6-7 and the Death of Meaning

At 21 and 23, my kids are securely Gen Z, and I will defend so much about them and their generation until I run out of breath. Their commitment to social justice, to inclusion, to combating toxic masculinity and rape culture, their embrace of democratic socialism are all proof that Gen Z is the best thing Gen X has done. All those participation trophies and filling buckets with kindness and zero tolerance for bullying created a wonderful group of young people who are more engaged politically and more compassionate than any cohort in history. I am incredibly proud of them.

That said, their "humor" is just unbearably stupid. And Gen Alpha is so much worse.

Back in MY day™️, there was a certain genre of SNL skit where the writers just repeated the same thing over and over and somehow we were supposed to laugh. It was a lot of why I stopped watching SNL. Part of the basis, I guess, was making fun of dumb people, which I don't find clever. Don't get me wrong; I'm a terrible person and I sometimes find the things dumb people do funny, but I would never want to then go further and actively mock them for it. It's too mean-spirited for even my black heart, and it's not funny.

Flash forward twenty years, and as Gen Z began to create their own content and memes, to use the modern terms for youth culture, Antonio especially would show me things he found hysterical and I literally did not understand why he was laughing. It wasn't just, "I think that's offensive" or "I personally don't think slapstick or pranks are entertaining," but just...how is it supposed to be funny? I seriously just did not get it. Is it ironic? Does it highlight an absurdity about the human condition? Is it a clever play on words? Is there something utterly unexpected going on? No?

Maybe the first version of the internet version of this bullshit that I remember was the "I can has cheezburger" cat meme. Like, ok. Cats want fast food, and they speak English but poorly. Ha ha? And it got worse from there. I remember staring blankly at an Instagram post that Antonio showed me and searching for any way in which it might have been entertaining, and I could come up with nothing—not even something to roll my eyes at.

When I discovered that the George Michael song "Careless Whisper," had become weirdly popular with Gen Z and I was a little flummoxed as to why THAT song. An older Gen Z, or maybe she's a millennial, explained it away as "it's a meme." What does that even mean? It's funny because...it gets sent around? It's not even like Rick Rolling, which is less about Rick Astley than the surprise of expecting one thing and getting a nineties one-hit wonder instead. That it's "Never Gonna Give You Up" hardly matters. At least I understand THAT.

This week after hearing in grown up media about these damn kids on my lawn and their 6-7, I ended up looking it up and it has NO MEANING. Some kids just repeat it, meaning...nothing. Is it just to annoy adults with senselessness? Is it "you don't get it cuz you're an Old"? Back in MY day™️, we had lots of "you don't get it because you're an Old," but it was "you don't get the combination of anger and ennui expressed in grunge," not "you don't get it...because there is nothing to get." 

And being the over thinker that I am, and wanting to defend young people because us Olds have historically been shitty to young people, I want it to be something profound. I want it to be a critique of Late Stage Capitalism or a statement about the existentialist shallowness of modern corporate media or an example of cognitive semantics.

But in the end, yeah, I guess it's probably just not that deep, bro.

Acting for Dummies

You know what would be awesome? (And not at all because I most definitely need it, preferably by Wednesday.) A remedial acting class. Not Stanislavski telling you to remain in character from casting through to the final performance, not Meisner using sexual battery as a fun teaching tool, not how to research and invent a historically accurate backstory that fleshes out your character's motivation.

Rather: This is a stage. Stage right, stage left, up/downstage (and why it's called that). This is how the lights work and how to "find your light." This is the "fourth wall" and what that means. This is how rehearsals work. These are the technical aspects that you can expect. These are the conventions about sets and costuming. And above all, these are the illusions about which audiences are expected to suspend their disbelief.

Because I have spent my whole life thinking that if you understand and empathize with your character, if you think about how they would speak and move through the world, how their voice and body would be affected by their situation and state of mind, you should be able to act.

And I have discovered, on the eve of tech week—also a term to be discussed in my imagined remedial class— for my show, that my idea is WRONG and there is NOTHING natural about acting. You are NOT supposed to act like your character would. You are supposed to act like an actor on stage. And now I can't unsee it.

To whit: people on stage are terribly RUDE to their fellow characters. They spend 90% of their time, even while having the most intense, heart-wrenching conversations, looking at that invisible fourth wall rather than their scene partner. Their bodies are nearly always facing one direction in this diegetic world. They should not be moving (or not moving) like normal people because that is apparently boring to watch. (This never would have occurred to me personally because I genuinely enjoyed all 3.5 hours of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In fact, I think it could have been longer. Yes, I am, in fact, also boring.)

But here I am, my lines all memorized, thinking about how my character would behave in this space were it real, how she would speak to the other characters. And IT'S ALL WRONG.

We open in five days.

Shit.

Panic! On the Sofa

 I'm not depressed. At least not yet. 

But I have this pulling-in sensation that seems like it is a prelude to depression. I have gone through this before, when it seemed like the thing to do was just to stop talking to anyone, stop looking at social media, prepare to disappear. The thought of interacting with anyone to pursue publishing books is just too much. 

I am struggling to find things to say to even the few people I (sort of) want to interact with. The kids call and I have nothing to say. Lucy calls and I have nothing to say. I spend part of my afternoon thinking of things to talk to Jose about when he gets home from work so that he doesn't worry about me.

I'm not sad. I'm a little panicky. But I'm having a hard time looking forward to anything. I just want to sit here and knit down my stash until I die, which, admittedly, will take a while. 

But I am being PROACTIVE. *eyeroll* I am going to theater auditions for roles I will never get and acting classes where I can pay to make people watch me perform, and more importantly, I go to places where people smile and hug me when they see me. Even if it's acting, I'll take it.