Reinvention & Its Discontents
Aug. 6th, 2010 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraHad an interesting conversation w/Don yesterday at Stupid But Provides A Minimum Safety Net Job where I’m back at work on the Disgruntled Professor’s shot at becoming a pop culture icon.
How did the Professor lose his gruntle? Well, Tuesdays with Morrie became a runaway bestseller – and the guy who takes 300 pages to croak and offers up such pithy homilies in the process was actually the Disgruntled Professor’s thesis advisor. So naturally he’s kicking himself, thinking, Why didn’t I show up at his bedside with a tape recorder?
To make up for that oversight, he’s hit upon this idea of interviewing a few hundred elderly people and asking them point blank: what advice do you have for younger people?
I hear cash registers across the nation clinking, don’t you?
Unfortunately most of the elderly people have advice like, Ya don’t spank your kids often enough! Spare the rod, spoil the child! Which is going to be difficult to fit into a sensitive, New Age bestseller.
But a few of the interviews delve deeper, and I was editing and transcribing one of those yesterday. A gentleman in his late eighties who grew up during the Great Depression, and dropped out of school in the 6th grade to help support his family.
The Disgruntled Professor always couches his questions to these elderly people in an immensely condescending way. I always want to scream, they’re not mentally retarded, they’re just old. I guess I’m close enough to being “just old” myself to feel defensive on their behalf.
“So!” DP booms at this gentleman. “You grew up during the Great Depression! I bet that was hard, huh? Very hard! I bet that was worse, lots worse, than what’s happening today!”
“Depends,” said the gentleman. “If you’re one of them that’s lost their job, lost their home, it’s worse. Say you’re a fellow that’s 45. You never gonna get another house – nobody’s gonna give you a 30 year loan, it’s too risky. Never gonna get a job that pays you what you was paid before either. You goin’ down a notch or three. Most people can’t take that, it breaks ‘em.”
“That’s a pretty salient observation,” I said to Don. “I think that’s part of what happened to me.”
“You don’t seem particularly broken,” he said.
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
“I think the problem with your generation is that you jumped around too much,” he said. “I’m trying to keep my career choices on a narrower track.”
“That’s true, isn’t it?” I said thoughtfully. “The peculiar ethos of my generation was that we could always reinvent ourselves. But that only works up to a certain point. Once you’re old, you lose the knack.”
I’d reinvented myself every five years or so. Before I owned a store, I’d been an agent at one of the largest entertainment agencies in LA. Before I’d been an agent, I’d worked for People Magazine and been an entertainment journalist. Before I’d been a journalist, I’d been a health policy analyst. I’d also been a nurse, a suburban housewife, a science fiction assistant editor, a model and a kept woman in Paris. It's a Boomer thing, this constant need to redefine the equation, a legacy of the sixties right up there with acid flashbacks. A whole generation responding to cues rather than expectations.
But I’m not sure I can reinvent myself again. I think I may have hit the wall.
In other news, it’s not at all surprising that Christina Romer is the lamb whose throat is being cut on the sacrificial alter, and not Larry Summers or the ineffectual Mr. Geitner. Her academic research focuses on the country’s recovery from the Great Depression. She seems to think it was serendipitous: nervous about the coming war, investors pulled their capital out of Europe and put it into America. This is quite a different explanation from the conventional wisdom that says Roosevelt saved the country by buoying the deflated economy with government dollars.
No, what's surprising insofar as Obama appears to be getting his economic cues from the Roosevelt administration, is how Romer was ever picked to chair Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in the first place.
How did the Professor lose his gruntle? Well, Tuesdays with Morrie became a runaway bestseller – and the guy who takes 300 pages to croak and offers up such pithy homilies in the process was actually the Disgruntled Professor’s thesis advisor. So naturally he’s kicking himself, thinking, Why didn’t I show up at his bedside with a tape recorder?
To make up for that oversight, he’s hit upon this idea of interviewing a few hundred elderly people and asking them point blank: what advice do you have for younger people?
I hear cash registers across the nation clinking, don’t you?
Unfortunately most of the elderly people have advice like, Ya don’t spank your kids often enough! Spare the rod, spoil the child! Which is going to be difficult to fit into a sensitive, New Age bestseller.
But a few of the interviews delve deeper, and I was editing and transcribing one of those yesterday. A gentleman in his late eighties who grew up during the Great Depression, and dropped out of school in the 6th grade to help support his family.
The Disgruntled Professor always couches his questions to these elderly people in an immensely condescending way. I always want to scream, they’re not mentally retarded, they’re just old. I guess I’m close enough to being “just old” myself to feel defensive on their behalf.
“So!” DP booms at this gentleman. “You grew up during the Great Depression! I bet that was hard, huh? Very hard! I bet that was worse, lots worse, than what’s happening today!”
“Depends,” said the gentleman. “If you’re one of them that’s lost their job, lost their home, it’s worse. Say you’re a fellow that’s 45. You never gonna get another house – nobody’s gonna give you a 30 year loan, it’s too risky. Never gonna get a job that pays you what you was paid before either. You goin’ down a notch or three. Most people can’t take that, it breaks ‘em.”
“That’s a pretty salient observation,” I said to Don. “I think that’s part of what happened to me.”
“You don’t seem particularly broken,” he said.
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
“I think the problem with your generation is that you jumped around too much,” he said. “I’m trying to keep my career choices on a narrower track.”
“That’s true, isn’t it?” I said thoughtfully. “The peculiar ethos of my generation was that we could always reinvent ourselves. But that only works up to a certain point. Once you’re old, you lose the knack.”
I’d reinvented myself every five years or so. Before I owned a store, I’d been an agent at one of the largest entertainment agencies in LA. Before I’d been an agent, I’d worked for People Magazine and been an entertainment journalist. Before I’d been a journalist, I’d been a health policy analyst. I’d also been a nurse, a suburban housewife, a science fiction assistant editor, a model and a kept woman in Paris. It's a Boomer thing, this constant need to redefine the equation, a legacy of the sixties right up there with acid flashbacks. A whole generation responding to cues rather than expectations.
But I’m not sure I can reinvent myself again. I think I may have hit the wall.
In other news, it’s not at all surprising that Christina Romer is the lamb whose throat is being cut on the sacrificial alter, and not Larry Summers or the ineffectual Mr. Geitner. Her academic research focuses on the country’s recovery from the Great Depression. She seems to think it was serendipitous: nervous about the coming war, investors pulled their capital out of Europe and put it into America. This is quite a different explanation from the conventional wisdom that says Roosevelt saved the country by buoying the deflated economy with government dollars.
No, what's surprising insofar as Obama appears to be getting his economic cues from the Roosevelt administration, is how Romer was ever picked to chair Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in the first place.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 05:18 pm (UTC)Did you ever like any of them at the time?
With the astonishing jumps you've made in the past, I've no doubt when you settle on what you want to do next, you'll sell it to whoever needs to believe. Ben's not the only one with persuasive skills in your (former) household ;)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 10:47 pm (UTC)I liked being an entertainment journalist too. There is a real art to spinning 10 minutes of press junket time in a room with 50 other reporters into a tale of Intimate Best Friendship with [Star's Name Here.] From the sensitive way, Drew Barrymore's tongue teased the wad of gummed up lipgloss at the corner of her kissable mouth, I could tell she was thinking of death and Venice -- not necessarily in that order....
no subject
Date: 2010-08-10 05:37 am (UTC)