If I Ever Feel Better

When older people make sweeping generalisations about “Gen-Ys with their Twitters and their Facebooks”, I usually think they’re…well, generalising.  I was born in the 80s (at the early end) and I’m pretty comfortable with technology, but I’m not ADHD about it, nor do I feel the need to post daily pictures of my lunch with annotations of “OMG LOL”.  Nor do I think this is how most of my generation are.  But my goodness, today made me wonder.

Nikki wanted to go and check out the Finders Keepers markets in Eveleigh, so we jumped off the train in Redfern and decided to “follow the hipsters” rather than be too particular about directions.  It was a pretty safe strategy.  The group of late-teen girls we ended up tagging behind were animatedly discussing a friend’s relationship where - and I am not kidding - all the action related to changes of Facebook status.

“So she suddenly went from ‘in a relationship’ to ’single’ and I was like ‘What?’ and I dunno…like, maybe I should ask her or something?”

Like they say these days, if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.

At the markets, it was a pretty mixed group: hipsters, yipsters, parents with well-dress toddlers, schoolkids - a good cross section of White People.  It was cool enough, although even Nikki had to admit that after seeing 15 stalls with design grads theming their work around owls and birds and deer head, it gets a bit old.

While we were there, the live entertainment consisted of a girl who couldn’t have been more than 18 strumming her guitar and singing folky numbers.  The incongruous thing was that half of her set consisted of angsty early-90s covers (The Cranberries, 4 Non-Blondes etc) and the remainder was her own compositions including songs about - here we go again - Facebook.  Arguing with friends and stalking boys online.  Write about what you know, I guess.  But more than anything, I just want to know how someone born in the 90s even discovers 4 Non Blondes.

What I’m trying to say is this: people born before 1975, I apologise.  You were right.  I’m sure people my age have spent the last few decades looking just as absurd to you as these guys do.  I just have one last question: how did you not end up slapping us?

“You’re not blogging anymore,” said my friend the other day, someone I hadn’t seen in a few years.

“No, I haven’t really had the time.”

“I guess the angst is all gone too,” she said.  “You’re married, you’ve got a good job.”

Maybe.  I certainly don’t feel the same way I did when I was 24 and starting blogging.  As I said in my last, very self-referential post, maybe this site wouldn’t work if I ever did feel better.  But that’s not entirely it too.

Mostly I think I just got tired of the sound of my own voice.  The same tone, the same kind of thoughts about the universe.  It started to feel like I wasn’t writing anything that I would want to read if it was by someone else.  Has that changed?  I hope so.  Maybe I need to try a few new things - throw some ideas out there and see if they work.  Experiment a little.

Standing up the front at Phoenix’s Sydney show this month, Nikki turned to me during the opening bars of “If I Ever Feel Better” and said “I just realised where your blog gets it’s name.” This coming from a massive Phoenix fan.  So much for flaunting my hipster cred in my blog title.

It occurred to me that if you don’t know the song then I’m not sure how you’d interpret my title.  To be honest, it probably just sounds emo.  But the song is far from emo - it’s resigned, but hopeful.  It feels like better times are just around the corner.  I guess that’s where I was going two and a half years ago when I moved to Sydney and re-named my blog.

When I moved to Sydney, I couldn’t have expected what would happen within a year: that I’d meet my future wife, lose my job, go travelling, find another, get engaged.  But as it happens, I do feel better than in early 2007, thanks for asking.

A decade isn’t a long time, but it’s apparently enough to trigger some heavy nostalgia among movie critics.  Not only did Popmatters run a gushing feature earlier in the year about all the brilliant films of 1999, now the Guardian is declaring 1999 “a cinematic goldmine“.  I’m tempted to agree.  I contributed to the Popmatters series and it made me realise how well some late century movies are standing the test of time.  But it’s hard for me to assess how good it really was, when it was also the year that I turned 18, moved to the big city, and spent every moment not in class or the pub in a darkened movie theatre.  I lived and breathed movies that year and maybe - just maybe - I’m a bit nostalgic about it.

But what’s going on with the rest of the people writing these articles?  We can’t have all reached adulthood and embraced film-nerdery at the same time.  Have 28 year olds taken over the internet?

The internet makes everyone a critic - but fortunately it doesn’t make everyone a good critic.  Everyone knows the quality of your average Amazon customer review, especially the one-star reviews.

Thanks to the Guardian, I’ve now discovered Cynical-C’s “You Can’t Please Everyone”, which collects the brilliant, misspelled contrarian wisdom of Amazon reviewers.  You’ll need to devote a bit of time to reading these gems, but a few of my favourites are:

“The 80s produced some great artists like Rick Astley, Milli Vanilli, Culture Club, etc. Then this horrible Smiths abomination comes along and makes this cringe-inducing album.”

(Of “Moby Dick”) “Too nautical for me.”

Two thumbs up, guys.

My introduction to post-honeymoon married life was a little bit bumpy.  A stressful time at work, a pulled muscle and a bad head cold all left me a touch grouchy and irritable.  Luckily none of that outweighed the sheer joy I get out of coming home to find Nikki here, rather than thousands of miles away.

I always pictured marriage as being a synonym for “maturity”.  Married people had responsibilities and commitments and children and didn’t goof around.  My dozen or so young married friends have taught me otherwise, but I still saw them as being a little more serious.  Getting engaged to Nikki, I knew that there was no way a marriage certificate was going to make us anything close to “grown-up”.

I get reminded of this when I come home to find that Nikki has bought a decorative metal tree to hang all her earrings (and a metal elephant for her rings) and has spent the afternoon dancing to Passion Pit in a style I can’t possibly describe.  I’ll post a video one day, I promise. Anyway, it delights me and makes me do a little dance myself.

I’ve spent too much of the last ten years wanting to be old and now I’m savouring the feeling of being impossibly young.

It was 38 degrees (that’s 100 in American) and we nearly died in the attempt, but on July 4, Nikki and I tied the knot.  It was a quick ceremony - 11 minutes according to someone with a stopwatch and a sporting bent - but beautiful.

And now we’re married people, with whatever that entails.  So far, it’s mostly entailed being the laziest two humans in the world, eating delicious things and snorkeling with tropical fish.  Normal life resumes tomorrow, but with Nikki now properly around, it won’t be boring.

After my first day in my new job, I blurted out to Nikki, “I’ve got an office, a Blackberry and a personal assistant! Who am I?”

To be true, the PA isn’t strictly mine - I share with two others - but I do have someone is supposed to manage my diary, do my photocopying and make phone calls for me. At least, I think that’s what she’s supposed to do. I haven’t quite got this figured out.

I did a bit of a survey of people I know to see what they thought.

My dad, who has had assistants for years now, said that you can get them to do anything. Organise your personal travel, get cards for birthdays, arrange your dry-cleaning. Basically, whatever work is making you too busy to do. My friends, most of whom don’t have PAs, generally agreed. “I’d love to have someone to do everything for me,” was the typical response. Although one mate said that he’d had an assistant for a few months and was as clueless as me.

I just feel really uncomfortable asking someone the same age as my mother to do things I am able to do myself. But on the other hand, this dry cleaning won’t take itself to the shops.

Moving to the North Shore has its definite positives.  I can afford a place bigger than a shoebox.  I don’t find empty syringes or condom wrappers on my doorstep in the morning.  I can walk up the street to get coffee without smelling urine once.  It’s just so frigging…nice.  There are trees and people have washed and my neighbours are nice and I am realising that I have always been a bourgeois yuppy on the inside.

There are dangers too.  Naturally, the overwhelming upper-middle-classness of it all could mean that I forget that there are poor people out there.  I could start to believe that absolutely everyone drives a BMW or a Lexus and that a Honda Jazz really is no car at all.  I could start talking about my stock portfolio.  I could have a stock portfolio.  The possibilities are endless.

Another risk that Nikki and I observed when scoping out the area is that, like a number of other harbourside neighbourhoods, this suburb has recently experienced a “baby boom”.  It seems as if everyone around here is aged between 25 and 40 and pushing a pram.  It’s clearly the place you go when you want to buy a unit, do some renovations and have yourself a kid or two.

“Everyone’s nesting,” said my fiancée on seeing the young families dotting the park we were in.

“The worst thing is that they make it look kind of appealling!” I commented, guiltily.

“I didn’t want to come out and say it, but yeah…”

If you intend to stay young and footloose, you can’t be too careful where you live.

Today I was about to do another post about atheism when I realised that it was probably time for a change of approach.  It dawned on me, as it does very occasionally, that there are people out there who don’t have regular updates on my life and are actually interested in what’s happening.  Since I don’t use Twitter, rarely update Facebook (although I lurk pretty often) and don’t have time to verbally update everyone in my life, I guess this little blog is a good a place to spread the word.

So 2009 is quite the year.  Just over a month ago, I started another job - possibly the most challenging yet and a strangely exhilirating one.  This weekend, I move across town to a new and unfamiliar neighbourhood.  In a matter of weeks, I’ll turn 28 and get married to the most beautiful, funny, ridiculous girl I’ve ever known.  Out of that list, only turning 28 doesn’t feature in the rankings of “biggest causes of stress” - and yet I feel strangely calm.

Perhaps it’s watching all my fears at the beginning of the year turn out to be baseless that has given me a new assurance.  There were a lot of fears and absolutely every single one failed to materialise.  There’s a lesson in there about always assuming the worst, but it’s one that I’m learning only slowly.

Everyone I know says that they keep expecting their life to simplify and it never does.  I think I now know that too - and that the secret is in learning to enjoy yourself and find fulfilment in the spaces between the busyness.  They’re not always easy to find, but they are there.  A piece of unremarkable wisdom, sure, but one I’ve seen others realise far later in life.