The Way It Is

the color signatures of various elements when ignited

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Don't get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?

Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.

My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women's football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn't afford to go there anyway.

We've made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.

Then they become adults and it doesn't go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you'd better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they've deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it's a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there's any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?

My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she'd write me up for improper use of sick leave because you're not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don't know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.

Original report (waybacked PDF) is from 2007. That's Gen Z kids.

When I, Gen-Xer, was about 12 - in my rural home, I had about a three-mile range. (Could've pushed it to more, but didn't want to walk that far.) In the city, it was about a mile. Not that anyone was checking; again, that was about the distance I wanted to walk, and besides, that covered all of "downtown."

My kids? Closer to that 300 yards limit at the same age. Not because I wanted to restrict them, but we live next to a freeway on-ramp and between two sets of train tracks... and there is absolutely nothing kid-friendly within a half-mile for them to visit.

I spent my 21st birthday bar-hopping. My kids spent their 21st birthdays at home with a nice meal. I don't think either of them wanted to go bar-hopping - but yeah, as a society, we've removed a LOT of teen-friendly options.

See also: End of Third Places, switch from video game arcades to home consoles (hey, then every kid has to buy their own copy--great for game-makers!), shutdown of malls or restrictions on youth at them, closure of public parks, reduced/removed after-school programs, etc. Plus the places that think it's illegal for a 12-year-old to walk to the corner store unsupervised.

I am, however, DELIGHTED to hear that the booze & other vices industries are panicking over Gen Z not going out to party. Like, you spent 30-odd years removing all the places and ways people can hang out together and have fun outside of someone's personal house, and... guess what, when people hit milestone events (graduation, milestone birthdays, job promotion, whatever), they don't immediately flock to the Party Zone that they have never been welcome at. How shocking.

and nowadays?? we've made the bar so fucking high for these kids. i participated in this mock interview program as an interviewer guest from the library, where seniors would get a chance to pretend interview for a job with me to get some experience before they entered the workforce.

and my god. the resumes on these kids. they're pumped full of sports, arts, extracurriculars, awards, volunteer work, like 60% of them had already had at least one job, and at least 2 of them had already started their own fucking businesses.

like. i'm impressed of course, overall this isn't a terrible thing. but when do these kids get to take a break? when do ANY of us get to take a break?? we have made society so back-breaking that 15 year olds are starting businesses while they run the student council, attend five clubs, volunteer on the weekends, and do ever increasing mountains of homework to maintain a 4.0 GPA.

Like again. I was a fucking square in school. I had all A's in everything and i did extracurriculars, i even did some volunteer work here and there. but mostly i went home, i read books for fun, i went rambling in the woods near my house for no particular reason. i chilled out with my friends and doodled pictures and wrote piles of fanfiction. i spent so much time in high school just...relaxing and playing.

when are these kids getting time to do that, between all the stuff we expect of them? where are these kids getting the space to do that as we continue to push them out of every single physical space, because teens hanging out in a gaggle of friends is somehow threatening?

why are we expecting this much out of kids, out of young adults, while we refuse to offer even a fraction of what our parents and grandparents were given for a fraction of the work we're putting in?

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

😔

If you would like to join me on this long and patient llama hunt, I have prepared a crude map of the terrain so you can get your bearings. We are starting on the road right next to the neighbour's barn.

My first instinct was to resolve the situation through diplomacy. If the animals wanted to slightly broaden the grazing perimeter, well, okay; I could let them eat on the side of the road. Unfortunately, only Pirlouit supported this plan.

He kept trying to stop and eat, while the llamas had places to go.

So I followed them along the road for quite a while, patiently waiting to reach the wider stretch where I knew I could sprint ahead, overtake everyone and force them to turn around. Not yet a full victory but at least I'd feel like I was regaining some influence over events.

But Pampérigouste is familiar with my manoeuvres, and she turned around of her own initiative before we reached this spot, left the road, and led everyone into the woods for a bit (and almost managed to shake me off as I kept getting slowed down by brambles, being the only person in this situation who was wearing clothes); then she re-emerged on the road near the barn, and went into the neighbour's pasture. Which is quite vast, and goes all the way down to the torrent.

So naturally, Pampe went all the way down to the torrent—following a route of astonishingly unnecessary complexity and glancing back now and then to check that her followers had not lost faith.

The other animals clearly felt that once you've reached a vast and lush pasture, the logical next step is to stay and eat (while Pampe sees it as evidence that vaster and lusher pastures remain to be discovered.)

... that is, until we reached the torrent and I finally managed to turn everyone around, back in the direction of their pasture. At that exact moment, Pampe realised grazing was an urgent priority.

Once we finally reached the road, with Pampe bringing up the rear at an aggressively leisurely pace, I figured that if I got the rest of the herd back in their pasture, she would grudgingly follow.

I was wrong.

The other animals briefly hesitated (it was getting late; their pasture was right there; they don't like spending the night in unfamiliar places) before recommitting to Pampe.

We could have actually followed the road in this direction all the way back to my house, and therefore the other, upper gate to their pasture, bringing this expedition to a neat and peaceful conclusion. Pampe solved this problem by throwing herself into the woods.

At this stage I feel that my updated map will be more informative than human language.

(I made an attempt to restore coherence to our journey through the use of directional arrows.)

When we somehow ended up back in the neighbour's pasture after an exciting (not for me) chase through the woods, I admitted defeat, and texted my neighbour to let him know my animals would be spending the night in his pasture due to circumstances not meaningfully under my control, but I would be back on the case in the morning to get them home. Having met Pampe, he didn't ask any further questions.

I didn't really believe that the animals might magically return on their own during the night, but still I left the pasture gate open—but only the one near my house; the other gate by the neighbour's pasture remained closed because I just couldn't face the slope again.

And somehow, the next morning, when I opened my window, everyone was here.

I should add that my neighbour later found several tufts of llama wool caught on his fence in various places, allowing us to partially reconstruct the llamas' return journey (that's me in the background attempting to get a statement from his cow.)

I have therefore updated my map once more to illustrate (in green) the final stage of this expedition, based on physical evidence and on my partial understanding of Pampe's worldview.

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.