Carrying Yourself Inside Out

To My Youngers,

I am excitable. I'm an excitable person. Maybe not excitable like what that word actually means, but excitable in that I get excited about things. And when I get excited I get, well, quite excited. I use a lot of exclamation marks! I talk more loudly! My voice goes up in pitch (like a seventeen year old boy)!

It took me a while to see it, but for a few years there I was stifling that excitement. It leaked out for sure (how could it not?) but mostly when talking to students about their art (the times I get so excited I couldn't contain it if my life depended on it. Well, maybe only if my life depended on it...). In most other ways it just seemed to get buried beneath a bunch of worries and stress and grown-up stupidness. Then I made some changes. And with those changes came a resurgence of the excitement. Music and Movies and TV started to regain their magical powers, books became engrossing again. The sun shined a little brighter, the cloudy days seemed more purposeful. I rediscovered a laugh I had forgotten I had.

And why hide that? It doesn't mean I don't take things seriously, it doesn't mean that I see the world as a permanently happy place (once again being able to appreciate melancholia without getting sad might be my favourite thing about being excitable again!), it just means I'm not apologizing for being me. And thats a pretty good place to be.

After all, your insides are who you are, why do anything other than wear them proudly?

-E

Family Friendly

To my elders,

I love kids. I do. I plan on having some, someday. But I f*cking hate things that are “family friendly.” Places that are designed for children, by all means, should be geared towards children. Public parks. Children’s libraries. Chuck E Cheese. And that is great for toddlers. Toddlers should be protected. They are not capable of understanding explanations and often not even basic safety rules. But this idea that we should clean up the world of adults, that we should protect kids from what makes up the other 80% of the world, not even that, that we should pretend it doesn’t exist, is stupid and annoying. Stupid because when these kids discover it, possibly earlier than we did thanks to the internet, they will need to deal with it. Annoying because I hate censoring myself just because I am craving McDonald’s fries.

I knew all your basic swear words by the time I finished first grade. I think it took me 4 years before I ever repeated one. I didn’t understand the sex jokes on early seasons of Friends but I watched it every week anyway. And maybe these things are why I had the mouth of a sailor when I was 15. And maybe not. Because I still had a 4.0.

I warn my friends that there are small children near by at the mall when I can feel some swearing or inappropriate story coming on. The friends who tell those types of stories, however, often could care less. So why do I actually hate places that are “Family Friendly?” Because they missrepresent the world. Its like watching Leave It to Beaver and thinking that it represented family life in the 1950s accurately. It is like then trying to reconsile Leave It to Beaver with Mad Men and The Feminine Mystic and The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit and remembering that our grandfathers killed people in WWII. Or may have killed people or would have killed people if they’d made it to Europe before the War ended. Tom Rath killed 19 people. Pete Campbell got a girl pregnant the night before his wedding. The version of the world that “family friendly” portrays, the world that 1950s Americana portrayed, does not exist. “Family friendly” is like Pleasantville. It is two-dimensional. It is without real personality or complexity or interests. Or maybe Pleasantville is just where I got the idea. But I’m sick of pretense. Truth is far more interesting. Truth in its grittiness, its uneasiness, its awkwardness, its heartbreak and honesty, its beauty and joy and silliness. Its louder and dirtier and more dangerous, as Toby Maguire put it. And I like it so much more than the “family friendly.” And one day, those kids will too.

-K

Melancholia and Music

To my youngers,

Sometimes its nice to feel sad. Not usually, usually its not nice to feel sad. Usually something happens, there's some sequence of events that makes it feel like your life is spinning out of control or like you just don't know what to do... Something immensely personal and upsetting gets you down and you just can't run away from it, because its inside of you. Sometimes what makes you sad isn't inside of you, its not something you can run away from, but it is something that affects more than just you, something that seems bad now, but might be okay later on. And sometimes, every once in a while, its kind of nice to feel like life holds some sort of beautiful mystery that will always elude you, like all of the things that seem not-so-great will one day be revealed to be the self same things that led to wonderment and joy.

I'm not good with definitions. I tend to make up my own very specific meanings for words and be willing to argue them 'till the cows come home ("an ass is not a dork, nor is a knob the same thing as a dink" will take me long into the wee hours of the morning...). This is by way of saying that this second kind of sadness, this one-day-it-will-be-important-that-this-sadness-happened type of sadness is what I imagine melancholia to be. And this type of sadness, this melancholia has, of late, been captured for me in the beautiful song Oh My God by the Wooden Sky.

Hauntingly beautiful and quietly sad, its made me feel like crying my eyes out and smiling my face off all day long.  Thank you Canadian music, thank you small timey bands, thank you art for once again proving your awesomeness....

-E