Crumble to the Sea

Last night at a good old fashioned backyard BBQ (backyard for Cambridge, anyway) we joked about gender division. These were good folk but there was still that small twitch in me when it was brought up that the "women" were inside while the "men" stood semi-circle, beers in hand, watching coals burn. The comments were made mostly ironically and our very awareness of embodying such roles implied an immediate dismissal of them. That's all we really have left, I think, a comical awareness of engaging in activities the way we've been shown is the norm. When we're not entirely deviant us twenty-somethings become a pastiche of our parents' generation. And their parents' postwar attempt at classic middle-class life.

Later in the night I had a conversation with a girl and she was kind enough to listen patiently while I spewed on and on about queers and marriage. We ended up having a good conversation about how societal pressures to be a certain way, have certain things, and have accomplished certain achievements (i.e. supportive consumer, 401k + baby, college diploma) are directly related to age and aging and the formulas our elders used are completely useless and irrelevant. We are the generation that's been told we can do anything and now it seems most of us have no idea what to do. Furthermore, that puckish sentiment isn't substantiated by the irresponsible, discriminatory pandering of our government. The old paradigms aren't going to work for us but we're being told it's our only chance. Get that Roth IRA in place, buy your house, grow that baby! or else when you're 45, 55, 65 you're going to be fucked. Maybe it's true, but the solution is not for all of us to find a tidy little 9-5 and small boxy house; rather, somehow we need to make the system meet our needs. Obviously this is a painfully old idea, changing the system to help the people instead of the people folding, squeezing, and transforming to fit into its parameters has been part of the general progressive agenda for decades. But what the hell, MA now insists on health care yet does little to make it affordable to the poor and working classes; higher education is ridiculously expensive and especially for us Liberal Arts kids the going really gets tough when we hit the job market. Makes sense I suppose, why would the US want to give high wages to people who've made it their job to think critically about the world around them? Big money is in Big business is on the Web and in your Big car. Good thing about the web though, it's still, for the most part, up for grabs. So grab it and shake it and paint it something ugly.