The Death of Personal Reinvention?

Sorry - Nerf Herder (mp3)
Linger - Cranberries (mp3)

A March New York Times Magazine included an intriguing column on the impact of Facebook on the maturation process, an article suggesting that Facebook risks preventing the normal maturation process of adolescents and young adults because Facebook always keeps your past crammed into your present.

To this day, I distinctly remember the horrible nausea that washed over me my senior year when I visited Rhodes College in Memphis. I had a similar feeling when I visited Washington & Lee. The nausea stemmed from feeling that, were I to go to one of those schools, I would always be trapped as the guy everyone thought they knew in high school. Rhodes and W&L were, for all intents and purposes, slightly altered universes of the very school I was so desperately excited to escape.

At my high school, I completely identified with Anthony Michael Hall's character in Sixteen Candles when he referred to himself as "King of the Dipshits." My geeky nerdy classmate friends were just enough more socially awkward than I that they seemed to look up to my ability to communicate with other "regular" people. My less geeky nerdy classmate friends tolerated my presence with patience and bemusement, but it's not like any of them were at a kegger on the weekends thinking, Y'know, this party would launch into the stratosphere if Billy showed up...

Socially, high school for me often felt like I had a special backstage pass for High School Musical. I was allowed to witness all the cool people be cool and fun people have fun, but I wasn't ever really a part of the performance. I was part of the stage crew or something. Just be grateful they're letting you see it all! was kinda the vibe.

You remember the video for "Take On Me" by A-Ha? (Sure you do.) Remember the dramatic conclusion, where Lead Singer Dude is trying to escape his sketchy cartoon bonds to join that girl in the full-color real world? That's totally what high school felt like, like I was pounding the walls and beating the floors and desperately begging for a full-color existence. I was trapped in two dimensions -- academics, comic books, role-playing games and church stuff -- and couldn't ever seem to break into the real world of... well, girls. The parties weren't nearly as painful to miss as the girls. I just wanted to be around them, to understand how they ticked. They were such a mesmerizing mystery to me. I longed to be able to study them like I did math or English or German, but I couldn't seem to find the right teachers.

To say I felt awkward, was awkward, in high school is to insult awkward people.

I wanted nothing more out of college than to escape that image of myself, an image I'd helped create, and an image I was convinced might haunt me the rest of my life if I couldn't escape it.

With 20 years of hindsight, it's far easier to accept that almost all teenagers feel this way. Even the most popular kids can feel like outsiders, and even the sweetest and kindest girls can feel like they're tolerated more than loved, endured more than appreciated. I thought my high school misery was unique, but it was really just one verse from "Message In a Bottle" I was sharing with millions of my peers.

And now there's Facebook.

Hawthorne wrote "The past lies upon the present like a giant's dead body." With Facebook, we have revived the damn giant, and it's now a zombie who wants piggy-back rides all over town.

Who knows whether the woman who wrote NYT article is right to be afraid of Facebook, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

As I approach 40, I've begun to love all of my different personae over the years even as I've begun to realize that the awkward nerdy Billy in high school is virtually identical to the wacky goofy Billy in college who is almost exactly the same eager uncertain Billy who worked in Warner Robins who is a hair's breadth away from the austere handsome unshakable Billy who sits here writing this entry. What I thought was a series of substantial personal transformations were actually more about a single persona traveling through a variety of environments, each time with a little more experience and wisdom in his quiver.

Sure, I've changed over the years. It's called "growing up." But I have trouble believing Facebook or even "helicopter parents" can leash a kid to their youth forever. Eventually, growing up happens no matter how hard we fight it, no matter how strongly we deny it. The past may never be past, but it never stays completely present, either.

Neverland never had Wi-Fi, yet Peter Pan still never managed to grow up. So maybe it's a little quick to lay all the future developmental problems of today's youth on Facebook.

However, if I read another one of those dang lists, I might go postal, and prison would definitely curb my future growth as a human.

Go getcha some Cranberries or Nerf Herder on iTunes or Amazon.com! Support great music!

The Decline of Civilization, Part III

Cry,Cry,Cry--"Shades of Grey" (mp3)
Creedence Clearwater Revival--"It's Just A Thought" (mp3)


What kind of people are we if we can't say who we are? Or were?

In chapel today, we had an alumnus from Kenya speak, a man who has started a rural school in that country where he provides a free quality education to students who would have had no opportunity for any education. It is a noble mission, a life's work more authentic than what I do sitting here behind this desk.

His talk was largely a retelling of his life's story. And while much of what he said was highly complimentary of his time here, he also talked about his own lost years--when he descended into drinking, smoking, using marijuana and LSD, when he lost a scholarship, when he didn't have a home, when he had thoughts of suicide amidst the lethargy.

It was refreshing to hear someone talk like that, especially as we enter this final phase of a bitter presidential compaign, when an admission of any unsavory aspect of one's past could prove to be very costly. Take Obama for example. Already, he's had to disavow a religious leader who has to have been important to him, but who is too much of a truth-teller and who has no idea how to present the truth like anything other than the blast of a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. So, he's gone, as if he never existed, though you can bet his name will be coming up in the next four weeks. Similarly, Obama has been tied to a 60's radical, and now Republicans are trying to make that into a "palling around with terrorists" situation.

Do you ever ponder the unsavory characters of your past? I had several friends who dealt drugs in college, including one who earned the moniker of "The Whippet King" for his business selling small cannisters of nitrous oxide to fellow college students. Where is that guy now? Do his employers know? Would they scorn him if they did know, or is he in a corporation somewhere where they could smile fondly on his entrepreneurial beginnings? I had three friends who committed suicide (not all at once--I wasn't a cult leader!). How would that stand against me in a political campign? I can see the TV ad now: "This guy is so toxic everyone around him dies or wants to. Vote for me instead. All of my friends are still alive."

The fact is that to get a full picture of any of us, we have to be able to see the whole history. It isn't all pretty. And it isn't all planned.

I can't even imagine what, growing up, a person who was mapping out a political career where he would be able to skirt any controversy or regret would have been like. Oh, wait, yes, I can. He would have been the guy who never bought any of his own pot but smoked others' stashes freely, but never in a large group. He would have been the one with the bland record collection who bought Boston when they hit it big, Frampton Comes Alive! when everyone had it, Bruce Springsteen because the college was in Philadelphia. He would have never given you an honest opinion about anyone who was pissing you off, and he probably didn't wear blue jeans to class.

And nowadays, I suppose he can offer plausible denial of everything he ever might have been.

But that's where the problem is. Who wants to deny things that they once did? Not me. I'll tell you whatever you want to know. Where's the growth, where's the honesty, where's the catharsis in hiding the past? You start thinking that way, and you end up not only denying what you did, but what your family did, what your city did, and, even, what your country did. And then you are lost, perhaps irrevocably lost, as lost as an uncivilized people whose past has been destroyed, unrecorded, or deemed too dangerous for anyone to know.

"Shades of Grey," a Robert Earl Keen cover, comes from Cry Cry Cry's only cd. "It's Just A Thought" can be found on Chronicles: Creedence Clearwater Revivals' Greatest Hits, Volume II. Both are available at Itunes.