On Losing Friends and Continental Drift

There are very dramatic ways to lose friends. Messy ways. Slamming doors and shouting insults and throwing brandy glasses into the fireplace.

I don't know anything about that shit.  I've never really had a fight or seriously falling out with anyone. My friends are pretty great across the board... Seriously, if you have the link for this blog, chances are I think you're awesome.

But there's a slower, subtler way to lose friends. Or at least, lose touch of friendships. In the way that's gradual, and unintentional, and a result of slow circumstance.

Things change. People move. Lives reshuffle. And it's no one's fault. It's not malicious or deliberate, it's just that people have diverging plans. No one's trajectories are ever parallel, not entirely.

I'm lucky enough that I'm still in touch with most of my closest friends. But people grow up, and "schedules" become a thing, and relationships become things to be checked on occasionally and revisited.

But the trend slants toward chaos. And change. And people move apart without knowing or trying. On a geological scale, the continents are drifting beneath our feet, and things we thought immovable will never be in the place they were the last time we looked.

The end result is that I'm not sure what's constant, or if anything is, really. To say that I'm afraid of change is so trite and unoriginal that it's almost not worth saying. So what's the moral, the conclusion, as if all things should have one?

Hold on, I guess. The earth is working always to reshuffle us. If something or someone is important to you, hold on to them. Or at least cherish that they're there, for however long they are.

That's it.

On Humor, Self-Deprecation, And Why I Do What I Do

I'll never forget a conversation I had with my sister, Izelle, once. We were talking about our styles of humor, and concluded that all her jokes were about her being awesome, and all of my jokes were about me being awful.

That's an exaggeration of course. (Izelle's actually very modest and down to earth, therein lying the humor) But it's fascinating how different I am, humor-wise, in that it's hard for me to speak highly (or at least positively) about myself, even in jest.

I'll skip ahead to a main point of this post: the purpose of humor. Not to say there's only one purpose... But I think that one of the most powerful things comedy does is repackage the horrible and the frightening things in life and make them bearable. 

Used outwardly, we can take tragedy and injustice and spin them into satire. But you can also turn the skill inward, and I think that's where my self-deprecation comes from. Yes, it's meant to amuse people, but it's also a way for me to bring my very real fears to the surface.

I, like many people, am afraid that I really am awful. That I'm ugly, or unlovable, or in some way inadequate, and I need an socially acceptable way to talk about it. And so I joke about it. Because really, in an odd, selfish way, I need to voice these insecurities, I need other people to hear them, and I need to be able to dismiss the issues immediately afterward, before things turn grim, or, God forbid, intimate. Humor makes that possible.

But this is not a sad thing. Actually, it's a strangely wonderful thing. In humor, you and I can talk about the things that horrify us, things that depress us, things that threaten us, things that absolutely break our hearts... And then we smile, precisely when we shouldn't.

Few things I've ever done are as profoundly powerful as that.

On Blogging and the Evils of Emo

There was a time when young people, wracked with angst and unnameable frustration, had no way to verbally outlet their feelings other than venting them, out loud, to a friend, in person.

Thank God such barbarism is behind us.

Then came the Blogging Age, when any twelve year old with an email account could throw a up a weblog and shout from the virtual mountaintops to any schmuck willing to listen.

And shout we did. About anything. And everything. It was self-centered, indulgent, and over-dramatic, but it was also cathartic, and expressive, and everything I needed when I was 16. I continued blogging through my early twenties, but all the while something was shifting.

Emo became a thing. Not "emo" as description of style, or "emo" as a vague off-shooting subset of American indie-rock, but "emo" as a derogatory term for anything emotional.

"Stop being emo," we said to the whiners.

 But dammit, we also said it to people who were just hurting, to people who had something legitimate to say. And so we, as a generation, shamed ourselves into shutting up about things that actually mattered to us.

We moved on to the microblogs like Twitter and Facebook statuses, and eventually just throwing pictures at each other with Instagram. Which is fine. I enjoy those, actually.

But somewhere along the way we lost something. I don't think some of us ever got over the idea that "emo" is bad, and that no one wants to hear what we have to say (outside of short, newsfeed-able microbursts of expression).

So I'll say it now, for what little it's worth, for what little it means coming from me:

Emo is okay.

Blogging is okay.

And I'll whine that from the virtual mountaintops to any schmuck willing to listen.