I think my little brother's girlfriend is dying.
Actually, even though it's hard to say it about someone that young, my little brother's girlfriend is dying. She has Hodgkin's lymphoma--I'm not positive, but it sounds like stage III-IV--and her prognosis is not good. The other night, she came down with an infection, and if her mother (with whom she had to move back in) hadn't unexpectedly checked on her, the doctors said she probably wouldn't have made it through the night. She's been in the hospital more than out lately. She's twenty-one years old, with luminous brown eyes and a soft southern accent. She never got to go to college, because she's been sick so long. She's twenty-one years old, and she likely won't see twenty-two.
My brother has been spending more time in the hospital than any twenty-six-year-old ever should, waiting. I can only begin to imagine what he thinks as he waits, and just trying to get my head around it absolutely breaks my heart. Inevitably, he'll finally hear the words he's been dreading. He'll have to go home, drive home in his car like he did the day before when he knew he had at least one more day to talk to her, except it won't be the same at all. Then the next day he'll have to get up and figure out how he's going to make it to twenty-seven.
Not too long ago I was putting my hair in a ponytail and gasped as I revealed two bright silver hairs beneath the top layer of dark hair. I felt like it was the end of the world, like my youth was gone, like I may as well hang it up now and figure out how to be happy with my lot, now that I no longer had my pretty face and any time to waste. Right now I realize how absolutely ridiculous and melodramatic I was being. In fact, I'm lucky I get to live long enough to grow gray hair. I will most likely get to turn twenty-eight next month.
Eventually, each one of us will end up in a grave of one kind or another. Not all of us, though, will get the chance to find our gray hairs, to watch them slowly gain more ground on our scalps. We don't all get to accumulate the stories, the laughter and heartbreak, the knowledge and experience that adds up to wisdom, that accompanies those gray hairs. Sometimes it's hard to understand that you're fortunate until you take a moment to put things in perspective.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
One day you'll be the mom on the online social network.
You know you've heard it before. One of your coworkers, from her cubicle five feet away screams "Oh my god, my mom just friend requested me on Facebook!" Your other five coworkers who sit within a ten foot radius join her and you in a mutual grimace and agree: "Ick." Then everyone joins in with bits of advice, such as "You'd better delete those pictures of yourself funneling beer in a baby pool of Jello," and "Dude, go ahead and make a 'family' list and put her on it and set the restrictions so she can't see ANYTHING, I mean she won't know the difference anyway--she's old."
Of course your gut reaction is "ick." After all, we are the generation that pioneered the social networking frontier. We found MySpace and Facebook and Friendster when they first launched, and we latched on. We put everything online, all those pictures of us partying like rock stars, thinking we looked so cool, or all those dimly-lit photographs of us giving bedroom eyes to the camera where we thought we looked so hot, disclosing on our profiles that we love spicy food and Australian men, and oh, that we're willing to try anything once. And then a few years later we realized that actually we looked like drunk twelve-year-olds and got tired of forty-year-old balding men or thug playas writing "Hey baby u look Hott i think u need 2 holla back" whilst masturbating over our pictures that feature us in the foreground and our dirty laundry in a pile in the background, and we yanked all those pictures and put up a few that made us still look fun, but more maturely fun, the kind of people who climb cliffs by the Mediterranean and then pose for photos fun. We still disclose online, but only just enough, chuckling over the actual twelve-year-olds who make all the same mistakes we once did. We add friends we haven't seen since middle school. We actually talk to some of those people online and realize occasionally that we both are no longer as dorky as we once were. We check our multiple social networking accounts at least once a day. We post on each others' walls to keep in touch, because regular e-mail just takes so much time. We have portions of an entire industries built around us--people get paid to keep our online lives running, other people get paid to figure out how they can use the information we willingly provide to target advertisements to our tastes. We're the generation that owns social media--we made it what it is, and to an extent, it made us who we are. So yes, we laugh (or scream and complain) when the older generation tries to get in on the action, to see what all the noise is about. I mean really, whose mom is really cool enough to even have any "about me" information to put on a profile?
But hang on a second there. As a whole, we may still be awesome and cool enough to add really amazing photos of us rocking out in whatever capacity, but have you noticed that some of us have (gasp) passed the thirty-year mark? That many of our friends are now starting to post pictures of their kids and pets and homes alongside those of themselves vacationing on verdant seasides? Well, since I mentioned them, what about those kids, the ones who ended up online before they even knew what the internet was (but who will never know a world without it)? Those kids are going to get older. They're going to become teenagers and young adults, and as we know firsthand, teenagers and young adults love social media, because it allows them to declare to the world "Hey, I'm here, and this is who I am." And one day, they too will create personal profiles on whatever social networking sites continue to thrive in the coming decades.
So the question is--what then? Who are we then? I mean, we made these sites what they are. Do we eventually drop off because the demands of a job and a family and full-on adulthood make it so that we no longer have time to write "Hey dude, thought about you today" on someone's wall? Do we drop off because spending time on MySpace or Facebook becomes considered immature? Do our kids create lists with restrictions that prohibit those included on them from seeing anything that says anything about who they think they are, and add us to those lists?
I think that realistically, our perceptions of social networking and family members' places on it will evolve as we continue to use them and our kids join in on the game. But I also that some things will never change--for the most part, when someone's parent friend requests her, that person will still yell and scream and tell her friends and coworkers, and have a silent moment of panic as she wonders what in hell she should do. Right now, we get to be the cool kids who complain, but in just a few short years, many of us are going to be the uncool parents.
I think the change in perspective will be painful for us in many ways. But then, I think getting older will continue to be painful in a lot of ways. Unfortunately there's no fighting it, so I suppose laughing at it helps some.
Of course your gut reaction is "ick." After all, we are the generation that pioneered the social networking frontier. We found MySpace and Facebook and Friendster when they first launched, and we latched on. We put everything online, all those pictures of us partying like rock stars, thinking we looked so cool, or all those dimly-lit photographs of us giving bedroom eyes to the camera where we thought we looked so hot, disclosing on our profiles that we love spicy food and Australian men, and oh, that we're willing to try anything once. And then a few years later we realized that actually we looked like drunk twelve-year-olds and got tired of forty-year-old balding men or thug playas writing "Hey baby u look Hott i think u need 2 holla back" whilst masturbating over our pictures that feature us in the foreground and our dirty laundry in a pile in the background, and we yanked all those pictures and put up a few that made us still look fun, but more maturely fun, the kind of people who climb cliffs by the Mediterranean and then pose for photos fun. We still disclose online, but only just enough, chuckling over the actual twelve-year-olds who make all the same mistakes we once did. We add friends we haven't seen since middle school. We actually talk to some of those people online and realize occasionally that we both are no longer as dorky as we once were. We check our multiple social networking accounts at least once a day. We post on each others' walls to keep in touch, because regular e-mail just takes so much time. We have portions of an entire industries built around us--people get paid to keep our online lives running, other people get paid to figure out how they can use the information we willingly provide to target advertisements to our tastes. We're the generation that owns social media--we made it what it is, and to an extent, it made us who we are. So yes, we laugh (or scream and complain) when the older generation tries to get in on the action, to see what all the noise is about. I mean really, whose mom is really cool enough to even have any "about me" information to put on a profile?
But hang on a second there. As a whole, we may still be awesome and cool enough to add really amazing photos of us rocking out in whatever capacity, but have you noticed that some of us have (gasp) passed the thirty-year mark? That many of our friends are now starting to post pictures of their kids and pets and homes alongside those of themselves vacationing on verdant seasides? Well, since I mentioned them, what about those kids, the ones who ended up online before they even knew what the internet was (but who will never know a world without it)? Those kids are going to get older. They're going to become teenagers and young adults, and as we know firsthand, teenagers and young adults love social media, because it allows them to declare to the world "Hey, I'm here, and this is who I am." And one day, they too will create personal profiles on whatever social networking sites continue to thrive in the coming decades.
So the question is--what then? Who are we then? I mean, we made these sites what they are. Do we eventually drop off because the demands of a job and a family and full-on adulthood make it so that we no longer have time to write "Hey dude, thought about you today" on someone's wall? Do we drop off because spending time on MySpace or Facebook becomes considered immature? Do our kids create lists with restrictions that prohibit those included on them from seeing anything that says anything about who they think they are, and add us to those lists?
I think that realistically, our perceptions of social networking and family members' places on it will evolve as we continue to use them and our kids join in on the game. But I also that some things will never change--for the most part, when someone's parent friend requests her, that person will still yell and scream and tell her friends and coworkers, and have a silent moment of panic as she wonders what in hell she should do. Right now, we get to be the cool kids who complain, but in just a few short years, many of us are going to be the uncool parents.
I think the change in perspective will be painful for us in many ways. But then, I think getting older will continue to be painful in a lot of ways. Unfortunately there's no fighting it, so I suppose laughing at it helps some.
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