– walking past your favorite snacks at the grocery store and not having the energy to even want them
– listening to your favorite songs and feeling nothing
– only being able to muster half a smile when your lover finishes telling a joke
– everyone asking you to speak up because your voice feels too heavy to raise
– getting irritated at things that force you to feign interest or participate in small talk
– knowing you’re kind of acting like a dick but feeling too drained to do anything about it
When you get older, you notice your sheets are dirty. Sometimes, you do something about it. And sometimes, you read the front page of the newspaper and sometimes you floss and sometimes you stop biting your nails and sometimes you meet a friend for lunch. You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, 5 years ago. You remember your umbrella, you check up on people to see if they got home, you leave places early to go home and make toast. You stand by the toaster in your underwear and a big t-shirt, wondering if you should just turn in or watch one more hour of television. You laugh at different things. You stop laughing at other things. You think about old loves almost like they are in a museum. The socks, you notice, aren’t organized into pairs and you mentally make a note of it. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, reaching for the box of tissues you bought, contains aloe.
When you get older, you try toner, you experiment with trousers, you experiment with real sexy outfits, you experiment with pin curls and darker hair and orange-toned red lipstick and you date people that look good on paper. You kiss them in public and feel only a little self-conscious. You never like them, although sometimes you really do. you think about safe sex and sometimes, kids. You think about plants, maybe succulents, or maybe even a cat?
When you get older, you try different shampoos. You find one you like. You try sleeping early and spin class and jogging again. You try a book you almost read but couldn’t finish. You wrap yourself in the blankets of: familiar t-shirts, caffe au lait, dim tv light, texts with old friends or new people you really want to like and love you. You lose contact with friends from college, and only sometimes you think about it. When you do, it feels bad and almost bitter. You lose people, and when other people bring them up, you almost pretend like you know what they are doing. You try to stop touching your face and become invested in things like expensive salads and trying parsnips and saving up for a vacation you really want. You keep a spare pen in a drawer. You look at old pictures of yourself and they feel foreign and misleading. You forget things like: purchasing stamps, buying more butter, putting lotion on your elbows, calling your mother back. You learn things like balance: checkbooks, social life, work life, time to work out and time to enjoy yourself.
When you get older, you find things like rejection hurt less and things like nostalgia hurt more. You watch people do things you want to do, and then you do some of those things too. Things start to feel like pins on a map. You watch landmarks pass and almost note them. You eat a taco from a food truck and be careful to dab the corners of your mouth with a napkin. You smooth your shirt down. You think about details, the details of how clean the beer cup is, how you need to put the dishes away, how she smells like a perfume you wore and how his teeth are perfect and aligned. You feel a little less downtrodden by things like routine and security and a little more appreciative of things like doing nothing, finding a friend, stretching on a big couch. You hear old songs and only sometimes do they gut you. You think about your future almost always, in both a thrilling way and a very very panicked way.
When you get older, you find yourself more in control. You find your convictions appealing, you find you like your body more, you learn to take things in stride. You begin to crave respect and comfort and adventure, all at the same time. You lay in your bed, fearing death, just like you did.You pull lint off your shirt. You smile less and feel content more. You think about changing and then often, you do.
When you get older, you barely notice it at all. Then, you are sitting somewhere you’ve been before, staring at the nothingness of the sky, and you feel the wind moving away from you, fast and almost impossible to catch.
Other, More Considerate People: I like to keep my story as close to canon and ship-free as possible so everyone can enjoy it. 🙂
My Self-Indulgent Ass: ‘Sup, assholes, here’re all my implausible OTPs, their future children, a bunch of OCs that play prominent roles, and all my sexuality headcanons are in effect.
“To understand this fic you’ll need to refer to page 15, side A of my Extensive headcanon timeline of the entire history of this character and everyone he ever met, the contents of which are helpfully provided absolutely nowhere.”
“behold as I construct the precarious scaffolding of this story from discarded tumblr shitposts, my id, a dream I had once, poorly concealed psychological projection, the abstract concept of the way it feels to look out at the sea, and a bunch of dumb jokes I couldn’t stop cackling to myself about. oh, but it’s fanfiction.“
i generally say i don’t like ‘downer’ media, and that includes tragedies, but i quite like hamlet, and i think moby dick is the shit. recently i got to thinking what it is about the few tragedies i like that makes them different from the merely-depressing rest. best i can figure, here it is:
our protagonist has agency. he’s not a victim or a dupe. he could get out of the shit if that was his priority. of course, the way he could get out is not going to be easy or fun – ishmael’s options, for instance, were ‘mutiny’ or ‘swim’ – or else it wouldn’t be a tragedy, but he has choices he can make, is the point.
once he is in the shit, he struggles like a motherfucker. he doesn’t just sit down and go “oh well, suffering is good for the soul.” he fights. he plots revenge against his uncle. he clings to his boyfriend’s coffin in the freezing sea. he’s not a quitter.
when it all goes to hell, he doesn’t waste his last hours on futile scrambling to escape. he puts the pedal down and accelerates into that brick wall, screaming WITNESS ME with his last breath.
these, i think, are the criteria for a story i’ll like even though it ends with tombstones instead of medals. because even though our protagonist is dead, or bobbing amongst the corpses alone, or what have you, he remained himself and did what he thought was the thing he needed to do. which is the victory that really matters: remaining yourself and holding onto your will in the face of whatever the world throws at you.
@sphealrical your tags are a good addition, thanks
that’s absolutely worth thinking about, yeah – othello is a soldier, swift to violence, and he’s also accustomed to being betrayed and lied to. he’s been treated badly not just because of his skin color, but because he’s a moor – representative of muslim invaders who took over spain and so forth – and therefore an outsider. he’s always been treated as an enemy in europe. desdemona seems too good to be true. so when he hears she’s NOT true, he goes full tumblr callout drama and ruins everything.
but in a situation where the accusations were legit? if it had been his father’s ghost saying ‘avenge my murder’? SNICKTY SNICK wolverine style, play over.
and hamlet, he’s practically the opposite of othello in every way. he’s a dreamy danish goth who’s dating a weird girl who likes flowers, he loved his daddy and he’s being a big sulky poop about his mom remarrying too fast, everything is emotions and emo music and writing in his diary with purple gel pen. along comes his dad’s ghost going “hamlet you must do a violence!” and hamlet’s like… no? what? how about i just take a xanax and hide in the graveyard? once he realizes he really will have to do something awful, he tries to drive ophelia away so he won’t drag her down with him, and i’m pretty sure her suicide is when he switches over from acting crazy to actually being crazy.
but if someone had instead come along at the beginning and gone “yo ophelia’s the town bike, thought you should know” he probably would’ve replied “hey fuck you, stop spreading rumors about the sweetest girl in denmark” and there would’ve been no plot at all.
That said, I think it’s also worth bringing up that Hamlet is, essentially, an extended riff on the then-popular genre of revenge tragedies. In some ways, they were kind of filling a similar niche to slasher movies, in that the plot was largely about killing most of the characters in a chain reaction of spectacularly gruesome murders. People get revenge, and people get revenge for the revenge, and other people want revenge for that, and by the end of the play everyone is messily dead. (Shakespeare had actually earlier written a straight revenge tragedy in Titus Andronicus; to take someone’s summary that Wikipedia quoted,
“it has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2
or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity,
and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for
every 97 lines.”)
Many of Hamlet’s plot points are genre cliches or references to The Spanish Tragedy (the play that more or less launched the genre), including the play-within-a-play and the ghost. The thing is, though, a standard revenge tragedy protagonist would probably have done the Othello thing. But instead we’ve got Hamlet, and he… acts like someone who’s seen a lot of revenge tragedies might, if they were trying to avoid the spiral.
He makes absolutely sure he has the right guy before he does anything. He tries to get Ophelia out of the line of fire (and for all that his dickishness to her works out horribly long-term, he does succeed in convincing Claudius that he doesn’t care about her). He figures out he shouldn’t trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and proceeds to not trust them. …And then he stabs the wrong guy, and all the plot tropes his actions were calculated to avoid come crashing down on his head because he was trying to avoid them.
Hamlet is basically like the vampires from Carpe Jugulum, but for revenge tragedy tropes.
ooh, interesting point! yeah, he is disturbingly genre-savvy, isn’t he?
(titus andronicus is the one shakespeare play i’ve never read. i do not need that kind of nightmare fuel thanks will ol buddy i’m just gonna give that one a miss.)
i love that pair of comics and i know i’ve seen them before but i had forgotten them completely.
Look, I’ve got a long-standing beef with Millennial v. Boomer discourse that I could spend a few hours on, but lemme try to sum it up briefly.
Many of the modern economic problems that affect many Millennials that are often blamed on Baby Boomers (unemployment/underemployment, soaring costs of education, loan debt, comparative lack of opportunities, poverty, etc. etc.) started well before our generation came of age. Most of these same economic issues fucked up Generation X before us, but because they were a smaller generation, people didn’t hear about it as much. And most of these problems grew directly from right-wing political and economic policies that began in the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, before the Boomers were in political ascendancy. (Yes, there were a few young Boomers in Reagan’s administration, but the leading neocons/neoliberals, using the actual meaning of the term, not the tumblr left’s version of it, who led the move rightward were older.) Boomers, by virtue of their age, enjoyed the unique benefits of the post-War (1945-1980) economy and many managed to escape the worst effects of the Reagan Era cuts, but not all did equally (see below.) And many of them, personally, are total clueless assholes about how unique their experience was. I have Boomer parents born in the early 50s, so like I know. But one of the biggest problems I have with Millennial/Boomer discourse is that it de-politicizes and de-contextualizes important social/political/economic shifts that were the direct result of Republican policies. It reduces it all to just a generational conflict in which one selfish group of people just didn’t want to share their toys with their kids. And even if you accept the idea that one generation can personally screw over another via political means, the idea that Boomers would target their own children specifically is particularly odd. Though I’ll also point out that the “who raised us” issue is more complex, as the Boomer generation ends in 1964, and quite a lot of people born in the 90s who could still be considered Millennials, have parents born after that.
As for the idea that Boomers make up the majority of the workforce, actually Millennials are now the largest segment of the workforce, slightly ahead of Gen X, with Boomers well behind. The oldest boomers are 71 now, and the youngest are 53. A lot of the oldest ones have retired and the younger ones are on their way there. X As for having “all the powers in government” that’s a pretty hard thing to quantify. Trump and many of his key advisers are Boomers, but there are a number of GenX and Millennials too. Which is why I get annoyed at the idea that Millennials are somehow innately more compassionate and kind than older generations, because not really. Millennials overall are more democratic/left leaning than older voters, but Trump still won among white millennials. Many baby boomers, too, were very liberal in their youth, and became more conservative with age, especially the white ones. It’s a pretty common thing to happen. It’s not as if that fate is going to magically spare our generation, so most of this discourse is not going to age well.
Which brings me to the other issue, that you can legitimately talk about Millennials and Baby Boomers as distinct groups with similar characteristics and experiences. Most of this discourse is highly race and class based but people don’t seem to acknowledge that. It’s focused around the experiences of middle to upper class white boomers and their kids, who presumably don’t have it as easy. And in many cases, this is probably true. Though if you’ve read any financial news in the last few years, they’ve been talking a lot about the huge amount of “wealth transfer” that has started from well-off Boomers to their kids. But for many other Boomers, this wealth never materialized. Plenty of people never had access to it thanks to their race or immigrant status. So the idea that one generation “owns everything” or needs to “take the blame” blurs the fact that within any generation there are huge differences in wealth and access to power.
Basically millennial/boomer discourse is ahistorical, apolitical, and focused on the experiences and expectations of middle class white kids, and that’s why I’m not here for it.
a good point. reagan and his bunch weren’t boomers, they were the boomers’ parents. the so-called ‘greatest generation’ – they named themselves that, which is pretty illustrative imo. they lived through the great depression and fought in ww2, and apparently liked it? or at least the politicians of that generation seemed awfully fond of being at war.
probably because there’s so much money to be made from it.
boomers, my parents’ generation, were the civil rights marchers and anti-war protestors, the stonewall rioters and the feminist groundswell. the progressive politics too many millennials seem to think they invented were hammered together by the boomers out of 1920′s socialism, vapid freshman idealism, optimistic drug-inspired asspulls, and oceans of blood. just because y’all young folks are farther along that path doesn’t mean you’re more idealistic or pure. so, you know, that’s about fucking enough of laughing at grannies for not being current on feminist terminology. no more of that.
my generation, gen-x, was political and active on an even larger scale, but having seen that our parents’ idealism didn’t fix things – and being under the thumb of reaganism, which SUCKED SO MUCH – we tried to think outside the box. we looked for ways one person, or a few people, could make a mark without needing to come up with a political party and a crowd of thousands. the punk diy ethic, zines, graffitti being more than just pissing your name on a wall with paint, guerilla everything. traveller bands who chose to be homeless and live on garbage for freedom’s sake. motorhead culture – yes, i’m talking about those greasy mouth breathers in the AC-DC shirts smoking behind the school in all the 80′s teen comedies, those guys were actually counter-culture as fuck. they didn’t think of themselves as political, but when the tv is selling you the idea that a shiny car means you win at life, building monsters out of stripped junkers and weaponized dgaf is pretty goddamn punk if you ask me. i might be biased a little, though, cuz that’s my jam.
anyway, motorcity is the 80′s motorhead counterculture repackaged in neon. i half think the reason it got canceled is because studio execs figured out how subversive it is.
and then there’s you guys, millennials, my darling childs, so angry because for just a few years we were actually living in the future and things were getting visibly better every year, and you had no reason to think it was a mirage, but then it vanished and left you with a mouthful of sand.
of course you want a culprit brought to justice. but that’s not how political change works. it’s not a cop show. you can’t slap granddad in handcuffs and suddenly have a living wage appear.
so my advice – take it or leave it, because i am not in fact your dad, however strong my dadfeels – is to not get distracted by the bullfighter’s cape. generational finger-pointing is flashy, but there’s nothing behind it.
depression: hi you’re now addicted to anything that makes you feel better
just moving along like everyone else 