Adbusters

I first saw adbusters in the airport when I was 19. I was stranded in Newark for what was to be a 7 hour delay. I was part of a study abroad group of 70 coming back from 2 months in Israel. It was a trip about 4 weeks too long. Not because of the country or the traveling or missing the US, but because of the students I was with. Nice people, all of them. I had no personal grudges. They were the picture of typical mormon kids, squeaky clean and well meaning and no secret agendas except for good clean fun. So it was kind of hard to put my finger on why I couldn’t stand being with them any longer. A little too much conformity, a little too much blatant consumerism, a little too many examples of assumed cultural supremacy, and i felt like they had all been gnawing at me the whole time. That extra 7 hours of time with them in the airport seemed like a 10 year sentence against me. I couldn’t stand it anymore and I wandered the airport stores and lounges alone.

Adbuster’s cover featured several marines carrying what looked like another soldier, probably dead, with the American flag draped over him. A quote sprawled over the front: “War is the force that gives us meaning.” It was obviously, blatantly subversive. Perfect. I had been trying for 2 months to be subtly subversive, and I needed to finally be out in the open. A magazine that was anti-war, that took itself seriously (too seriously), that openly spoke of the problems in our society. Blatantly anarchist and anti-corporate. This is something that I could wave in the face of my fellow students and say “Hey! I am different than you!” Which they already knew, which they already suspected. But I was just as desperate as they were to put me in a category. Just how was I different from them, exactly? And why?

I had personally connected with very few of the students. And I questioned the sincerity of the few I’d connected with. One I connected with because we were both the obvious outsiders. One because she was my roommate, and hey, I was a social creature after all--spending that much time with any person who isn’t totally hostile leads to some kind of connection. One I connected with because we both had an interest in journalism and were a little too intense for other people. I have not kept in touch with any of them. 

Like I said before, none of these people on study abroad were mean or bad or cruel, or even unfriendly. They tried hard to welcome me and i tried to fit in, but it just wasn’t working. But being truly nice, they even found ways to disguise that. “You’re so independent, Gini,” or “you are someone who does their own thing and doesn’t care what others think. I wish I could be like that, I admired you.” I was told these things so much over the 2 months I lived with these 70 students, I wondered if they had sent around a group email or had a secret meeting to coordinate how as a single body they should handle the strange, serious, freshman girl that was somehow outside the norm.

Anyway. I would have been attracted to any magazine that addressed war and peace, as that had been something of an intellectual hobby for several years already, and would only intensify as college went on. But it was a good time in my life and my psychological history for subversive magazines. I don’t want to make too big a deal out of it, because it’s not tragic and it’s something that I’m changing gradual, but I’ve always been in the ‘outsider’ position. Outside of popular groups, outside of the mainstream of thought. I still don’t know if other people put me there or if I put myself there. Probably both.

Adbusters lit the spark behind OWS, did you know that? You probably know that by now. 

Advice that I am trying to follow

"One, I would take some classes at the UCB. Two, the secret to the success of The State was we never waited for anyone to ask us to do anything, or for anyone’s approval to do anything. We just fucking did stuff. We were shooting all the time, writing all the time. We would put up a live show every couple of months. We were aggressive. If you wait around for an opportunity to come up, it’s not coming. It isn’t, ever. Opportunities are not coming. The only opportunities that are coming are the ones you create. Otherwise you are just waiting around. "

Thomas Lennon’s advice for people who want to break into sketch comedy.

Not that I want to do sketch comedy, but you know. Other stuff. 

How to make a protest sign

Step One: Think of the things that make you angry. This is where you will draw your best material. Is there a particular issue that bothers you (like greed)? Is there a specific news article, fact, or statistic that makes you angry (like this one)? What about your heros--what advice of theirs is consistently discarded and forgotten about, and makes you angry (like, say, this passage)?

Step One Point Five: Do some research if you still don’t have ideas. You can take the experts' advice or you can go to the people in the streets. Either way. Just make some signs. Whatever. 

Step Two: Figure out how to fit these onto a piece of cardboard in an intelligible, meaningful way. Remember: People will have like 5 seconds to actually read your sign as the drive by in your car (unless you are lucky enough to get on the internet). Keep in short and edit for clarity. For example, i totally removed all the biblical/old english-speak from the Mosiah quote.

Step Three: Gather supplies. Hopefully you have cardboard, paint, and a paintbrush in your apartment. If not, I don’t know what you will do, use blood? As you are going to use these signs in anti-capitalist protest, I don’t think you should go out and buy stuff specifically for this event. But I guess if that is your only option, whatever, the ends will justify the means (maybe). I want you to think seriously and prayerfully about it before you take that route and go to Home Depot. Maybe you can borrow a sign from someone else instead.

Step Four: Paint on Cardboard. If you are a normal human being with a limited spacial sense, you will probably mess up. This can be fixed through creativity and/or reminding yourself that people are only going to look at this sign for like 5 minutes so it doesn’t matter all that much. And also, messing up makes it look more anarchist-y and DIY and that’s what you guys are going for anyway.

Step four must be completed while listening to some kind of awesome “fight against the man” music (remember those great Punk Against Bush albums? I wish they had those for wall street. Punk against Wall Street!). Anti-Flag will do. 

Or actually i just listened to whatever after awhile, it felt better to be mellow and listen to Arcade Fire.

Step Five: Don’t take all day and make it a work of freaking priceless art, because let’s face it, I’m underemployed! I’ve got some job applications to finish!

The finished product

I commented, like an upstanding participating citizen of the 21st century

on this article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jd-samson/i-love-my-job-but-it-made_b_987680.html?ref=mostpopular

This is what I said incase it gets buried in all the other comments:
JD, don't listen to the haters. I respect your "coming out" financiall­y, admitting that you can't keep up, and voicing your worries about income and money. People get upset because they too recognize these same fears in themselves­--that no matter how 'successfu­l' they are, money will always be a worry--and they worry that these things are because they are lazy, or stupid, or they are selfish, etc. 

But this is the real problem, the real reason to Occupy Wall Street: to protest the lie that if you keep up the good work, you will be fine financiall­y, guaranteed­. It's not a guarantee, it's a crapshoot. This idea of the "American Dream" is used as a tool for control, to say that if you are poor, you deserve to be poor, and if you are rich, you deserve to be rich. This is obviously not true in many cases, and this lie is exploited by the rich to prove that they deserve what they have.

So thank you for voicing your insecuriti­es and admitting that you have had financial management problems and that you need to change. Good luck in your quest to become more financiall­y stable. I know that you can do it, even as a freelance lesbian artist. The part of the American Dream that says anything is possible is still true! It is just a matter of understand­ing what the actual costs of that dream are, and whether we are willing to accept those costs.


***End***


I am excited because I have gotten several angry replies already. I feel like I am participating in modern society. It's fun and also awful.

Soccer Trophies--The Real Enemy of Human Progress!

What is wrong with my generation? There has never been any generation more connected, that is for certain, but there has also never been any generation more covered by the news media, too. Over the last two years, for some reason, people keep forwarding me articles about how 20somethings have really awful job prospects and are floundering as a whole (maybe because I make less money now than I did in high school? maybe....).

In these, Millennial diagnostic reporting articles about parenting and psychology, the questions are, “what went wrong with these guys? besides the economy sucking, how did this happen and isn’t it tragic and what is going to happen next? what did we do wrong as parents?” And oh boy do they have the answers--it was helicopter parenting and it was too many IQ tests ‘proving’ we were smart and it was never letting kids fail in their entire lives. 

The ultimate symbol for this is the Soccer Trophy, which now stands as some kind of metaphor for why we are all messed up. When we all did soccer as 6 or 7-year-olds--being all cute chasing after the ball in a huge mass, wearing shin guards too big and shorts too long so they covered our entire legs in a sporty pantaloon--we looked ridiculous and we ruined the rest of our life. This is because we all got trophies (all of us!) the winners, the losers, everyone. We got rewarded for our efforts, even if they sucked, and we never failed, because failure is bad and our parents didn’t want that for us, only success and only trophies. 

As if when I was 7 years old and got that trophy I somehow translated that into “I’m never going to fail at anything! I am going to be awesome and always be successful and if I’m not, then I have done something wrong, I am a loser failure, and I deserve to have a rotten life!” The trophy thing is mentioned in like every article about the Millennial childhood, I am so tired of this cherry picking of my childhood, pulling this one thing out of all the hundreds of things that happened to me and saying, “well there now, that’s your problem.”

I did soccer when I was little and we never bothered with rankings and I got a trophy every year and it was awesome. Did I think I was the best? No. I was well aware that I was the kid who never scored a goal and the kid who had trouble dribbling up the field. Now, hip checking other kids or taking a ball to the face or the gut? There I was a champ. I may have been just a child, and I may have been rewarded with a trophy every year no matter the actual outcomes of our games, but I had a very clear picture of my abilities and failures.

I feel insulted that psychologists and parents and coaches look at this kind of thing, the soccer trophies, and think, “this is how we messed our kids up,” like we were pliable and subject to their designs, and we would have turned out perfect, but they just picked the wrong designs. Doesn’t this just seem like Helicopter Parenting, Part II but on an societal scale and supported by social science research with all these articles about what parents should have done?

These articles aren’t about real kids, they are about perfectionism. Parents and psychologists keep looking around and scratching their heads and saying in surprise, “you mean, we haven’t gotten it right yet? I thought we were going to be perfect this time!” No one has, no parent has, and there is a good chance that no one will. This is an obsession with perfect, which doesn’t exist.

But we keep looking. I mean, I’m doing it already. I don’t have kids, and yet I can feel within me the desire to save them from the mistakes I made--to make their life easier. I fantasize about fully rectifying all the mistakes my parents made so my child will be flawless, well-adjusted and successful. But my kids will have flaws! Big ones, probably, life all of us. No matter what I do, my children will have hard times and hardships and no guarantee of success in life. 

Robert McNamara said that you can’t change human nature. While he was referring to war and peace, this is true of everything. There is the human experience, and it has always been messy and confusing and it always will be. Most of these articles focus on how we should have taught our kids to work hard, not that they were smart, and all our problems would have been fixed. I agree that we as a generation maybe could have used a little more hard work ethic. But it wouldn’t have been a fix-all solution. An interesting study was conducted in China, focusing on students who were told from a young age that the most important thing is hard work. And still! And still despite all the positive reinforcement a survey revealed that students were convinced that the ability to work hard is an inherent personality trait that you either have or don’t. Many felt doomed and faced the same fears that we as westerners, taught that you are either smart or you are not, also experience. 

You can’t change the human experience. Things will be hard for you, things will be hard for your kids. You will make it hard through your choices and shortcomings and failures, and in part, hardness will just be thrust upon you. You will not find the magic bullet, because there isn’t one. There wasn’t a war to end all wars. There isn’t a psychological sound method of raising children that will produce perfectly well adjusted adults. No matter what I do, my kids are going to struggle with something, that’s how it works—trophy or no trophy.

WARNING

If I read another news article that says that the Millennials were ruined as a generation because everyone one got trophies for soccer when they were 7 and not just the winners, I am going to bust some heads. In a metaphorical kind of way because I am non-violent. More to follow.

The Worst/Best Year of My Life

I have been married for one year. Joel says it has been the best year of his life. I say that it has been the worst year of my life. Not because of my marriage though. If anything, that has been the reason why I got through this year without totally losing my shit. 

I haven’t felt like the sentiment expressed by many in the church that “i don’t know where i would be without the gospel” is totally sincere, or much more than a cliche truism. I mean, if you didn’t have the gospel, where you would be is not caring that you didn’t have the gospel, most likely, or part of another religious tradition, or you would be on track to find the gospel eventually anyway. It wouldn’t matter, your life path would be totally different. But like most of my cynicism, I eventually come to a point where i have to rescind and eat my words. Because i don’t know where i would be without joel. And that DOES matter because THIS is the life path that i want to be on, not some alternative reality one that doesn’t involve Joel (or okay, the gospel too, if i have to be all honest and non-cynical here).

So this has been the worst year of my life. I have had a full-on crushing bout of Quarter Life Crisis, complete with clinical depression and losses of hope and faith in myself and in the future. (It is also basically the biggest twentysomething cliche i could have picked. let’s get cynical about that sometime.) And to make the biggest understatement about my mental condition that I could possibly make, let’s just say that I spent a lot of nights crying a lot (you know that part where i said that i didn’t “lose my shit”? well, i guess whether i actually kept it together or not is actually debatable.) Joel was incredibly patient through all of this. He was also incredibly funny and good-natured and tried his best to keep me at least treading water. And he did his best to be my at-home therapist, no easy task as my mother and countless former roommates will tell you, since i simultaneously want your advice and want to rebel against any kind of advice you give me. He wasn’t a miracle worker, and as with all hard times in people’s live, you kind of just have to wait it out; there isn’t really much you can do to help or fix it until time or mind just takes its course. But he kept trying, and I always felt incredibly loved and cared for, all year.

I still stand by my statement that it was quite possibly the worst year of my life. But sometime, soon hopefully, I’ll be beyond this whole “i cannot function as an adult omg” episode. Maybe it’s even this coming year. And there were so many awesome parts of this past year, due to Joel and our marriage and all the great things we did together, that even with all the sucky parts, i have to admit that it still was good in many ways. And when the sucky parts are gone, it will be all that much better.

Or be replaced with different sucky parts (SHUT UP CYNICAL ME SHUT UP). 

What marriage is like: