning a home, and feel like that is not possible or advisable in our current climate. Feeling like a goal remains constantly out of reach, or letting go of a goal altogether, is a difficult experience. But this post makes me wonder - there are many good reasons why someone would want to be married, have kids, and own a home, but is "feeling validated as an adult" one of them? What about those of us who don't have, or ever aspire to have, those things? I know many people (myself included) who are personally not interested in those things for many reasons, one of which is that they never really seemed to make our parents that happy. A job was something to be endured for a paycheck and a pension, the house always needed to be repaired, and kids - sure, the sun shines out of our asses, but we're also a huge sacrifice, emotionally, physically, and financially. Many of us saw these realities of our parents' lives, and said, "No thanks, not for me." So are we automatically excluded from ever claiming our status as adults? I know many people who don't have a steady 40-hour-a-week job, but who work as educators, teaching hundreds of children and adolescents in outreach and after-school programs, or as artists, creating all sorts of amazing original work. I know people who don't have children of their own, but are wonderful nurturers who are the nexus of safe, supportive communities for friends and colleagues. I know people who have dealt with intense trauma, overcome illnesses, lived all over the world, started their own business, earned advanced degrees - are they not adults? At what point do we stop waiting for the Adulthood Authority to show up and give us a trophy that says, "Congratulations, you're an adult," and own the fact that the Millennials (if you must call me that) are going to make adulthood look like whatever the hell we want it to look like? I'm not here to minimize anyone's feelings or experiences - as I said, these are questions and concerns I've felt myself. But reading this awakened in me the sense that, like any obstacle, we have to find a way through or around this. Isn't part of being adult having the autonomy to define who you are? If we can do it individually, we can do it collectively, and maybe in the process shed some of the existential dread of not living up to the standards of previous generations. If we want to the world to see us adults, we have to start owning our adulthood, in all its messy, contradictory complexity. Stop waiting for someone else to define us. Let's define ourselves. Dear Krissy,
Hello. This is your Future Self, writing you a blog from the year 2018. You don't know what a blog is because it's 1998, and the Internet is some mysterious thing that has something to do with talking to people through computers, and you don't really understand it, but you know if you had it you could vote for the Backstreet Boys' videos on TRL every day, and so you would like the Internet very much. Spoiler alert: You do get the Internet, and you do use it to vote for BSB on TRL, and one day in November 1999, your message scrolls across the screen during "Larger Than Life" and it will be the highlight of your week. So you got that to look forward to. But I digress. A blog is a collection of online posts that can be written by one person, or many people, and can be about anything under the sun. People have been telling me to start a blog for years, but I've always hesitated. I don't have anything to say, I would think, and even if I did, who would care? I imagine you're surprised by that attitude. You, 13-year-old Krissy Scatton, have a lot to say, and why wouldn't people care? Your thoughts, ideas and feelings are IMPORTANT and anyone who thinks otherwise is a stupid idiot who just DOESN'T GET IT. You would never hold back an opinion, or question whether someone would want to hear what you have to say. You are a doer, a dreamer. You choreograph entire dances in your mind and then perform them, with costume changes, in your backyard. You are going to be a pop star even though you have no clue what middle C is actually supposed to sound like. You wrote a book that was basically a rip-off of Titanic, and give zero fucks about it. It's going to be a bestseller, get turned into a movie, and "Truly Madly Deeply" by Savage Garden is going to be the theme song because WHY THE FUCK NOT. You're not going to be tied to one place, one person, one job - you're going to travel the world, having adventures. You would never spend years dodging suggestions and encouragement, and waffling about why and how and I don't know, maybe eventually. I confess to you that somewhere in the twenty years that stands between you and me (I know, that amount of time seems just as impossible on my end, too), I lost that sense of confidence, that willingness to claim space and attention for my ideas and feelings simply because they were mine, that belief that anything is possible. In fact, a lot of the time, I wanted to be smaller, to hide my ideas and feelings and my whole self, to avoid being exposed to judgement, embarrassment, cruelty. harassment. I doubted whether anything I could add to any conversation, online or in person, could be of value. I started to accept that a lot of my dreams would be just that - dreams. How did this happen? you make ask. Part of it comes from the things you do in those 20 intervening years. The places you'll live, the people you'll meet and the experiences you'll have will expand your world and worldview. You'll realize that there are a lot of people who have a lot of important, intelligent things to say, and they deserve opportunities to say them and be heard. You will learn a lot by listening to other people and not thinking that you know everything all the time and like, maybe it's ok if you're not the center of universe 24/7. Perspective goes a long way in this life, and it's something that you will never stop acquiring and adjusting. Part of it comes from - and I know this will be hard to hear - the fact that Mom and Dad were right about some things. Being an adult is a big responsibility. Bills are real, not just some mysterious scapegoat for why you can't go to Disney World every year or get a car on your 16th birthday. You will not be able to do what you want, whenever you want, with no consequences, 100% of the time. There are people who do that, and you will dislike them very much, because they tend to make life more complicated for everyone else. But there are a lot of awesome things about being an adult, too. There's traveling, and living alone, and whiskey, and sex - I'm here to tell you that sex is absolutely as much fun as you think it's going to be, provided you do it with the right people. You're going to do it with a lot of the wrong people before you figure that out, but that's ok. That happens to most people. The other part of the explanation...that's a little tougher. You will want to avoid judgement, embarrassment, cruelty and harassment because you will experience all of those things. You will experience them at the hands of people you love, and and from complete strangers. You will experience those actions firsthand, and you will witness others experience them as well. You yourself will inflict those behaviors on others, and feel the weight of compounding ugliness in your own heart for behaving that way. You will be hurt. I'm sorry, but it is simply unavoidable. And your reaction will be to grow doubtful and fearful, and retreat behind walls so you can't be hurt again. You will lose faith in the value of your ideas and feelings, both to yourself and the wider world. You will shrink, to be just another voice in the cacophony of voices clamoring around inside the mind of 33-year-old Kristen Scatton. But! Before you think that all is lost, I am also here from the future to tell you that it is not. Though you may shrink, and get buried in the muck of broken hearts, displaced dreams, and a world gone mad, you never disappear completely. And one day, in 2018, I will find your diaries - those frantic scribblings, dashed off in a rainbow of colored inks long after you were supposed to be in bed, because how could anyone sleep with so many ambitions and passions flowing through them? I'll read them, and something dormant in me, something that I've stifled and tried to ignore for a long, long time, will be awakened. I'll rediscover who I really am - you - and understand what it is I've been seeking for these past several years. I will say to myself, Damn, I was a force. Fuck going through life with the confidence of a mediocre white man - I want to go through life with the confidence of a 13-year-old Krissy Scatton. That bitch could do anything! And I'll create a website (how cool is that? Not only do you have the Internet, you know how to create a whole website!) and I'll sit down to write my first blog, and those voices of doubt and fear will start whispering to me, like they always do, like I suspect they will do for a long time, if not forever. But on this day, I will shout back, "HEY! SHUT UP! I HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY TO MY 13-YEAR-OLD SELF." So, my dear, restless, ambitious, naive, cocky, daydreamy, fearless, know-it-all self, this is what I have to say to you - thank you. Thank you for not abandoning me, no matter how hard I tried to silence and forget you. You have so much in store for you, both good and bad, but rest assured - I'll be waiting for you when you get here. I love you. |
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