I think I’m done…

…studying for my first Environmental Science exam, even though I’ve got at least two more hours in which I could pour of my notes some more.

I used to do this in undergrad (grad school didn’t really have exams). I’d just reach a point and I’d stop; I couldn’t study any more. Well, I could have, I suppose, but I just felt full up and that anything more was just overflow. But maybe that was justme being lazy,  a slacker. Still, I didn’t do half bad in college — community college, undergrad and grad school. So…

In any case, I can’t help wondering what difference it will make. Good grade, bad grade. What am I doing anyway? Aren’t there more productive/constructive ways I could be spending my time? Is this just a distraction? From what? And why?

I guess I just got kind of worked up about the idea of Environmental Science, but as always the reality set it. And as we all know Reality Bites, right. I know because I’m watching it on cable…again. This was a profound movie for me when it came out. Just as Generation X by Coupland was a profound book for me and Smells Like Teen Spirit was a profound album for me.

I still like the movie. But I guess I just woke up one day and realized that I wasn’t Troy. Oh, sure, I might be a slacker extraordinaire but I’m not as smart as the character is supposed to be. And I never was. I may have thought I was for like a blink but …

Anyhoo…it’s been kind of existential (if that is the proper term) day. Can you tell?

this GenX dad on Superbowl Sunday…

…can  only hear the roaring of the crowd from the TV set in the other room — Go Colts! — because I’ve chained myself to the desk in the office in order to study for my first exam in the Environmental Science course that I decided, for some dumb reason, to take. We can use one 4×6 card of notes for the exam, so i’m carefully selecting info, typing it out and shrinking it down to 8 pt. font and pasting it to a card. So far it’s working quite well. Although as per usual I’m sure I’ll forget something. Hopefully the test is all multi-choice. I rock at those. And at essay exams. Fill in the blanks, though, I suck at.

I still have to write 1-2 page CTR (current topic report) as well,  in which I distill a news article that is relevant to the course in some way. I have the article, this time on the increased growth rate of trees in the northeast part of the country, but I’ve yet to write it. Hoping to do that tonight.

Add to that a pretty busy first half of the week. Wife is out of town on biz. While she’s working hard in the Big Apple, I’ll be filling in for my daughter’s Brownie troop outing to a local police dept for a safety program. Not only am I driving but I’ll be providing snacks – got em, check! Then on Tuesday morning my daughter has an 8:45am doc. appt. (need to remember to call school to let them know she won’t be there in morning) after which I need to hustle her to school and the head for work. Now, I’ve got a babysitter lined up for Tuesday night so I can go to class to take this exam but if it snows too hard (is it supposed to?) that could fall through. Have a couple of options, though. We’ll see.

Damn, I feel tired just writing this.

An old GenX story…

In many ways Tisha Kulak-Tolar’s novel, Gen X, is an old story.

Girl meets boy. Girl befriends boy. Girl shares a place with boy.  Girl pines for boy while boy boffs a string of ditzy, sex-pots. Girl and boy eventually fall in love. Then fall out. And eventually have one last good-bye shag. And all is far from being right with world.

Well, an old Generation X story, anyway.

Of course, that is reductive; there is more to this story than that.

And let me just say before I proceed any further (or is it farther; I need to watch Finding Forrester again to clarify). Anyone who bothers to read my blog knows that I read a lot but also that my posts about books are more like reactions than reviews. At least, that is how I think of them. Because I may start out talking about the book but end up on the planet of irrelevant tangents. So with that….

Of course, I was flattered that Tisha would want me to “review” her book on my blog (she is the first but hopefully not the last author to do so) but I was also a little leery because it seemed a bit chick-lit-ish to me, and at risk of coming across as some kind of literary snob I have to admit that such fiction is really not my thing. But I figured if Tisha went through the trouble of contacting me and sending me her book, at no charge to me, then the least I could to do was give it a go. So I did.

And as I read something happened. I began to care about what happened to Genevieve Xavier, aka Gen X, (clever, I know), and that is arguably the main ingredient for a successful story.

Gen X is a 22-year old woman who lives with her friend Jared,  a man-boy on whom she has a crush, but Jared is too busy banging anything with a hole and heartbeat and a big rack. Or so it seems. One night he tells Gen how he really feels about her, if one is to believe such a scoundrel. But hey, Han Solo was a scoundrel too and he turned out to be a stand-up guy?

Jared turns out to be a stand-up comedian, a pretty good one at that. And before Gen and Jared know it they are on their way California where Jared is going to be a big star and Gen is going to manage his career.  But Gen is quickly maneuvered out of that roll by a savvy, ruthless agent who has here designs on Jared. After a brief stay at the home of an actor that Gen had an almost tryst with back in Philly, the city she and Jared started in, and where she meets a budding sweetheart of an actor named Scott, Gen finds herself living back at home with  her parents — ugh! — and working a suck-ass McJob for a Temp Agency. Could things possibly get any worse?

Then answer is: yes they can. They always can. Every GenXer knows that. Gen meets Chris, a guy with a big brown eyes and, it turns out, drug habit.

And this is where the story takes a darker turn and where you really find yourself alternately routing and fretting for Gen. Will she end up stuck in her home town? (The horror!) Will she make it back to Philly? (Mmmm cheese steak sandwiches!) Or even California? (living large, or at least relatively warmer than on the east coast) What will happen when Jared returns to Philly while on tour? (Dunt dunt da!) Well, you’ll have to read the book to find all that out, won’t you. I’m no spoiler.

The thing that is so (oddly?) compelling about Gen X is that you can pretty much see the mistakes the Gen is going to make. But that doesn’t deter you from reading on. It’s like watching the painful home vidoes on that show with that guy that makes mildly amusing remarks to an laugh track that is way too amused. You want to look away, but you just can’t.

You want warn Gen — No, don’t do that. Can’t you see what a mistake you’re making? But of course you don’t, because Gen is, after all, just a fictional character. And that would be just silly, like yelling at Rocky Balboa to get up in that final scene of Rocky. It’s pointless, but I did it anyway.

I don’t know. Maybe I saw my 22-year-old self in Gen, making poor decisions, and what I really wanted to do was save myself. Ugh! I sound like a Boomer in therapy. Somebody shoot me. Now!

Even if you could communicated with Gen, we all know it wouldn’t make a difference. Because she’s not going to listen. I know I wouldn’t have at that age. And to tell you the truth, I don’t really regret. Well, not too much anyway. Besides, it’d be a pretty boring novel if Gen didn’t end up in a tangled web of regret and broken hearts. That’s drama!

Finally, I have to say that I really admire the gumption to self-publish. I’ve not mustered the moxie to give that a go myself. Of course, I’d have to have something completed to do that anyway. It must be difficult. And one of the downsides of it is not having professional copy editors and proof readers to go over your prose, tune it up, and make sure to parse out all typos and mistakes. This book could have used that kind of care, because no matter how much I tried I couldn’t help marking corrections, like when I was a freshman comp instructor. It was distracting, but not so much that I didn’t keep reading.

It was fun! And who doesn’t like a spot of fun now and again?

About Last night’s class

It wasn’t as bad, maybe because it wasn’t as cold.

Got to campus early after dinner with the wife and daughter — mmmm burrito!  Since I had time I decided to check out the library. I hadn’t been in it years. When I first went to Macomb, I worked in the library. It was as pretty cool job. The library has since been remodeled — a new front desk and now there is a cafe inside. Bookshelves have been slight rearranged. I found myself wandering down the American Literature isle. It was funny how some of the book spine were still familiar. I used to spend a lot of time in the library, studying, sure, but also just discovering new stuff to read.

I searched the collection of Best American Short Stories volumes for the one with a story by my former teacher at Western, Jaimie Gordon. Found it. It was my favorite bit of writing by her. I started reading it but knew I’d never be able to finish. Perusing to the end of the fiction section I pulled down a small book of John Updike stories. The cover had been rebound but pages practically fell out when I opened it. I wondered when was the last time anyone had picked it up. Not that many people attend Macomb with literary ambitions, or so it always seemed to me. Community college is a practical place — people want to be trained for jobs, or educated to go on to a four-year university to be educated for a slightly better job.  I wondered if I’d ever picked up this collection before. It was all stories about the Maples, a married couple who end up getting a divorce. Of course, it is an Upike story. What else would the do? The most famous of these stories is Separating, which I still adore.

Anyhoo… standing there among those books I knew that even if I do manage to muster enough enthusiasm to get another degree English, books and writing will always be where my heart, always what I felt I was meant to do. Just haven’t been able to make money at it yet, not enough anyway.

Got class….

….tonight. And not really looking forward to trudging across campus from the parking lot in the cold. Ugh!

Any excitement I had for taking this course pretty much dried up last week when it was really cold. It just felt depressing. That’s not to say I don’t find the Environmental Science class that I’m taking interesting. I do. But I beginning to wonder why I really took it. I mean, do I expect to start a whole new career? Or what?

Sure there’s nothing wrong with taking a class just because you’re interested but I can’t help feeling that I’m trying to return to something. What exactly, I can’t say? Perhaps I thought I’d recapture something that I felt their all those years ago, when I was a young twenty-something first time college student. I did well then. I was excited about my classes. I figured I was going somewhere. Where exactly I couldn’t say beyond transferring to a four-year university.

Now, going to class really feels like work. I”m tired and yet I have a hard time just sitting still. I want to do well and don’t really care at the same time.

Thing is, I was good at school. I did well. I enjoyed it. In the work world, not so much. I’ve felt often very inept ever since I left grad school and stepped into the “real world,” into corporate publishing at the time, a job that did not work out well for me, which I did not excel at, unlike school, which I always excelled at. Perhaps there’s something in that? I don’t know.

Anyhoo…thanks for attending this installment of my navel-gazing self-pity party chock full of ennui and angst. Come back next time when I when I lament my thinning hair.

The new GenX books are here! The new GenX books are here!

Anyone who bothers to read this humble blog knows that I read… a lot. And from time to time I like to fancy myself a bit of literary opine-er, pontificating on and about the book or books that I happen to be reading at the given moment. In the past, I’ve always chosen the book. But that has recently changed.

Twice in about two weeks two different authors contacted me, asking if I would review their books. I was both surprised and delighted, and of course flattered. Often I figure the only people reading my blog are the few family and friends that no my fragile ego needs constant bucking up.

I’m also a little angsty over the prospect. First, it would be just my luck that such opportunities would come up just as I am starting my class at the community college  — reading and studying to do. And I’m on a  deadline to finish a short story to enter in a contest. Things always seems to come on like that, all at once. Make me nervous, and honestly want to downshift into comfy slack mode. But I’m determined to not do that this time.

Anyhoo… here are the two books that I’ve been asked to review.

First, a novel entitled Gen X by Tisha Kulak-Tolar, which I’m about two thirds of the way through already and should finish soon, and which is available at amazon.com.

And second, a nonfiction book about generation x in the workplace entitled What’s Next Gen X?: keeping up, moving ahead, and getting the career you want, by Tamara Erickson, which I’ve only overlooked briefly to start with but am eager to dig into. Usually, I’m not that interested in these workplace/business books about Generation X but recently I’ve been thinking that my own career — yes, I have a job! — away from the computer, this blog, my fiction efforts, could stand an upgrade. Hopefully, I get some useful info out of Tamara’s book.

Thanks to both authors for seeking me out. I promise to deliver.

The post I’m NOT going to write about JD Salinger’s death

Unless you’ve had your head up your backside this past week, you know that JD Salinger died [no link required - just google it for crying out loud]. Dude was 91, and he was healthy an active right until about the first of this year. Hope I’m that fortunate.

Anyhooo…I respect the way JD Salinger chose to live his life as much, if not more, than his work. And I’m not going tarnish that respect by blubbering about what his books meant to me.

I’ll just say this: He lived. He wrote. He died.

And I just hope that some of what he wrote will yet be available to read.

The Gilligan Island Effect

Just got back from my 2nd day (well, night) of class. Man, that campus is desolate when 10pm classes let out. Not really scarey or spooky, though. Not like being at Wayne State in downtown Detroit at night. Just quiet. There’s something about a college campus at night that I really dig.

Anyhoo… second class, second GenX popculture reference. This time it was Gilligan’s Island, when the instructor was pointing out spots on a photograph of the earth from space. He was identifying Hawaii so of course he had to make the Gilligan Island reference. How could he not? Right.

And like that I had the title for my first CTR (Current Topic Report).  Every few weeks we have to select a news article that we can relate to what we’ve been talking about in class. For my firt one I’m using an article about bicycles made out of bamboo. My intention it to relate it to sustainiblity since bamboo is a renewable resource where as metals are non-renewable. And according to the article bamboo is indigenous in many different place in the world. And if you can make bikes out of bamboo why not other things? Also, this bamboo bike movement is working to help alleviate poverty in developing nations by teaching people from such places to make bicycles out of bamboo thus providing them with a means of transportation.

But the title of my CTR, right. I’m going to call it the Gilligan’s Island Effect. Pretty catchy, eh?

I just started thinking about how they made everything out of bamboo on Gilligan’s Island. Even a pedal-powered car at one point. Maybe it was just a fantastical TV show, but why couldn’t some of it become reality? Why couldn’t we make things out of bamboo instead? Things like broom and mop and duster handles. Swiffers too. Think of all the little things that you see in place like Target that don’t need to be metal or plastic. It boggles the mind.

Anyway. That’s my topic and I’m sticking too it.

Curious, irrelevant aside. The young woman sitting in front of me had multiple piercing in her ears, even up on the top part. I didn’t realize that people still did that. Also, she had a tiny tattoo of a star on one hand and a tattoo of some musical notes just behind one ear. I wasn’t ogling. I just happend to notice. I can’t helpt it. It was an interesting detail. And I collect such details. Store them in my head for possible later use in a piece of fiction.

GenX parents v. teachers

Courtesy JenX67, here are a couple of really great advice/informational article for teachers re: GenX parents.

The first one is by a GenX mom who fully admits to stealth-parenting, which is so much cooler a label (I mean if you have to have one) than helicopter parenting, which was/is a Boomer thing.

Here’s a taste (i.e. quote from the article):

“They’ll go over your head if they don’t get the results they want from you,” says Anita Thomas, who taught science in a public school in Beaufort, South Carolina. That makes sense, says Lisa Chamberlain, author of Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction. “Anything that smacks of bureaucratic red tape or protocol is an irritant,” she explains. “We had to fend for ourselves, which is great if you’re an entrepreneur, but not when you’re a parent.”

The second is by generational guru Neil Howe:

Many Gen-X parents acquire a surprising degree of (self-taught) expertise about teaching methods and will bring stacks of Web printouts into meetings with teachers. A quip often used by former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings (herself a late-wave Boomer, born in 1957) speaks to many Gen-X parents: “In God we trust. All others bring data.”

This local, pragmatic, bottom-line perspective certainly contrasts with the more global, idealistic and aspirational perspective of Boomers. It has driven the rapid growth of parent-teacher organizations that opt out of any affiliation to the National Parent Teacher Association. According to many younger parents, the PTA is simply too large, too inflexible, too politically correct and too deferential to the educational establishment.

GenX in midlife crisis mode

Ever wonder if you’re going through a mid-life crisis?

Think about it. GenXers are reaching that age.

Anyway, I do. And other times I just think that I’m not getting enough fiber in my diet.

I just turned 42 (which btw is NOT twice as cool as turning 21) and that definitely put me in that mid-life freak out range. Still, I have to say that I’ve no desire to buy a sports car. I like my Civic — it’s plucky. Maybe because I’m not really losing my hair I’m not as prone to a mid-life crisis. Still.

I’ve developed a nostalgic fixation on things from my childhood and adolescence. Most recently it’s been BMX. I got super geeked when the library where I worked decided to start carrying BMX Plus, one of my favorite magazine when I was kid. I’d read each issue until literally fell apart. Also, this past summer I rescued the BMX bike that I gave to my nephew years ago. He’s 17 now, a senior, and predictably more interested in cars than bikes. The bike is an SE Quadangle and it needs some work to say that least — new wheels, brake cable, refurbishing of crank barrings and chain etc. But that’s going to be a project this summer.

But from what I’ve read this is a healthy way to channel mid-life crisis energy. At least, according to this WSJ article it is. And the WSJ wouldn’t lie. They’re a newspaper after all. And GenXer’s are more likely to take a healthy approach to mid-life than, oh, say Boomers — the kings of freak out!

Leave it to GenXers to take it in the opposite direction of  Baby Bo0mers. And it isn’t just oh so ironic that that direction would be a positive one. Because, you know, Generation X is cynical and pessimistic and being positive just isn’t cool, right.