I stole this from my LiveJournal...

but I liked it, so I'm putting it here. Word for word. To be fair to me, it was a lengthy endeavor and exactly what's on my mind so it's seems silly to restate it just because I'm a blog junkie. Just fill in all appropriate capitalizations, and there you have it. And Abby, you only have to read one journal today.

So as you were:

i offer this entry, laying it out like freshly cut flowers on the grave of livejournal.

before i go a-rambling, i would like to mention that i'm going to happy hour today. call me if you feel like joining.

alright. you can tune out now.

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before i moved to new york, i started listening to this song a lot. for some reason, i just knew that it might be like my experience in new york. just kinda knew. didn't even need the cards.

maybe because it's everyone's experience when they flee the coup. i don't know. maybe because i've always felt like nell of the forest, running out of my little ballet world, speaking a completely made-up language and trying to comb my hair with a fork, these phases in life that are so common seem surreal and completely new to me. i've decided my life would be far less awkward if i could do everything to an 8-count.

i was on the phone with ashlee the other night. we were just in awe of how to figure out what to do next in our lives. we were stumped. she called julie. she's stumped, too. and jaime, and amy, and...

ok. we're all stuck. nice to know it's not just a new york thing.

"is this a generational thing?"

we decided that it had to be, because if we were going to embrace the cliche about our generation being different, we were going to do it with gusto. but does it happen to all of us entering the real world after being in school for so long? or is it something in particular about our generations' experience with college, economy, opportunity, the coming of the apocalypse...?

ashlee calls generation x "generation angst."

"that was their thing. that's what they did."

ashlee and i, both being the youngest in our families, and cool bitches to boot, were always like the little mascots of generation x. because how adorable is it to see your 10 year old little sister rocking out to nirvana?

"so what's our generation?"

hmmm....stumped.

"and why is it we're all so unsatisfied and lost to what to do next?"

perhaps it's because we grew up with too many options. [violin player enters] this never would seem like a problem, but i remember growing up and being told i could do anything, anything at all that i wanted to do. i wasn't bound by my gender or protocol or whatnot.

i look at my life now and wondered why i never went for that whole astronaut thing.

but maybe it's like when i went into this cheese store. damn, i love me some cheese. but it took me about 45 minutes to pick ONE. ONE. we're not talking about elective surgery here, it's cheese, for god's sake. the choices overwhelmed me and i ended up making no decision at all. i picked up beer instead.

this is what my life is. i don't think i've made a single decision in my entire life, maybe because there were so many choices i never felt forced to choose any. and then i pick up beer.

i'm even in a play now, playing a character called fire who nobody knows if she's a girl or a boy. it was written by someone our age, and i think it's telling he wrote a character who can't even decide what gender he/she is. more on that one to come though. my attentions are elsewhere today.

maybe this is why we're all fucked up when it comes to love. i do the cheese thing again. or maybe i don't know good cheese when i see it. maybe my friends and i, as a sample of our generation, can't commit to another human being because there are even more options today when it comes to love. i've grown up in enough tolerance that anyone i choose isn't bound by age, race, or even gender. and we don't commit because there's always another option out there, maybe something better, someone more perfect...


my mom got married in her day because she loved the guy and it seemed nice enough. and she wanted to get out of her house. she tells me i over-intellectualize love too much. i tell her silently in my head that she's on her third marriage and perhaps she should intellectualize it more. but her under-intellectualizing has given her 3 marriages, and my over-intellectualizing will probably leave me with none. i bet i get a cat.

but i have a feeling that there's a happier balance between our two perspectives on the matter. and i think that when i find it, it will feel like this
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i think that all the options we were lead to believe that we have leave us with a weird perspective about time and the future. the present becomes something that is preparing us for something in the future. but what is that something?

i researched colleges while i was a freshman in high school. i planned out my schedule pretty close to how i ran it early on in college. and now? i'm building toward something with theatre. i think. or something. but in the meantime, what is there? what do i have now?

i have a rubber finger at work that prevents me from getting paper cuts.

do we focus so much on where we are going that we don't know where we are?

i currently have a lot of problems when it comes to this forward-thinking mentality. mainly because i was always such a planner. i had it all worked out, kids. down to the letter. i'm far more anal-retentive/ocd than i appear.

and then i almost died.

suddenly, the future became something that was not only uncertain, but un-promised as well. when you think about it, the only real inevitability is death, and the rest we just create for ourselves. we predict an outcome so well that it happens. we pretend that death is something that we can predict, or at least we do by proxy of that focus on the future. we've got it all backwards and upside-down.

but all our problems are squarely in the present. bills, rent, living somewhere in there. so what happens to a mind with all the solutions in the future and all the problems in the present? we busy ourselves so much with those immediate needs that i'm not sure how well it all fits together for that little future we've decided is ours. we live paycheck to paycheck, knowing where the cheapest food is, the nearest available fuck. so how does that help for my future plans of a satisfying career, a lasting love? there's got to be a way to reconcile the ghosts of our past, the absolute necessity of living in the present, while still keeping a mindful eye on the future that could or could not happen.

any ideas on that?

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in the end, we maybe decided that the problem is that we are the first generation to be let out into the world after an entire childhood spent medicating. ADD/ADHD/depression/acne/anxiety all have cures. turns out there's an easy fix for everything. this, on top of the belief of so many options, and the access to higher education, has left us more institutionalized than generations before.

ashlee called us generation ritalin. i called us generation Rx.

i said that we were like those animals that live their entire lives in captivity. they make a big deal about releasing it into the wild.

[opens cage, flails arms]

"go! be free little one!"

and we just sit there. we take one step outside the cage and lay down at their feet.

when's feeding time?

ain't nobody coming to feed you, little one.

and that's our generation. a huge wide world full of excitement, and we sit, waiting to be pet and fed and convinced that it must be beautiful out there, if only someone would show it to us for us.

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and that's all she wrote.