my misspent may...

I forsee May to be an unusually busy month for me, fearfully so. If everything works out that is. But before the storm I'm trying to squeeze in some leisurely reading. My friend handed me a book of essays, My Misspent Youth, by Meghan Daum, signed for me. I was amazingly touched by this special gift. What a special present. :-) (thanks, Chris!!)

So although I was initially irritated by Ms. Daum's class-consciousness and the pretentiousness of it, on the other hand I really identified with her need to analyze why she was where she was by examining the contextual details, the outer trappings. Her speciality is finding the "ness" of all kind of nesses, something that is a bit of a personal hobby of mine as well. Like analyzing the upper class behaviors of middle class kids who to go to school with upper class kids to explain why she as a successful writer is $75,000 in debt(at the time she wrote the essay). It's not merely a sign of irresponsibility although my financially successful friends may disagree. She explains all the things that led her there. The cultural mores of her circle, of the things going on in her life that were so specific and small as to seem insignificant yet significantly shaped the course of her life and got her in debt.

I think about how most international school kids grow up with a chip on their shoulders of being proud of their otherness and how many of us cultivated and loved that exclusivity and how it sent me off on a strange trajectory to where I am now. I came back to the states for college and quickly attached myself to what looked like a version of my life in Japan in my Asian-Americans friends. I was, however, completely underwhelmed by American culture as seen through the lives of college students who decided to go to school thirty five minutes away from home. How could going to movies be the highlight of the week? and who cared which theater had better screens? The theater was empty and the crowd was all wearing Gap. I know, I know such a snob but in 1999 Japanese fashion was light speeds ahead and American girls had just discovered Carrie Bradshaw and apple maritinis. (The "fashionistas" were wearing Seven jeans and grasping Louis Vuitton pochettes, remember?) Fast-forward to now and American style has become once again trendsetting and sophisticated, I'll skip past my artsy, party girl era after college when I found "my tribe" of stylish, disenfranchised, intelligent, artistic types except to say that I've graduated from the heady days of cavorting, and I have a new receptive attitude towards normal. Non-threatening blandness seems relatively exotic to me in L.A. where everybody is trying to be somebody. I feel comforted by the well-adjusted and quiet lives of nine to fivers and revel in their steadiness. I find a sweetness in the naivete' of the unhip. They're harder to find now that irony has made everything previously uncool, cool and what was cool, uncool which can still be cool because uncool is cool. You know what I'm talking about. Of course it all seems to be an issue of thresholds once I meet my regularness quota or coolness quota or if I'm surrounded by only one thing I know I will become restless and start examining it anew.