Uncategorized – from the gen x files

March 18, 2020March 18, 2020

Thank you to the Fredericks

One of my favorite children’s books of all time is Leo Lionni’s Frederick. In this story, a group of mice work together to prepare for the winter. Most of the mice are busy gathering “corn and nuts and wheat and straw.” The mice, we are told, work all day. But not Frederick. Frederick moves at a much slower pace. The mice are understandably perturbed and ask him, “Why don’t you work?”

Frederick says, “I do work.” He goes on to explain, “I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days.”

The story goes on in much the same way, with Frederick continuing to explain that it may not look like he is working, but that he is busy gathering things like colors and words.

Now, if you’re the other mice, tired and sweating and muscles aching, this can’t go over so well with you. Gathering the sun? Gathering colors? Gathering words? That’s what you’re doing? Yeah. Okay, Frederick. Thanks. Remind us how those colors taste when you’re eating the food that we got for you.

I mean, everybody knows that guy, right? The one who seems to not be doing much, who lets others do the heavy-lifting. In the college courses I teach, I usually refrain from assigning high-stakes points to any kind of group work because I want to spare my students the frustration of having to drag along a Frederick.

Except here’s the thing. Frederick is not the slacker he appears to be. He is just using his gifts in a different way. He really is harnessing the sun.

Frederick, you see, is an artist.

In a productivity-driven mouse society like his, Frederick’s gifts may seem less apparent. Less useful. But they are real just the same. And Leo Lionni, in this wonderful tale, tells us that they matter.

I have been thinking about Frederick a lot these past few days as my family and I engage in what Michael Stipe dubbed “Q.S.Q.” (quasi-self-quarantining). Like many others, I have been sustained, in these uncertain and scary times, in part by the sense of community I have had online with friends and family. And, while online and checking Facebook, I have been heartened by the efforts of our artists and the entertainers.

John Legend is one of many artists who has hosted or who will be hosting online concerts.

To be clear, I know there are so many people out there who are real heroes, who are putting themselves in genuine danger every day, sacrificing, potentially, their own health and well-being to help others and to keep our society going. The health care workers, first and foremost. The first responders. There are also the heroes—usually getting paid a minimum wage salary—still showing up for work at grocery stores and gas stations so that our society can function, quarantines and all.

For those of us trying to stay home and to stay calm, trying to, well, not freak out at the unprecedented, almost apocalyptic nature of it all, the artists and entertainers are providing a service that, while, perhaps not heroic, has certainly proven invaluable, too.

The Indigo Girls will be playing some songs on Facebook Live on Thursday, March 19th.

If you are on social media, you will see it everywhere—artists like The Indigo Girls , Bruce Springsteen, John Legend, and Michael Stipe posting and sharing free mini-concerts from home or making footage of live shows available. Vulture shared a list of many of these online shows yesterday: https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/all-musicians-streaming-live-concerts.html

Museums like the Guggenheim and the National Gallery are offering free virtual tours https://www.travelandleisure.com/attractions/museums-galleries/museums-with-virtual-tours. Access to some Broadway shows and plays has been around a while now, but its access is certainly welcome, too. https://www.playbill.com/article/15-broadway-plays-and-musicals-you-can-watch-on-stage-from-home Having cancelled its performances through March, the Metropolitan Opera is planning to livestream some performances, too. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janelevere/2020/03/14/responding-to-coronavirus-closures-metropolitan-opera-and-92y-livestream-performances-free-starting-tonight/#5c8ded28194b

The National Gallery is one of a number of museums providing free virtual tours.

Yesterday, Jimmy Fallon posted an “at home” of the Tonight Show, filmed by his wife, at his house, featuring his dog Gary and his daughter. https://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/the-tonight-show-at-home-edition-the-first-one/4134367

Yesterday, Jimmy Fallon hosted “Day One” of his “At Home Edition” of The Tonight Show.

And it all helps. It really does. It helps so much.

In the book Frederick, winter comes, and the days become almost unbearable. The mice, nestled into their hideout among some stones, are running out of food. It’s dark, it’s cold, and they are stuck in a small confined place together. How are they going to manage to survive until spring in conditions like this? And then it happens.

One of the mice says, “What about your supplies, Frederick?”

So, Frederick climbs upon a rock, and he speaks. He tells them about the sun, and they feel its warmth. He tells them about colors, and they can see the colors. He recites a poem he has written about the coming of spring, and, suddenly, the other mice, too, believe that spring will come.

And for just a little bit, when they need it most, they are sustained.

January 25, 2019January 28, 2019

Will There Be School Tomorrow? Cultivating Patience During a Polar Vortex

It has been a long winter in the midwest. I mean, given that we have Netflix and all, probably not as harrowing as, say, the long, cold winter that the Ingalls family faced in the Dakota Territory in 1880, but a long one nonetheless.

My children have missed five and a half days of school due to weather. Five. And a half. A feeling of restlessness has descended upon our home, the kind of restlessness that all midwesterners in January know, a restlessness born of grey skies and static cling, born of dry skin and chapped lips, born of socks that keep getting wet when you step in a piece of snow that has been trekked in and left upon the floor.

The first snow day, as always, was joyful. We knew the weather was coming, and we got the snow pants and mittens and hats and boots all lined up the night before the storm. The next morning, with snow covering the ground, we texted friends and hosted, in our yard, a neighborhood snowball fight. Kids came from all around. A few of them made snow angels. Others built a snowman. Our enterprising young neighbors across the street made a sled ramp on their front steps. It was about as Norman-Rockwell-magical as a person would have a right to hope for in 2019.

And then.

Snow Day #2. Okay. Not quite as exuberant as Snow Day #1, and maybe the kids should check Google classroom to see if they’re missing anything, and maybe I should check those work emails. But okay.

And then.

Snow Day #3. When Snow Day #3 arrived, it had been more than a month since Snow Day #2. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with preparing my classes for the new semester at the community college where I teach, and I didn’t have it in me to organize a big neighborhood snow hoopla, but the kids and I spent the afternoon snuggled under a blanket drinking hot chocolate and watching the rebellion take on the AT-ATs in the great snow battle on Hoth, and what more could a person want, really, from a snow day?

And then. Snow Day #4.

And then #5.

By Day #5, I was getting rather desperate to get more work done. The kids were getting restless, too. In an effort to make myself buckle down, I organized something I called “let’s have one-room schoolhouse.” For two hours, the children and I sat at the dining room table, and they worked on doing extra reading and schoolwork while I worked on my classes. My youngest, ever a good sport, claimed to enjoy this and asked if we could do it again. Her older brothers? Not so much. That afternoon, when everyone seemed to be really getting twitchy after too much time indoors together, I declared that they should all go outside and play for at least 15 minutes. It was cold, sure—pretty darn cold—but they could bundle up, right? The pioneers used to stay outside for longer in worse weather, I figured, and they were fine. Right?

My children obliged. They bundled. They went outside. They sort of aimlessly walked around in the cold and half-played. But, as B.B. King once observed, the thrill [was] gone.

And then came another half. An early dismissal due to blowing winds.

And here’s the thing—the forecast says that for the next week, the weather is going to get worse. Daytime temps below zero kind of worse. And wind. And, hey, more snow.

Even as I type this blog, I am literally just waiting for the phone call to get the news for tomorrow’s inevitable cancellation. School, this semester, seems to be happening more in theory than in practice.

On social media, my friends debate: Should school have been cancelled? Maybe, maybe not. It’s always a tough call, and I do not envy superintendents for having to make it. I tend to err on the side of caution, but I realize I am lucky that I work at a job that also tends to cancel in bad weather, making those snow days at home a lot more manageable, save for the boredom and the twitchiness.

Meanwhile, we wait—something we aren’t too used to having to do in 2019. At a time when we can run much of our lives as we see fit from the press of a single button on our phone, winter in the Midwest reminds us that maybe we’re not in charge after all. We wait for the “school has been cancelled” phone messages, for the next storm to hit. Will it be as bad as predicted? Even better? Even worse? We wait for the boots to thaw, for the roads to get plowed, for the sun to shine. We adjust, we adapt. We make it work. We shovel the walks for our neighbors. We scrape the ice. We get seed catalogs in the mail and dream about baseball, and gardens, and bare feet, and we wait for spring.

January 13, 2018January 13, 2018

The Crockpot Blues: A Mother’s Lament

Oh, Crockpot. You are an enigma to me. A mirage of meal planning. A siren song of supper.

You might think the food in this Crockpot and its little companion looks delicious. But you would be wrong.

Why do you tempt me and tease me so?

I love the idea of you. I even like the food that you produce—very much. The problem? My kids do not.

This is their own fault, of course, for having such infuriatingly picking palettes. Probably mine, too. I mean, I’m the mom—it all circles back to being my fault, in one way or another, doesn’t it?

I was also a picky eater as a child. I didn’t really even embrace pizza until the later years of elementary school. I’m fairly certain I did not deliberately eat a slice of cheese until somewhere closer to college. I was, in short, ridiculous.

This photo, a good approximation of the nightmare plate of my youth, can be found online featuring the words “Getting your child to eat healthy food may be as easy as adding color.” Sure, it’s colorful. But did the writers of this caption not notice the suspicious crust? The these-aren’t-baby-carrots spears of asparagus? The saucy pea concoction covering it all? Nice try.

My greatest nemesis for the better part of the first two decades of my life: FOOD THAT TOUCHED. I liked my plate lean and mean. Bread goes here. Peas—if there must be peas—here. Never the two shall meet. I liked applesauce, but it always posed a challenge, as it had a way of sneaking its way across the plate to the other items’ neighborhoods. I liked a clean border. A clear perimeter. Applesauce—stay on your side. Do not even think about going over to visit that macaroni. Do. Not. Even. Think. About. It.

In retrospect, “picky” is probably being kind. To say I was “kind of a freak” about my food might be more apt. Today, I may be labeled with some sort of syndrome and given something soothing to comfort me. Instead, because it was the 70s, I ate a lot of plain bologna sandwiches and, when confronted with a plate of offensive and gelatinous items, remained vigilant.

Somewhere along the way, I figured it out. Cheese is good. So are lots of vegetables, even. So are lots of FOODS THAT TOUCH—lasagna, and cheese enchiladas, and omelets, and chile relleno, and huevos rancheros, just to name a few.

This. My children will eat this. Plain pasta, with butter. Two of my children will add Parmesan cheese. The other will not. And one of them, truth be told, isn’t super keen on the butter.

My children, sadly, have not yet seen the light. This means that virtually everything a Crockpot could produce will be rejected by them.

Still, I keep trying. Because I am busy. Because I am a working mom and because Crockpots offer the promise of mealtime sanity—that wonderful feeling of walking in the door and knowing that dinner is already made. And in one pot, no less!

Why do my children persist in their rejection?

Maybe, I think, I just have not found the right recipe. So, I search. Just this morning, I cozied up to Google and hunted for “Crockpot recipes for picky kids.”

The results? From esteemed, allegedly informed websites?

Recipes for Crockpot dinners that kids will love, the sites promised, for “creamy mushroom . . . [something]” (I don’t know the something, because I stopped reading after “creamy mushroom”) and for another dish that “tastes just like grandma’s chicken casserole.”

Creamy mushroom [something]? Grandma’s chicken casserole? Really? Who are the picky children these recipes have in mind? What do these hypothetical children not like? I mean, I know picky. I was (am?) picky. And you, hypothetical internet child who will happily eat creamy mushroom [something], are not picky.

I called off the search. Who am I kidding? Until I can find a Crockpot recipe that magically produces “chicken nuggets and a separate container of French fries” in a white McDonalds bag, the effort is probably futile. Oh, wait, come to think of it, my youngest doesn’t like French fries yet either. Ah, well, a mother can dream.

September 19, 2017September 19, 2017

80s music: It’s Still Rock ‘n Roll to Me

There is a list tacked to the bulletin board in my kitchen with names of contemporary artists and bands that are probably fantastic. I say “probably” because I haven’t listened to them yet.

Our babysitter, Abby—it’s strange to use the word “babysitter” because she is more friend and family at this point—made the list for me about a month ago. Okay, maybe two.

“Have you listened to any of the music yet?” She recently asked.

“No,” I confessed. “I will. Soon. Soon!”

Soon? Why did I sound like I was being asked, around the first of April, if I had finished my taxes? Since when did listening to new music become a chore?

Music has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. It started with 45 records and an FM radio, progressing through boom boxes and mix tapes, all the way to CDs and playlists. I have camped out for concert tickets; spent three days in a muddy tent at several music festivals, sans running water, and living on oatmeal crème pies, just to see the likes of Bjork, Green Day, Hole, the Indigo Girls, Soundgarden, Weezer, Oasis, Pulp, Belly, The Dave Matthews Band, and the Cure. Instead of passionately pursuing a career or a calling with great zeal, I spent my early twenties accruing a stack of ticket stubs and concert t-shirts. With great zeal.

I always vowed that as I got older I would not become one of those people who only listens to music from their youth. I have spent much of my adult life teaching college students, and this has helped. Artists like Cat Power, Phish, Regina Spektor, and The Dropkick Murphys found their way to me mostly because of students.

It also helps to have that one friend who has remained fantastically plugged in to all things hip, who lives in a university town, and who sends you the occasional mix and playlist. You know this friend; she is the smart and artsy one with the most effortlessly cool glasses and the best shoes, the friend who can actually pull off the leopard-print haircalf flats (Julie of Wisconsin, I’m looking at you, and thanks again for The White Stripes and Neko Case). In recent years, Abby has helped, too. Or at least she has tried.

This summer, though, I realized that despite my best intentions, all the “new” bands I listen to—Spoon, The Avett Brothers, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, St. Vincent, Alabama Shakes—aren’t new anymore.

So I asked Abby for the list. She was happy to oblige. But I still haven’t listened to anything on it.

I did, however, attend two live shows this summer: U2’s The Joshua Tree anniversary tour and Billy Joel, performing his greatest hits. Both were fantastic. The fact that these were my two concert choices, though, only exacerbated my concern that I had let myself grow out of touch.

Sidebar: My husband and I like to play a game called “Have you ever heard of this band?” when we watch Saturday Night Live these days. Good times.

As I stood there listening to Billy Joel play “Still Rock and Roll to Me,” I thought of Abby’s list. I promise I’ll listen to it, I thought. I really will.

But. U2’s The Joshua Tree, for Pete’s sake. Billy Joel in center field at Wrigley at a grand piano singing “The Piano Man.”

These are good things in this world. Good then, good now.

Meanwhile, that list is still tacked to my bulletin board, still untouched. That’s okay. I’ll get to it. Soon.

Billy Joel—funny, irreverent, and as crazy-talented as ever—chatted with the audience casually all night and swatted flies with a flyswatter—made it seem like we were at small piano bar watching a private show. A handful of times, he let the audience choose between two songs when determining what to play next. A surprise highlight was the blistering “Sometimes a Fantasy,” but my personal favorite was the classic “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”

July 22, 2017July 22, 2017

Eureka! Happiness is Just One Bottle of Coconut Lime Verbena Away

Happiness has been found! Repeat: Happiness has been found!

After centuries of poets, philosophers, and artists have struggled to find it. Religion, politics, and self-help, too.

It turns out, happiness has been waiting for us all along. Not in a creed or a mantra. Not in self-love, meditation, or a downward dog pose. Not even in an insanely catchy pop song by Pharrell Williams.

Nope.

We need look no further, it turns out, than a bottle of soap. Specifically, a bottle of soap purchased from Bath & Body Works.

I just placed an online order for some olfactorous delights—I mean, seriously, have you smelled the French Lavender? The Peach Bellini? The Japanese Cherry Blossom?—and I noticed on the bottom left of my screen a truly bold promise: “Happiness Guaranteed or Your Money Back.”

Happiness? Guaranteed? Really?

Wow. I couldn’t help but think of all of those great Don Draper advertising pitch scenes from “Mad Men,” always the best part of the show, and how Don would find these beautiful, romantic, nostalgic and subtle ways to make a hidden promise to consumers that if they buy this product they will, at least briefly, be happy.

Turns out, maybe the poetic and hidden messages didn’t need to be so poetic. Or hidden. Maybe the trick all along has been to slap a label on the product that says, “BUY THIS AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.”

Poor Henry David Thoreau, spending all that time alone in his bean field. If only he had been born a few centuries later. He didn’t need to go to the woods. He just needed a fine mist fragrance that smelled like them.

Let’s be clear. Not even the founding fathers when writing the Declaration of Independence promised us happiness. Just our right to the “pursuit of” it.

Good news Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Adams, et. al. No need for us to keep pursuing. Looks like it’s time for a rewrite, or at least an asterisk and a footnote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and a pomegranate-scented foot scrub.”

Ah, yes. Much better. I feel happier just thinking about it.

June 14, 2017

Midnight at the Walgreens Oasis

I am no longer the parent of little children. Young children, but not little.

On the plus side, after the kiddos go to bed, my husband and I can binge watch House of Cards. Sometimes, we’re even able to stay awake while we watch it.

But, when I am walking along the sidewalk with my children, no child automatically reaches to hold my hand.

I can take a shower now without interruption. Sometimes even a bath. With a book.

But, no more lazy mornings cuddling on the couch and waiting, in great anticipation, to find out “the letter of the day” on Sesame Street.

Taking our children to a restaurant is no longer an act of daring. We arrive, we sit, we order, we eat. We even talk. It’s like we’re people in the world. We no longer send a steady stream of urgent, telepathic messages to the kitchen to “hurry!,” or eat like we’re being hunted.

But, no more chubby cheeks, bright eyes, and big smiles greeting me from a crib in the morning, as sunlight streams through the window. No more little person whose whole world lights up just because I entered the room.

So it’s a mixed bag, to be sure.

It’s easy sometimes, when I am missing those big belly laughs and outstretched arms, to start feeling wistful.

Also, at the moment, there are babies everywhere. Everywhere! Okay, by “everywhere,” I mean my Facebook newsfeed. But in 2017, that counts as everywhere, right?

I was on the older side when we had our daughter, our third and final child. As she has gotten older, I have become Facebook friends with some of her classmates’ mothers, many of whom are young and just starting their families. Similarly, college students who I taught a dozen years ago and with whom I am Facebook friends are having children, too.

I am far enough away from the infant years that when I look at these posts—babies with crazy hair, snuggly PJs, and big yawns—it can be easy to forget just how hard parenting these sweet, adorable little people can be.

Enter Walgreens.

Whenever I am tempted to wander down the “Oh, I wish my children were little again” path, I remember Walgreens. More specifically, I see it.

I drive past the Walgreens near my house nearly every day, and I am reminded that there was a time in my life not long ago that everything felt so overwhelming, so exhausting, so hard that a solo trip to Walgreens used to feel like a vacation.

When our two boys were little, they contended with a number of ailments and medical issues—everything from your everyday assortment of infectious delights to an “unusually intense” case of rotavirus, and more challenging conditions like colic, gastro reflux, and pyloric stenosis. (Fortunately, they emerged healthy from the maladies of these early years, and for that, we are grateful, grateful, grateful).

Between their health issues and our need for everyday necessities, we ran to Walgreens a lot. I mean, a lot.

Usually—if it wasn’t the middle of the night or the middle of a subzero snowstorm—I volunteered.

My husband frequently noted that picking up one prescription for medicine or buying one loaf of bread took me far longer than it should.

He was not wrong.

Walgreens was my oasis. It was like my very own personal spa, but instead of a masseuse and fluffy white towels, I was surrounded by rows of cleaning products and toilet paper.

No matter. I was alone. Blissfully, wonderfully, marvelously alone.

No one needed me. No one was crying for me. Well, maybe they were, but if they were, I couldn’t hear them.

I meandered down aisles studying make-up and face lotions that I had no intention of buying. Toothbrushes. Random bargain bin books and DVDs. Greeting cards. Candy—so much candy. And all of it in its place, sitting there quietly and neatly, under the fluorescent lights, wanting absolutely nothing from me.

Mostly, though, I hung out with the magazines.

I was shameless. It would be nice to say I just skimmed the promos on the covers as I walked past on my way to the pharmacy to pick up my sick child’s medicine. But, no. I would stop. I would open the magazine. And I would read it.

I had my rationalizations.

Really, I just needed a break so badly. So badly. The good people of Walgreens would surely understand, right? My children, too—that is, if they were old enough to be capable of understanding.

If only I could have fifteen minutes to find out just how Katie Holmes escaped from Scientology with her daughter Suri, I would come home revived. Ready to throw myself into the breach again. Ready to be loving and devoted. And it wasn’t just my children who would benefit from my stopping to read that article about Katie Holmes. No, I would be a kinder, gentler, more patient person with all of mankind if only I could have a few flipping minutes to myself to read celebrity pop culture garbage. So, really, it was for the good of humanity. Right?

I even took my shameless Walgreens-as-Oasis show on the road.

One time at a Walgreens in another state, when my oldest was a baby and I was feeling particularly stressed, I went to a nearby Walgreens to pick up some Tylenol. At this particular Walgreens, there happened to be a metal folding chair that had been left, fortuitously, near the magazine aisle.

I took that chair, I dragged it over to the magazines, I picked up the latest Vanity Fair, and I read the lengthy first interview with Jennifer Aniston since her split from Brad Pitt. Yes I did.

I will not divulge more about the circumstances involved. You’ll have to trust me. Let’s just say I needed it.

In the song “On My Own” from Les Miserables, Eponine sings that, when she comes to from her magical reverie, “the river’s just a river.” Well, now, for me, the Walgreens is just a Walgreens.

These days, if I see a magazine with an article I want to read, I buy it. I take it home and read it there. Because I can.

When I see super cute baby pictures and posts, it serves me well to remember this other part of parenting. The part that made me choose to sit in the aisle of a Walgreens in a folding chair to read a celebrity interview because doing so felt like the only available life vest to keep me from drowning.

A few days ago, a former student who is the mother of a newborn, in a gracious act of “keeping-it-real-Facebooking,” posted a picture of herself looking disheveled and exhausted as she described her morning. I will spare you the details, but they involved the words “diaper explosion.”

It was another good reminder that all stages of parenting have their ups and downs. That evening, my son and I snuggled under a blanket on the couch as we took turns reading the seventh Harry Potter book aloud to each other. It wasn’t the “letter of the day,” but it was good.

April 7, 2017

The Dead Talk So My Husband Doesn’t Have To

By S.E. Trotter

If there’s anything more fun than watching a zombie show, it’s analyzing a zombie show. Such is the premise behind AMC’s The Talking Dead, a one-hour show that airs after new episodes of The Walking Dead.

Host Chris Hardwick spends the hour interviewing cast members, producers, writers, and fans, and dissecting the show.

My husband is a big fan. I don’t mean he likes the show that much, though he likes it just fine. No, what I mean is that he likes that the show exists. He likes that Chris Hardwick exists, and that Chris Hardwick spends an hour analyzing the nuances of each episode because it means that he—my husband—does not have to.

Let’s just say that when it comes to evaluating films and TV shows, my husband and I have different approaches. More importantly, different speeds.

Upon leaving a movie theater:

Me: I loved how the movie used color to signify the themes. Words, words, words . . . red jacket . . . words, words, words . . . shades of blue.

Him: Uh-huh.

Me: And it was really smart, the way they didn’t give the audience the cliché, expected ending. . . Words, words, words. More ambiguous. Words, words. Like real life.

Him: Uh-huh.

Me: And the soundtrack! Words, words! That Grace Potter song!

Him: Yeah. That’s a cover of a Bill Withers song.

Me: Really? Cool. Words, words, words x 1,000. What did you think?

Him: I don’t know. I need to process it.

And so I wait. Impatiently. When I ask a few minutes later if he is ready to give an opinion, if he has finished processing, he tells me this: “You can’t force it. You have to let it bubble up.”

Bubble up.

I have spent nearly twenty years with this man. That’s nearly twenty years waiting for the bubble up.

To be fair, my husband has plenty of interesting insights to offer. Eventually. But I don’t want them the next morning when we’re in the kitchen making coffee. If we have just finished watching something, I want them right now.

Enter Chris Hardwick and The Talking Dead.

Like millions of others, I am a fan of The Walking Dead. And there is nothing I want more after watching an episode than to analyze it. When a character makes a bold move to attack a herd of walkers is it brave? Suicidal? Both? Was the episode’s take on the future of mankind hopeful? Fatalistic? MUST. DISCUSS.

True, I am not a participant on The Talking Dead, so it’s not exactly a conversation. But the show tends to cover many of the topics I would want to discuss. It satisfies my Siskel & Ebert compulsion.

This is not hyperbole. When I was twelve, my heroes were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. And, really, that probably explains all one needs to know about my junior high years.

I actually used to take notes on their show At the Movies. I would grab a spiral notepad and pencil and sit down on the carpet in front of the TV set (the big, square, piece-of-furniture kind with the fake wood paneling). What was it Gene Siskel just said about the masterful way that Debra Winger ate a piece of lettuce in that scene in Terms of Endearment? Better write it down.

On my closet door, I would tape Siskel’s reviews, which used to run in the Chicago Tribune. They would find a home somewhere amidst my posters of E.T. and Indiana Jones, and pictures of Rob Lowe and Duran Duran.

Decades later, waiting for the bubble up, I have often found myself channeling Steve Buscemi in Fargo, telling his taciturn partner, “That’s a fountain of conversation, man. That’s a geyser.” Chris Hardwick helps me channel Steve Buscemi less frequently. And channeling Steve Buscemi less frequently is always a good thing. (At least for, you know, a mid-dish-aged mother of three. No offense, Mr. Buscemi).

Plus, if I have found myself vexed at my husband’s reticence, it is fair to say he has found my impatient demand for WORDS just as aggravating. So, The Talking Dead is a win-win. Now if my husband could only convince Hardwick to tackle a few other dreaded items on his list—scrape the basement walls, clean the gutters, paint the den—we might make it another twenty.

March 29, 2017April 7, 2017

Indiana Jones, the Dodo Bird, and Me

By S.E. Trotter

There’s nothing quite like the blank, uncomprehending stare of a teenage video store clerk to make a person feel, well, old. Of course, I realize that acknowledging that one still visits a video store doesn’t exactly scream “young” and “hip,” either.

Here’s how the latest confirmation of my non-young-ness unfolded.

A recent conversation around the dinner table about the films of Steven Spielberg led to some Youtube searches after dinner, which led to my nine-year-old begging to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. My oldest son, who is twelve, had seen the film a few years ago; he loved it and wanted to see it again, too.

For reasons unclear, I have somehow managed not to own a copy of this film on DVD. I know I had it on VHS.

I blame the children.

Around the time that my husband and I started switching our movie catalog from VHS tapes to DVDs, we also started having babies. For years, discretionary income that should have been set aside for important expenditures, such as ensuring ownership of all early 1980s-era Harrison Ford films, was gobbled up for items such as impossible-to-close strollers instead. I mean, I still have copies of nearly a dozen Baby Einstein DVDs in case anyone wants to watch a zebra puppet admire Monet’s haystacks to the music of Vivaldi. But no Raiders of the Lost Ark. Shameful.

To my surprise, Netflix didn’t have it either—and Netflix has not been spending its money on diapers, cribs, trips to the pediatric ophthalmologist, and birthday party goody bags, so it’s hard to know Netflix’s excuse.

But I digress.

Anyway, this is how I found myself at our neighborhood video store Friday night, searching not for Mr. Goodbar, but for Indiana Jones.

Now that we have Netflix and a smart TV, our trips to the video store have grown increasingly infrequent. I am almost surprised that video stores still exist. With physical CDs, physical books, physical DVDs, physical newspapers, physical brick and mortar stores—physical anythings—disappearing from the landscape like the infamous Dodo bird in 1662, my affection for the tangible has grown. Hello book, hello newspaper. Hello, actual thing I can touch. Thank you for existing somewhere besides behind a glowing screen.

Getting a Netflix account (it’s all Kevin Spacey’s fault—him and his treacherous House of Cards) had made me feel slightly guilty. Complicit, even.

Visiting the video store assuages my guilt a little. It makes me feel like I’m doing my part to help keep the dodos alive. Throwing the birds a few breadcrumbs, at least, on December 31^st, 1661, as the clock marches to midnight.

I headed for the “Favorites” section. If Raiders of the Lost Ark is not a favorite, then what is? Not Raiders of the Lost Ark, as it turns out. Failure to Launch, but not Raiders.

Okay, time to go to the archives. I searched out in the general populace, for movies that start with the letter “R”. Nope, not there either.

Finally, it was time to ask a clerk.

“Do you have Raiders of the Lost Ark?” I asked the ten-year-old behind the counter. Okay, okay. The clerk wasn’t really ten. She had to be eleven, at least.

“What?” She asked.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Readers of the Lost Ark?”

“Raiders.”

“Readers?” Again with the readers. What would readers want with a lost ark?

“Raiders. You know. With Harrison Ford.”

Nothing. No recognition fired in her matter-of-fact eyes, no smile of understanding crossed her unlined face. It was as if I was speaking in tongues.

“Indiana Jones?” I tried.

Nope. Nothing.

Oh dear God. That’s when it hit me. She was not mis-hearing me. She had not ever heard of the movie. Or Harrison Ford, for that matter. Or Indiana Jones. And then I saw myself through her eyes: just another middle-aged woman, slightly disheveled, in need of coloring some of those gray hairs that were showing through at the roots, with kids in tow, asking about some irrelevant movie from her equally irrelevant youth.

Maybe it was the stunned, perplexed and confused look on my irrelevant face that made her decide to try entering one more search in the computer. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was just good old-fashioned customer service, indulging the middle-aged and the irrelevant, no matter how pathetic they may be. Either way, she tried again, this time typing in the words “Indiana Jones” instead.

Eureka!

“Oh, Raiders of the Lost Ark,” she said. “I thought you were saying Readers. Yeah, we have it.”

She pointed me to the “Must See” section, where my son quickly found the movie. It turned out the going rate for deep humiliation is pretty cheap: just $2 for five nights. I even bought a jumbo box of Bottle Caps at the counter to help numb the pain.

My husband and I watched the movie later that night with our boys, who loved it, but, let’s be clear: this was a Pyrrhic victory. I am, apparently, living in a world where it is possible for a young adult not to have heard of Indiana Jones. Who is the dodo bird here? I am. I am the dodo. Gobbling Bottle Caps instead of breadcrumbs. Make that request for Bottle Caps a double. I’m going to need them.

March 26, 2017March 29, 2017

Welcome to the Gen X Files

Here we are now, entertain us . . .

So goes the refrain of one of the most seminal songs of the 1990s, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A few weeks ago, I kicked off the Composition 2 courses I am teaching by playing the song for my students. We’re working on critical thinking skills, and we’re talking about the pleasure-oriented, dystopian world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Analyzing the lyrics to Nirvana’s song seemed like a good place to start.

Looking around the classroom while I played the video, I couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that not only had many of my students not heard of the song, the majority of them had not even been born when it was released.

I was born in 1971. So Nirvana, to my students, would be the same as the top 1946 artists are to me. Think Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, and Nat King Cole. I didn’t dislike these artists when I was young. They just seemed to be the relics of a different, dusty era. I.E., they were that dirtiest of dirty words in our Botoxed, bleached, filled, plumped, and lasered society: old. Was it possible that for my students . . . Nirvana = Perry Como? Was it possible that Nirvana seemed old?

And if Nirvana was old, then what, exactly, did that make me?

According to the Pew Research Center, the answers are “neglected” and “stuck”.

I am a member of Generation X, the generation born in America from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. A few years ago, Paul Taylor and George Gao published for Pew an article titled, “Generation X: America’s neglected ‘middle child’.”

Like my fellow Gen X-ers, I am, according to Taylor and Gao, “smack in the middle innings of life, which tend to be short on drama and scant of theme.”

When they argue that my life is short on drama, I should note that neither Taylor nor Gao have been to my house on a morning when I’m rummaging through laundry baskets and hustling to get my three children out the door on time whilst also trying to find the required colored team t-shirts that said children are supposed to wear to school.

But okay. Here it is. The middle.

Taylor and Gao explain that not only are we Gen Xers at the midpoint in our lives, we are also, generationally, stuck between two much showier, flashier generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials: “Gen Xers are a low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths”.

With my oldest child in middle school and my youngest in kindergarten, I have been feeling my middle-ness more than ever, David Bowie’s “Changes” the current soundtrack to my life.

I don’t have the time for a mid-life crisis, nor the stamina. Nor the temperament, for that matter. This might be a Gen X trait—rolling our eyes at the cliché of it all: “What, a mid-life crisis? That’s so baby boomer. Please.”

A baby boomer feeling an existential middle-ness might have gone out, gotten a divorce, a new spouse, a second mortgage, and a shiny red sports car. A few years from now, I can only imagine, millennials feeling the same push and pull might chuck it all and decide to star on a reality TV show that they will share via Snapchat from the rooftop of their tiny house overlooking their tiny organic salmon farm. Or something.

But what’s a Gen Xer to do?

Probably something decidedly more Gen X low-key. Something like finally getting around to starting the blog they have been envisioning years.

Which brings me here. Welcome to From the Gen X Files.

What this blog won’t do: Offer advice, tackle serious world issues (which, of course, need to be tackled, just not by the likes of me), or attempt to tie anything up with a neat bow.

What it will do, I hope: Offer an entertaining respite from the drudgery and the drama, a little we’re-all-in-this-together half-smile. I know. A half-smile. I should probably aim the bar a little higher. But I’m a Gen Xer, and high bars bring out the sarcasm in me. So a half-smile it is.

Topics to be covered: Mostly parenting and pop culture, though I always admired radio DJ Chris on the show Northern Exposure, so there may be the occasional unexpected scat, the unplanned riff.

The middle isn’t all bad. On the day I played Nirvana for my students, I wore to class my longtime favorites, my great fashion item of the 1990s—my Doc Marten flower boots. Enough time had passed that the boots are no longer cringeworthy -outdated; they have graduated to a sort of retro cool.

Maybe that’s where we are as Gen Xers right now. Enough future still stretching in front of us to hold the promise of good times and adventure. A future that, like Lloyd Dobbler, has potential. The missteps of our youth far enough behind us to be seen with the proper perspective, what was once regrettable baggage now seen through the lens of wisdom and lessons learned, or at least nostalgic affection.

The boots still fit, by the way. And I’m not gonna lie. They felt damn good.