Mar 04 2009
Signposts
Ugh, so tired today. Am far too tired to think up new and interesting content for you people, but I’ll try. I could talk about internal matters (”today my fourth-grade best friend found me on Facebook”) or external matters (”today I read an article about a topless coffee shop that just opened in Maine”). Exhaustion breeds narcissism, so unfortunately all you people will have to hear about my fourth-grade best friend.
Seeing this woman’s Facebook profile (we’ll call her P) made me think about the many ways in which people measure achievement. P has two children now, the second just recently born (come to think of it, she might have opened the FB account purely to make her baby photos more public), and is married to a man who appears (in the photos, anyway) to be healthy, involved and present. Some people feel as though these things are a good measure of progress: children and so on. Probably according to these people, I’ve done very little with my life, and have even regressed since first building my Facebook profile in January of 2008. When I began that profile, I was married and owned a house. You know, fast-tracking to heteronormative success. A colleague discovered I was married and exclaimed, “Wow, I have GOT to get my shit together.” An old friend found out about my breakup last month and exclaimed, “Oh no! I had been so impressed with you!”
Am I not enough of an adult to recognize my regression into queer single PhD studenthood? Will the folly of all this one day become clear to me as I telescope all kinds of bitterness onto 2009 (”I was Married, I Owned a House… I really had my shit together”)? Or should I continue to frame the marriage and the house as an interesting experiment with no intrinsic value beyond personal growth?
Anyway, P’s Facebook profile is probably a lateral deviation from my own White Lady in Late Twenties profile. She is the While Lady in Late Twenties who has a husband, a brief career in the military, and two lovely babies. She probably didn’t eat acid at a party in Los Angeles this past weekend like I did. It’s all a tradeoff.
