Wow.

Okay, so I get home yesterday, exhausted from a late bit of work — whip up some dinner (chinese dumplings, yum!), throw the laundry in the washer and rush downstairs with a bit of eagerness to start watching The Other Boleyn Girl. I really am a huge fan of that period in English history — and I read the best selling novel that the movie is based on and enjoyed it despite it’s hugely fictionalized nature, straying from the facts far too often for my own level of comfort. So — I was hoping for something great, something awesome, I mean isn’t Natalie Portman one of the best young actresses of our time (if not one of the most intelligent!?).

There were a LOT of things that bothered me about this movie, so forgive my ranting. I’m not saying that it was absolutely terrible, but for sometone who religiously watches The Tudors and finds it so much more fulfilling visually and intellectually. First off the film immediately starts off with the assertion that Scarlett Johansson is much more “attractive” than her sibling counterpart. Now this can be open to speculation, my male friend and I have Natalie Portman at the top of our respective “top 10″ lists. Subsequently followed by other brown haired beauties such as Jessica Alba and Biel. It’s nothing against Scarlett, she is surely a beautiful woman — and I suppose that the simpleton role is really the one that she deserves in this film. Her performance is coarse but fitting, her abilities on the screen are limited to acting hot and heated in the bedroom and playing the simpleton. Though Match Point was certainly an excellent film, the coarseness of her acting plays a stark contrast to the rest of the characters, the film wasn’t great because of her — there were other factors including the storyline, the performance of Johnathon Rhys Meyers (who actually plays King Henry in The Tudors), and the cinematography.  I hardly consider her work Nanny Diaries as her best film. I much prefer her pre-2004 work in such great films as Ghost World, Lost in Translation, and the Girl with the Pearl Earring. Poor Scarlett just looks awkward and out of place through the entire film, her acting leaves a lot to be desire, and not one ounce of her is very convincing. Natalie Portman, my favorite of the two possibly for her roles in V for Vendetta, Star Wars, Hotel Chevalier and her just generally awesome character in Paris Je T’aime and also possibly for the fact that she’s so hardcore she’s dating Devendra Banhart — they’re the greusome twosome for nerdlings and indie hipsters! Her acting struggles to be to par with that of  Natalie Dormer (who plays a much better albeit less attractive Anne Boleyn in The Tudors), it is clear that she has the basic idea behind it but I feel that she lacks the ability to play what some would call history’s most manipulative little bitch. She’s on half of the time, the other half she’s merely struggling to create the same idea. Queen Catherine reminds me of the ugly nanny from Nanny McPhee, when really I imagine her being something much, much more regal. I mean Catherine of Aragon was known for being a very beautiful woman in her youth — it wasn’t her fault that her husbands younger brother was attracted to her. It is so sad that this is what ended up being her demise.

Jim Sturgess who was in Across the Universe and perhaps better known for his lead role in the shitty book made rendition 21, plays George Boleyn. He flounders abouth throughout the movie looking positively ridiculous in the costuming — interacting well with Scarlett and Natalie but he’s not really given enough face time to have any large influence on the shittiness of the film. They don’t even touch on the fact that he was gay. His interaction with Zoe Kazan is by far some of the better acting in the film. Young Zoe completely emulates the idea of what Jane Parkhill would be like — her face is inquisitive, slightly snobbish and her demeaner completely embodies the role. For that I was happy, it was something that slightly redeemed the movie in my eyes. I’m in such a good mood now that I’m not even going to delve into how terrible it was to watch Eric Bana pass as Henry VIII, or even try to figure out why they cast the movie as they did.

Now for what I’ve been reading.

Generation Me: Why today’s young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled and more miserable than ever before. [ Jean M. Twenge]

My parents are young enough to where they’re not from the peak of the baby boomer generation, they kind of rolled in on the end of that train. But I know that they’re the kind of people that were  surrounded by those stern figures of authority and raised with that entire mentality that “Mom and Dad know what’s best”. Mom was still very young when she married my dad (21) and back then, that was acceptable. Just as acceptable as both of my Grandmothers a generation before getting married even earlier than that.  It’s such a contrast to now when I’m sitting in the middle of my office — I’m surrounded by ladies in their late twenties just now discussing the prospect of marriage — however all of them are well educated, got mostly A’s in school and have both a Bachelors degree and have attended Graduate school. When I first left Texas I thought I was running away from those girls who just wanted to re-live the high school experience in College, get away from the big hair and the drawls, the boots and the denim skirts. But there I also see people that are willing to start their family young, to get married in or right out of college, and part of me thinks that it’s really not that bad. I aggree with Dr. Twenge in that a lot of our society is incredibly Narcissistic (I’m only 1/3 of the way through the book, I can’t draw complete conclusions as of yet) but a lot of me feels like I’m an anomoly according to her statistics.

For example according to Dr. Twenge “The individual has always come first, and feeling good about yourself has always been a primary virtue. Generation Me’s expectations are highly optimistic: they expect to go to college, to make lots of money, and perhaps even to be famous.”

I was raised in an environment where I was treated as an equal and with respect. Not necessarily one that was a self-esteem booster, but one that allowed me to take pride in any accomplishments that I had made and pushed me to strive for greater things. As for the rest, I feel that most have my generation has been raised with the standard that the college degree was the last generations high school diploma equivalent. We have been raised and taught that what we need to succeed in life NOW is a college degree — of course don’t push us all to go to college if you’re going to just accuse us of being overly optimistic about it. If you really wanted to go to college, you can, the question is being driven enough to get there. As for making money, I don’t know about anyone else — but I’m seeing an awful lot of Psychology degrees out there, I have friends left and right English Majors, Environmental Science Majors, Graphic Design & Photography Majors, sociolgogy majors. Do you really believe that these are kids striving to make a mean dollar? I’ve done research and I’m fully aware that in the field I’m in that my starting salary is going to be ~45,000 dollars, or approximately 1/5 of what my dad makes on a yearly basis. Do I expect to be as successful as my father? No, maybe if I had decided to become a business major with a minor in Entrepenurial Studies then I could have that dream but I am fully content to realize that for the next 10 or 20 years I’m going to be struggling, hopefully making ends meet with a husband whose salary is the equivalent or greater than mine. I’m not sitting here expecting to become a famous designer like Paula Scher, Michael Beirut or Stefan Sagmeister, I’m just hoping to get along somehow and maybe do something that I enjoy doing. That is what I had instilled in me from the beginning, my parents basically said “I don’t care what you do, if you wanted to play the bagpipes professionally then go ahead, but do what you love, what you enjoy, and what you do well.” (That’s not a direct quote, but it’s essentially what they said.) They always pushed me to do my best, I know that it surely killed them that I wanted to work in a creative field, but they did their best to help me grow in my work, sent me to programs, and now I’m one of the top in my class. I don’t regret any of it, I’ve worked hard to get where I am today, but I am striving for neither fame, nor fortune. I just want to do my job, do it well, and live my life in a way that is cohesive with society.

“Eighty-one percent of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll released today said getting rich is their generation’s most important or second-most-important life goal; 51% said the same about being famous.”
-USA Today

“Money is by far their most important problem; 30% cite financial concerns. College and education was the second-biggest concern at 18%, and careers and jobs were third at 16%.”

I can understand where the latter statistic is coming from. It’s the natural heirarchy of things, in order to go to college you’re going to need money, and in order to make money, you’re going to need a job, but in order to get a good job, you have to go to college. It’s this never ending black hole that keeps sucking kids in. I was very fortunate to have gotten a scholarship which augmented my parents financial support, allowing them to pay less. I’m going to a school where I can also get real work experience ( a year and a half’s worth ), where I get to make real (not monopoly!) money and that also goes towards my education. It hurts me to think that kids don’t get the best opportunities simply because of the lack of money.

I haven’t finished the book yet but it has caused me to do a great amount of reflection upon myself and the way I was raised. My parents I feel did a good job of raising me, mostly because I feel like I don’t fit into a majority of the statistics presented in the book. Sure I have self-confidence issues, and sure I have high-reaching goals, but I feel that that is a problem that many teenagers face, especially those who view themselves as even somewhat intellectual. It also causes me to look at the people around me, analyze the situation a little bit better. Sometimes I don’t understand how some people don’t strive to do better, when they have so much potential, or I’m astonished at just how lazy some of the people around me are. I don’t really know, I’m hoping that Dr. Twenge’s book will answer a few of my questions for me. But we’ll see.

Some analysis (Exposed)

I was perusing through the New York Times website yesterday as I was sitting hopelessly bored at my desk waiting for the never-ending large-scale printouts to finally finish. Eventually with enough clicks on various links throughout the labyrinth of a site I came across this article which is set to be published in the Sunday Magazine. I have to say that I was intrigued, I’m always interested in things regarding social media — and Emily Gould is a well known blogger (considering her previous experience with Gawker), I was hoping to delve into a wealth of information, how to be disovered,  maybe get those answers as to why so many of us blog today, you know, those sorts of questions. Instead I found an overwhelming amount of crap — she’s an excellent writer that is for sure, a 10 page article on the NYT website is a fairly uncommon thing in itself, but to have it fairly well written and interesting well that’s an accomplishment right there.

I suppose I’m going to just dissect it in bits, some of her comments and actions bothered me, some other things made me wonder, others I simply had an opinion on.  I’m not really attacking her writing or her, I simply had a lot of thoughts while reading the article, and I feel that need to get them all down.

All excerpts from this article are in italics [ and blockquoted ].

“The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry [...] Henry, seemingly alone among our generation, went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal.”

Damn, that guy is smart. If you even Google my name now you’re going to find a Vimeo account, my blog, as well as a couple of other websites I run. There’s also undoubtedly my address somewhere in there, a way to contact me, maybe even a phone number. There’s LinkedIn, Scribd, Twitter. Heck I even have a lot of my medical history linked to a Google Health account. If there were anyone who really felt like stealing my identity all they’d need is my Facebook account and I’d probably be done for.  Not to mention all of the original Google-fears that everyone has. My mother is incredibly afraid of Identity theft — having suffered it multiple times. I however freely give all of my information away to the tangled tubes of the internet, at least I’ll be able to say that I admitted that it could happen.

“Once, I made fun of Henry for referring to “Project Runway” as “Project Gayway.” He worried that “people” — the shadowy, semi-imaginary people who read my blog and didn’t know Henry well enough to know that he wasn’t a homophobe — would be offended. He insisted that I take down the offending post and watched as I sat at my desk in our bedroom, slowly, grudgingly making the keystrokes necessary to delete what I’d written.”

I think that she touches on this later on in the story. However I don’t understand how one can feel comfortable enough to mention their significant others in their own blogs. I mean, I myself divulge a fair amount of information. Maybe going so far as to mention incidents with friends, but my relationships I have always felt a need to keep private. It’s really my sort of thing, trying to protect it and keep it in a little bubble while I can. If there’s problems they’re internal and not meant to be shared with the world — and even if you need advice you should have it be personal — not have some sort of ridiculous expose and only display one side of the story… But that’s just my opinion.  He was right to be angry — and she should have known better especially considering that he preferred his minimal presence on the internet. Something like that must have felt terribly violating.

“I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt.”

This is something that I incredibly enjoy about the internet, and the entire concept surrounding a blog. I was always raised in a household where even though I was allowed to voice my opinion, Mom and Dad would still maintain that their point of view was “right” no matter what I said. They always raised me to say and do what I felt is right and to an extent I feel like I do — which I may not always do in the most productive manner — and sometimes I do pretty crazy things (dreadlocks)…but it’s always turned out alright in the end. I feel like my maintaining a blog really allows me to have an outlet. I’ve always enjoyed writing and to have that unconstrained ability to say and write whatever you want is incredibly freeing. We were always raised in this society where English Teachers decide your topic, or in History you have to answer your Document Based Questions, there was hardly ever that freedom to do exactly what you willed — to go crazy and to be creative and free. That is what I love about writing my own blog.

“It’s easy to draw parallels between what’s going on online and what’s going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.”

I felt like this was a slightly limited observation — there’s been some death of scripted televsion, but it’s only dying when compared to the SONIC BOOM that is reality TV. There is this book that was released that I’ve been dying to read titled “Generation Me” and it’s talking about just how selfish our generation is, how self-centered and self-obsessed. Our generation has really lost touch with reality — I think that a lot of us feel like we can easily become famous, that we can Myspace Whore ourselves out enough til we can reach Tila Tequila status. Maybe we can even get our own reality TV shows! OH YEAH! This part of my generation really sickens me, when I see girls from my high school desperately auditioning for every MTV slot that comes along. Why would you want to do that?  Emily is right here that everyone is just dying for their chance to be on television — I’m sure that everyone wishes that they could be famous, I always sincerely wonder AT WHAT COST.

“Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.”

I would never personally have done a lot of what Emily reveals that she did here. That’s just me. I’ve always been a relatively shy and introverted person, I never liked announcing my personal problems to the world, and a lot of her actions here are specifically vindictive and hurtful. I have such a guilt complex that I would probably never even be able to really deal with it. Heck I still feel terrible for picking on Stephen Potter in 11th grade Chemistry — simply because he was annoying me at the time. I always of course had my little sketch book where the pretty cheerleader girls who were never nice to me somehow found their way to a fiery death or a hangmans noose but I certainly never CIRCULATED it. I mean, the Bible beating “Christians” that I attended school with already thought I was a Wiccan, I wasn’t going to let them think I was a homicidal maniac as well.

“In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting “Manhattan media gossip,” which it did, sometimes — catty little details about writers and editors and executives, mostly. But it was also a clearinghouse for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.”

My only comment about this was HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? Especially considering that she only had one small blog at the time, a couple hundred readers — no big whoop. How do you get attention like that? That’s ridiculous. Then again I don’t know if I could do that simply because the high stress environment. 12 posts a day? Shit.

“I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! Never again would I have to censor my office-inappropriate sentiments or shop the sale racks at Club Monaco for office-appropriate outfits.”

I know that feeling all too well (except I never shopped the sale racks at Club Monaco — super cool clothes but out of my price range fo’ sho’ [that was me too poor to afford r's]). Or at least the office job where I feel like I don’t fit in at all. Telling your boss that you’re more of a “choose your own adventure” book rather than a Mystery is sometimes a mistake, as is labelling your top drawer “Pirate Hats”.

“Another person I ended up I.M.-ing daily was one of Gawker’s most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and then into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. Julia wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in high-profile ways — her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship’s ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia’s naked attention-whoring — “Attention is my drug,” she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how badly she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her — even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.”

All that I can really say about this is that I really strongly dislike Julia Allison — maybe I was a little jealous of her because she dated the super cute, really nerdy, and very strange my kind of guy and creator of Vimeo Jakob Lodwick, however I really think it’s just because she’s a huge attention whore. Girls like that are still living in high-school, they need to be the prettiest, have the best clothes, and date the most high profile guy. She really just disgusts me. At least she “thrusts out her breasts”. Maybe if I stand up straight I’ll look prettier — or seem to have bigger boobs.

“I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it.”

Okay, her comment is slightly true — she may not be featured in OK or People with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. She’s sort of famous within her own Microcosmic community. Just like Perez Hilton with celebrity blogging would be or Tim Buckley, (really dreamy) Ryan North, Randall Munroe or Jeph Jacques would be in the realm of webcomics. ROFLCon did a really good job of illustrating that with internet memes, and such. Emily Gould and Julia Allison are really only important within their own little world of New York and the Blogosphere that is covered by Gawker Media (okay, not so little world — but still — my mom doesn’t know who she is).