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Month: October 2023

Reunion, or “Happy Birdeversary!”

Reunion, or “Happy Birdeversary!”

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As mentioned in a recent post, where I reviewed a book by a Gen X author, the girl and I went to our 40th year high school reunion at the end of September. Another milestone in this year of milestones.

I had been resisting going, since we already went to our 30th reunion in 2013. I mean, that was how Aileen and I reconnected, a story which has been partially revealed in this blog. Was there any reason to go back again, now that our own personal tale of reunion was complete?

But one of our classmates, Melanie, kept asking us about going and hanging out, and in the end we relented. It was too late to get a ticket to the main reunion event, which had sold out, but we could still show up at the informal events, and even hang out at the bar at the restaurant where the main event was, and meet up with people.

We got there on Friday, in time to join the homecoming parade, in which we marched, along with Melanie and about a dozen of our other classmates. I should mention that this was in Reston, Virginia, where Aileen and I met when we were teenagers, and that our school is South Lakes High School.

This was the first and only time in my life that I was ever in a parade. Our class was close to the front, after the marching band. Notably, our class of 1983 was the first one to fully occupy SLHS for all four years of high school, since the school was founded in 1979. So I guess that makes us kind of special, like we are the first ancestor generation of SLHS graduates.

As we walked the 1.8 miles from the starting location to our high school, the spectators lining the road cheered us on, often expressing surprise and delight to see graduates from so far back in time. “We’re old, but we’re still going!” we let them know.

The class of 1983 comes home to SLHS (40th reunion, September 2023).

You might recognize me and Aileen there on the left, wearing the caps. Melanie is in green in the center, and our two classmates who did the organizing to get us all together, Kathy and Sarah, are on the far right.

Not everyone from our class is still alive, naturally. To honor those who have passed away, their names were added to the banner. In that way they could march with us.

Names of our classmates who have passed away on our class banner.

After the parade, we went to a restaurant in Reston at Lake Anne Plaza to meet up with even more of our classmates. On the way, for fun, we drove by the house where Aileen used to live, and where I would frequently go to visit her, in our high school years. It looked very much the same, though we did note that there were a lot more cars than we used to remember in the neighborhood, which seemed a little rundown. It could be that the neighborhood is just old, like we are, or it could be that we remember it through rose colored glasses.

Reston is an interesting place. It was founded in 1964 as a “planned community,” meant to embody a new post-war ideal of land use that included ample green space, with room for both residential and commerical zones to develop in tandem, as well as room for both pedestrian and automobile traffic. With lots of walking paths and wide roads through wooded areas, and residential neighborhoods intermingled with commercial plazas, it’s sort of a middle-class consumer car culture utopia.

Having been founded around the time I was born, Reston is about my age; about the same age as everyone in my high school class, in fact. With its dated architecture of buildings and houses constructed during the Gen X childhood era, this town feels like a creche built just for our generation.

I remember it well from my teenage years. As we drove through town on our way to Lake Anne, I admired how nice Reston still looks, even as it evoked this nostalgic feeling. “I could move back here,” I told Aileen. But that is a highly unlikely scenario.

As it turned out, Aileen and I were able to get into the main reunion event after all, as not everyone who had reserved a spot was able to come. This happened on Saturday evening, in an events room at a nice restaurrant. I believe there were about 90 people attending, and the space was a bit small, so it felt crowded. We were a fairly large class; almost 400 people, and for a quarter of them to show up for the event is impressive, in my opinion. And many who couldn’t make it commented on the Facebook group, participating in spirit.

I had a great time, and very much enjoyed the feeling of solidarity with my old high school class. Many of the people from the 30th reunion in 2013 were there, and those are the folks I remembered the best. Back in my school days, I was kind of on the periphery, and honestly didn’t know most of my classmates. I hung out with the freaks and geeks, with the punk rockers and the stoners, who probably mostly didn’t show up for this occasion. If you’re from my class and don’t remember me, well that’s OK. It was so long ago, after all.

Aileen and Mr. Wareham, recreating a shot from the 1983 yearbook.

Our old high school principal, Mr. Wareham, was there! He is 84 years old. We chatted briefly, though it was hard to understand him in the noisy space. I learned that, after retiring from South Lakes, Mr. Wareham took postings overseas so he could travel the world. There was something comforting about his presence at the event, like it established a continuity with those distant but formative school years. And it helped me feel less old, knowing that an adult who was an authority figure in my late childhood is still alive.

I can’t deny, though, that going to your 40th high school reunion will make you feel old. We’re all deep in middle age now, many of us with adult children, divorces and remarriages, on their second careers or even retired already. Where did all those years go?

And yet I can attest that at a reunion, as was also the case ten years ago at our 30th, it feels very much like you are back from where you started, with all those same people you grew up with. It’s the same peer group, with the same social relationships, and the same personality types. No one’s really changed all that much. You’ve all just grown older.

As I said, we had a great time. Lots of pictures were taken, we enjoyed some food and beverage, listened to 1980s music, and had some good conversations. Late in the night we said our goodbyes. I have a feeling we will be back for the 50th in 2033, or the 45th in 2028, should that come together.

In retrospect, I thought that the 40th reunion felt more chill than the 30th, like we had all mellowed out a bit. The energy at the 30th was more hyped, with more anxiety and anticipation in the air. Maybe because we were all in our 40s instead of our 50s. Maybe because it had been a longer time (even longer than 10 years) since we had last seen one another.

The 30th reunion was the event in which Aileen and I reconnected, when I was still living in North Carolina. We had known each other in school, were very good friends, and dated when we were in college. After our mutual breakup which was totally mutual, we stayed in touch, and saw each other a few times in the 90s. But we didn’t see each other in the 2000s, not until the reunion in 2013.

Back then, we had recently connected on Facebook. It’s a common enough experience for Gen Xers to have reconnected with their old school friends on that site, and sort of gotten a fast forward catchup on everything that happened to one another in the past twenty years, before there was social media. Aileen, for example, now had two sons. I had a house.

In 2013, Aileen kept sending me posts and messages, asking me to come to the reunion, until I finally relented. When we met up during the day, before the main event, it was like we had never been apart. When I looked at he face, I saw the girl I knew thirty years earlier. It was October 19, the same day that I’m writing this, and we went to a matinee of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and just enjoyed one another. We still call this day our “birdeversary.” At the reunion event, we danced together, had a wonderful time, then went our separate ways.

The next year, I called Aileen on her birthday. From that point on, our relationship just kept building. We started visiting each other, and then, as you may know, in 2018 I sold my house in North Carolina, moved up to Pennsylvania, and now live with her in her house.

This whole story was news to some of our classmates at the 40th reunion. But at least one of them was tracking, and had some kind thoughts to share about us. He called us the “feel good story of the last decade.”

It does feel good to be reunited, to be connected and in a family. I honestly think that I would not be in a healthy place if I had stayed single and alone in my house in North Carolina, though I do miss the area and the friends I made there. And though I was mostly comfortable in solitude, a voice inside me was urging me to get out and find someone, and luckily, Aileen found me.

Staying connected, even if only through a support network of trusted friends and family, is crucial to your well-being. It leads to better outcomes in life; I know it has for mine. It is in being together with others that we ensure a happy future for ourselves.

The Patriarchy Will Be Crushed Under Taylor Swift’s Glittering Boot Heel

The Patriarchy Will Be Crushed Under Taylor Swift’s Glittering Boot Heel

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We got these nice cards at the movie theater.

So our son’s girlfriend and her friend wanted to see Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and our son wanted his brother along for company, so it ended up being all of us going, somehow. Her parents came along as well, and got us all our tickets. Not that I knew anything about Taylor Swift other than that she is immensely popular, and that she had a hit song called “Shake It Off.” I went because I always want to be in the zeitgeist, as this blog’s title indicates.

The theater was one of those dine-in places, and I grabbed a beer and a wine at the bar while Aileen ordered us some nachos. As we went in to the theater to sit down, an employee approached us and asked us what our favorite Taylor Swift song was. I answered “Shake It Off,” as that was literally the only one of her songs I knew of. “That’s in the show!” the employee said, and for my trouble she gave us each a sticker from a bag she was holding.

The seats were nice, not recliners but big and comfortable. We were sitting in front of our son’s girlfriend and her friend, and when I showed them my sticker, it turned out they hadn’t gotten any, so we gave ours to them. The friend in particular was a big fan, and had already seen the movie the previous night, at a different location.

The movie, which is a film of Swift’s currently touring concert, turned out to be very long (but not even as long as the actual concert, as I understand it). It was filmed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, just last August. It was quite entertaining, and I enjoyed it throughout despite its length, and despite the small crowd of young girls who were noisily singing along to every song.

And I mean girls – just kids, some no more than 5 or 6, who knew every word of the lyrics, though I had to wonder if they really understood them. They were being supervised by their moms, who presumably were the ones who had indoctrinated them into the cult. The moms were about the same age as Taylor Swift herself, and recorded the girls on their phones as they paraded through the aisles and sang off-key. I’m sure it would have mortified any fire marshall, or voice instructor, who might have been there.

The show is a spectacle, with lots of fun sets with moving platforms, flashy costumes, and incredibly talented musicians and dancers. It is divided into multiple acts, each featuring songs from one of Swift’s albums, in chronological order. These are the “eras.”

But the thing about her music is, to me at least: all her songs sound the same. They have the same dancy beat, and I could barely tell the melody apart from one song to the next. The lyrics aren’t poetic so much as personal monologues, like each song is a journal entry. Her concert ends up being a musical about the last ten or fifteen years of her life.

What stands out about Swift’s performance isn’t her musical creativity so much as her incredible poise and presence. If she were an RPG character, her main stat would by charisma. I mean, she has it at legendary levels. How else do you think she got millions of followers? She’s been brashly telling them her life story through song, freely confessing to every insecurity and petty grievance, and they are hooked on it.

Swift is an iconic embodiment of the ambition and confidence of her generation of women. She’s a Millennial, and even identifies as such at one point in the program. Her generation was raised to believe in their specialness and their capability, and the women of her generation in particular have benefited from this upbringing. They are the “girl power” generation, and Taylor Swift surely projects power when she is on stage.

She projects the self-assurance of an independent woman, like the female pop singers of a slightly older age (Beyoncé is a great example) that came before her. I’m sure this is part of why the MAGA crowd is so annoyed with her. That and her support for Democratic candidates. It might be only superficially, but in her style and choices she is clearly on the side of the Culture Wars that supports diversity and inclusion. If MAGA has a problem with that, she just tells them: “you need to calm down.”

As I watched the spectacle on the screen, I realized that it reflected a vision of women and minorities empowered that is the antithesis of the reactionary MAGA vision. Taylor Swift’s cult of personality is thus in direct opposition to the one of that other guy. Joanna Weiss, writing for Politico, noticed this as well, commenting on the power of group belonging, and how it shapes politics.

Culture and politics instersect, and though Swift isn’t a politician, if her superfans of voting age follow her lead, she will certainly act as a counter to the other cult leader at the ballot box. His rallies might have their own energy and enthusiasm, but they don’t reach anywhere near the scale of a Taylor Swift concert. Judging from that alone, in the final anaylsis, the partiarchy doesn’t stand a chance.

A Gen X Life Story

A Gen X Life Story

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As the girl and I headed off to our 40th high school reunion at the end of last month, I needed a book to read on the trip. I picked The Gen X Girl’s Journal by Kari Thorsdottir, which had been on my reading list for a while. It seemed appropriate since we are both Gen Xers, born around the same time as the book’s author. Based on the book’s cover, I expected something like a memoir about the Gen X young adult experience, full of trenchant social observations and pop culture trivia. That’s what you expect from my generation.

What I got instead was a novel that very directly and subjectively describes the life of a woman named Annika, from her freshman year in college in 1985 all the way to current times, ending in the year 2019. It is somewhat of a conventional life – Annika joins a sorority in college, graduates into a white collar career, marries and has two sons, and struggles with balancing family life and work life. There are a couple of story arcs that achieve closure by the end of the book, which finishes with her 30th year college reunion, but for the most part the narrative just goes through the paces of an ordinary life, up until middle age.

The writing lacks literary embellishment, simply describing events and the characters’ thoughts and emotions from a third person perspective. It sometimes dwells on specific events, and at other times skips years in a single paragraph, reflecting how we typically recall our lives. Some moments stick with us, even as the years fly by.

I enjoyed the read, even though the story is so basic. I mean, I’ve read other memoirs of Gen X women born around the same time as me. Some have led more interesting lives, like commercial jet pilot Laura Savino; while others, such as professional writer Sari Botton, write with more literary flair. But in its unassuming way, Kari Thorsdottir’s book drew me into Annika’s personal experience, with all the intimacy of a journal or diary. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was based on the author’s own life, even though it purports to be a work of fiction.

As was the case with the other memoirs by Gen X women that I have read, I found that despite the significant differences that come with being a man, I still recognized and could easily empathize with Annika’s life experiences. She tread territory that was familiar to me, since she was born at the same time as me. That’s what it means to belong to the same generation; you share the same course through history. Anyone from my generation – man or woman – could easily see a part of themselves in Annika. And anyone from any generation would gain a better understanding of the Gen X life course by reading this book.

Here is the author’s link tree if you want to get a copy- https://linktr.ee/genxgirlsjournal