Yes, Exactly
You know the feeling. Every now and then, a writer captures something of the essence of who you are. You're reading along and it hits you that this person understands a truth that has never before been identified in print.
Here is an example from David Owen's "Shouts & Murmurs" piece in this week's New Yorker, about being a 52-year-old man trying to pass for 45:
I received a somewhat humorous e-mail from someone I vaguely knew and reflexively deleted it, the way I used to, rather than almost deciding to forward it to fifteen or twenty other people under the subject line "GET A LOAD OF THIS!!!!!!"
Please understand that I am not being at all sarcastic when I say that he totally nailed it.
It's easy to imagine the back-and-forth with the editor, who probably said, "Huh? What are you talking about?" And then, I hope, the writer said, "Please trust me on this." If so, then the system worked.
I hope someday to understand Owen's observation more deeply. At this point, he has merely pointed to the existence of a generational divide. He still has not shed light on why it is there.
In any event, thank you, David Owen. Perhaps my parents and my slightly older friends will finally understand why, when they forward "humor" to me, they might as well address it to blackhole@gmail.com.
And thank you, too, for alerting me to the apparently inevitable fate that awaits me.
Here is an example from David Owen's "Shouts & Murmurs" piece in this week's New Yorker, about being a 52-year-old man trying to pass for 45:
I received a somewhat humorous e-mail from someone I vaguely knew and reflexively deleted it, the way I used to, rather than almost deciding to forward it to fifteen or twenty other people under the subject line "GET A LOAD OF THIS!!!!!!"
Please understand that I am not being at all sarcastic when I say that he totally nailed it.
It's easy to imagine the back-and-forth with the editor, who probably said, "Huh? What are you talking about?" And then, I hope, the writer said, "Please trust me on this." If so, then the system worked.
I hope someday to understand Owen's observation more deeply. At this point, he has merely pointed to the existence of a generational divide. He still has not shed light on why it is there.
In any event, thank you, David Owen. Perhaps my parents and my slightly older friends will finally understand why, when they forward "humor" to me, they might as well address it to blackhole@gmail.com.
And thank you, too, for alerting me to the apparently inevitable fate that awaits me.
posted by DO at 8:36 AM
7 Comments:
I had a friend named Meg who used to forward goofy "humor," but she was so nice that I never had the heart to tell her to remove me from this list.
One day I got an e-mail from a friend of Meg apologizing for using Meg's list, but she wanted people to know that Meg was in the hospital with leukemia.
Had it not been for this dumb humor list, I would not have been able to keep up with the increasingly bad news on Meg's condition up to her death.
This is totally uncanny. Just this morning, I was talking with my editor about developing a piece recounting the time I read something cool in the New Yorker and went to my blog to tell everyone "hey look at this" "this guy is brilliant" and whatnot and then started going on about how I'm not like those old people who send e-mails to batches of people saying "hey check this out". He didn't really think it was that interesting a story, and I tried to start saying stuff about trippy meta-bisulfite, and irony, although I have never been sure I even know what that is. So I asked what if I started it out with "Olsher you are too funny!!!" and ended it with "I'm DYIN' over here!!!" My editor cautioned me against using that style. Then I suggested maybe if I would include "Olsher you jackass -- is it yourself you need to kid that you are not one of THEM (yeah we all know old people are icky), or some specific doe-eyed reader out here??" My editor responded that "Olsher is not a jackass." When I asked how he knew THAT, he said "Well, I certainly know that your name is not Stacey." I had no answer for that, so I asked "What if I just called him a *tool*? Please? Come on. Pleeeez. Plizzz." He said something that actually surprised me: that there would be plenty of opportunities to use this language in the future, and why blow this currency now, over this?
He panned the sarcastic question about the job at the NSA which would allow one to know that any topic whatsoever had actually never made it into print before, the nitpicking over whether or not friends or parents had ever actually puzzled over received-but-not-forwarded-further e-memes, and my lengthy exposition on this generation gap possibly being a result of what decades the respective generations were born in, thus not indicating at all that anything inevitably awaited the youngsters, as if it had some relationship to biological age... He panned any innocent queries on whether this blog entry were simply some sort of performance art.
So I said "OK. It's not for nuthin you're called my editor. How bout I just ask him if he ever ended up receiving that official apology from the New Yorker regarding that fiasco where they sent everybody the Borat instructions SOOOO incredibly late?"
Suddenly I saw a glint in his eye, just beyond which, behind him, next to his class of seven-four gold ring from Old Miss, hung the dusty portrait of his dear, departed Central Asian mother and Southern Baptist father -- a glint that said to me:
10:21 am: OMGWTFBBQ LOLOLOL!!!!1
No only can't my stepfather stop himself from forwarding "humorous" e-mails to me, but the jokes he forwards are all of a right-wing propaganda nature. They're unfunny *and* morally questionable! If only they came with viruses attached, he'd be hitting the trifecta.
Francis's stepfather is my uncle! He sends the right-slanted "humor" (anti-woman, anti-Pakistani, anti-liberal, you name it) amid the "it's funny because it's true! (to people over 65)" brand of humor. And my aunt likes to forward the alarmist urban legends, but she's finally learned to forward those to me and ask if there's any truth to it before she sends it en masse. (Why she can't check snopes.com herself is another issue.)
My sister is only 41, and she is wont to forward (though she keeps me off the list most of the time). I think it's because her husband is going to be 50 this year—she's pre-aging.
Dean, I don't think it's an inevitable fate. It's akin to middle-aged+ people never turning on their cell phones unless they're going to make a call, somewhat younger people turning them on when they go out, younger people having them on all the time, and still younger adults dispensing with having a landline and exclusively using their cell. In 50 years, the forwarders will have died off and been replaced by the generations who never had the forwarding habit (or stopped in in 1997).
It must be so, because the alternative—that within 15 years, I will begin forwarding Sylvia cartoons from Hallmark cards—is intolerable.
And yes, I quit turning off my cell phone when I became aware that doing so was a marker of age.
Wow, you made my day: I'm in the category of Younger People. Not even "somewhat!"
Of course, having your day made by what category your phone use places you in is one of the first signs of dementia...
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