the lost generation
went to gowanus yacht club on saturday with will and some of his broskis from chapel hill. we’d spent the earlier part of the afternoon at coney island and brighton beach, eating nathan’s hot dogs, wandering across the boardwalk, speculating about the value of real estate, swapping stories about girls, enjoying the warm weather. gowanus was crowded, so we ended up sharing the end of a picnic table with this girl from brown and her friend who was trying unceremoniously to pick up an older guy at the other end of the bar. will quipped, “unc is kind of the brown of the south,” to which this woman1 responded, “oh no. i’ve been to chapel hill. it’s so cookie cutter. everyone there is the same. and southern.”
that last word stung. she got up to talk to her friend, or to get a drink at the bar or something, and we all looked at each other like “what the hell just happened?” will’s friend said he was a little pissed she used “southern” as a pejorative. the more i thought about it, the more i agreed. she came back a few minutes later and said she hoped she hadn’t offended us. will was being nice and said something like “it takes a lot more than that to offend us.” i, on the other hand, was feeling belligerent, especially considering i was only on beer number two. but like 50 cent said, “summer time is the killing season / it’s hot out this bitch, that’s a good enough reason.”
“i am offended,” i told her, almost in unison with will’s denial, “that you would use southern as a pejorative.” after which i launched into a bar room discussion defense of my alma mater.
she back pedaled slightly but maintained that everyone in chapel hill was “the same” and that the monogamy bothered her. by the end though i think she at least partially realized she was being a closed-minded bigot and that the south was a lot more complicated than she gave it credit for. i can’t remember what she did for a living–i think maybe she had been a teacher–, but she had just gotten a masters in social work and was moving to cambodia to do lord knows what. i wanted to tell her she was a member of the 21st century’s lost generation2. but it’s hard to be so condescending and judgmental to someone’s face, stranger or not. much easier on the interwebs.
i really do think this browner embodied the lost generation. a group of people who were never spoken to, never made to feel a part of anything. they were fed on a diet replete with irony and cynicism until their stomachs burst and a shell of an existential, sartre-inspired human being was all that remained.
so these people drifted from high school to college to grad school to nonprofit social outreach groups, never really feeling like they fit in anywhere. each new goal, each new job, each new school, was just a stepping stone to “something else.” something else could have been anything. when you’re little, it’s the answer to that age old question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” the younger you are, the more varied and beautiful the answer is. when you’re eight, you want to be a fireman and an astronaut and a senator and a governor and a prosecuting attorney and a professional basketball player and a rock star. you want to be them all at once, simultaneously, every day and at all times. in the deepest moments of imagination, you picture it where every day of the week you can do and be something different. monday morning i think i’ll go to madison square garden. tuesday morning i’ll go to one world plaza. and then this weekend i’ll get the chopper to pick me, the wife and kids up and drop us off on the white house lawn for a little cook out and some treaty signing.
you get older and “something else” becomes smaller, less idealistic, more mundane. the illusion of youth is that if you just grow up your life will be a continuous string of ecstatic moments and accomplishments. but this can’t be real. if it was, even the ecstatic would become mundane. granted, life is full of mountain tops and accomplishments. but the vast majority of our lives are spent down in the valleys doing the drudgery, usually at the behest of others. the behest of others. that’s why we idealize and feel nostalgia for the “self-made man/woman,” isn’t it? the idea of total, absolute, uncompromising financial, personal and professional independence. to not be on anyone else’s schedule. to not work for others, but for one’s self. but how does this ideal not collapse into solipsism? into narcissism? the world is complex and interrelated. to do ANYTHING is to, at the very least, affect others. what’s the big deal with working for others? how is this so different from working with others? toward something? toward something bigger/greater than yourself? if you don’t believe there’s anything bigger/greater than yourself out there, life becomes a pretty lonely, depressing, soul-sucking place.
i can’t remember where i was trying to go with this. i felt bad for brown and for all the people like her that i’ve met. i felt bad because i didnt think she’d ever believed in anything. then i felt bad for thinking this because i’d only talked to her for 20 minutes in a bar. what the hell did i know? her pejorative of the south was no better and no different than my complete judgment and dimissal of her lackadaisical lifestyle. at least i didn’t make mine based on an arbitrary criterion: the region of her birth. i made it based on 20 minutes, which in a twitter-fragmented free fall of internet-fueled info glut was probably more than enough.3
- i should probably call her a woman because although she would not tell us how old she was, she emphatically let it be known that she was “much” older than us [↩]
- i use this term with neither the affection nor sense of purpose that i presume gertrude stein intended [↩]
- the original title of this post was “the best cure for boredom” and the first line was “is to work toward something. anything.” followed by this paragraph: “have had incredibly too much time to think lately. all last week i pretty much did nothing all day except the following things, each day, in interchangeable order: 1) run to prospect park and back; 2) brew coffee, let cool on counter, transfer to pitcher, place in refrigerator, hours later drink delicious iced coffee with milk and sugar; 3) watch an average of three movies per day on netflix; 4) grocery shop and cook an elaborate and/or cheap dinner.” the post went in a completely different direction, but rather than delete those words, i’ll just tack them onto the end as a completely unrelated appendix [↩]
June 8, 2009 
reflections | 
Comments (7)
this summer is full of ridiculousness and good times before the workworkwork of lawl school begins. i can’t wait to be a student again. i am very grateful for my experience working at my law firm, but it will be so so nice to finally be master of my own schedule again, and to not be beholden to the needs/workflow of others. i don’t think it has actually set in yet that i don’t work there anymore. it feels like a vacation. like i’m going to go back to new york and ride the subway the next morning to my office and sit down at my desk and check my email and do some assignments and “get back into the flow of things.” however, once i get back to nyc and don’t actually do that, i think i’ll realize that i really did quit. working created a rhythm that organized my days — all my free time was organized around the pattern supplied by working. so now i have nothing to set my rhythm-pattern to until i get back in the swing of law school. kind of feel like i’m floating around in jello right now, bouncing from one thing to the next, like i have nowhere to be and nothing to do. everything is by choice not by obligation, duty, or necessity. i like it though. i went straight from graduation to LSAT studying to full-time employment. my mom says i “deserve” this break. i don’t like that word deserve. like someone up there monitors your activities then doles out rewards. i think i worked hard and am now taking the initiative to reward myself, and am totally okay with the somewhat selfish nature of this decision to “take time off,” and totally consider myself lucky to even have this opportunity to “take time off.” the way i look at it is, i have my whole life to be tied down to obligations and duties. i saw a chance to cut the cords for 3-4 months and i took it. AINT NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.