My "Complete Idiot's Guide" That Never Was

In February of 2011, I went to the Complete Idiot's Guide website and saw that they were soliciting book proposals.  Thrilled beyond words (at the time, I could think of nothing more exciting than seeing my name under the words "complete idiot" on a book cover), I asked my friends and family, both in person and on Facebook, what topic they considered me an expert on (i.e., what topic I could most swiftly and easily churn out a book on).  Of the many suggestions I got (and of those for which guides had not already been written), I narrowed it down to two:  social media etiquette (huh) and "Adulthood for Millennials."

I quite earnestly started both books and equally earnestly abandoned them after deciding I was perhaps not a true expert on either.  But here is a tiny taste of one of the two, in what might have one day become The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials:

(Complete Idiot's Guides always start with a letter to the reader.)

Dear Twentysomething,

Well done!  You have survived into your “early adulthood” in the modern world.  Much has been made in recent times about the Millennial Generation, those of us born sometime roughly in the eighties or nineties and coming of age roughly around the millennial mark.  If Generation X was all angst and grunge and inner turmoil, then we Millennials are defined by our relentless optimism and

hopeless fascination with fame and technology.  We are the “Me Generation,” raised to value our personal happiness and to celebrate our individuality.  And we are coming of age in a world that is full of people who weren’t raised the way we were.

This book approaches the topic of “growing up” from the practical standpoint that in the modern world, no generation can be defined by the generations before or after it.  Our parents didn’t need to know how to make a LinkedIn profile after they graduated from college any more than the next generation will need to be taught basic computer skills in school.

As a member of the Millennial generation, I’ve found that the transition from adolescence to the “real world” hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be.  And amidst all the self-help books and generation-deprecating memoirs out there, there weren’t any practical guides to basic Millennial issues.  Getting a job is one thing…but how do you handle older co-workers who are constantly asking you for tech advice?  And while we’re bombarded with ads warning against our future wrinkles, no one thinks to prepare us for the moment when our childhood icons start showing up as “vintage characters” in trendy clothing stores.  And, really, how are you supposed to pick a grad school (or career) when society can’t even settle on a social networking site we all agree on?

Some of the advice in here is given with the understanding that there are plenty of books out there that offer endless advice about major issues, like jobs and relationships, though those topics are covered here too.  But mainly what I wanted to present was a guide to the things that only Millennials have to deal with.  We are, after all, a generation first and foremost concerned with ourselves.

So revel in your uniqueness! And enjoy the read…

Becky Heineke

  

Introduction

Congratulations!  You are now old enough to be considered a “responsible and self-sustaining citizen” by the unsuspecting public.  Now what?

No doubt you’ve spent your formative years being told that a college education is all you need to succeed in this world.  Unfortunately, a bachelor’s degree isn’t what it used to be.  And neither is your infantile adulthood.  Many obstacles face you before you can truly call yourself a grown-up:  employment, maintaining friendships via the prickly world of social networking, pet ownership...  Luckily for you, there are lots of books already on the market that deal with many of these challenges. 

Unluckily for you, they’ve probably been written by people much older than you who have had far different life experiences than you.

So first, we must determine whether or not you are a Millennial.

The millennial generation, aside from being ultra-hip and pop-culture forward, has a couple of defining characteristics:

Mashable.com stock photo of The Millennial Human

- Millennials grew up in the “can do” era.  Remember the participation ribbons you got just for showing up to track meets once a week?  Remember the Reagans telling you you could be anything you wanted to be when you grew up?  Your Baby Boomer parents didn’t get that when they were kids.

- Millennials are the first generation in history to grow up as “digital natives.”  We’re also the last generation in history who – barring a cataclysmic technological breakdown - will be able to remember a time before the internet was part of our daily lives (though for some of us, remembering back that far might be a little hazy).  The people who study these sorts of things liken it as similar to learning a language as you grow, as opposed to picking it up much later in life.  Your parents, for instance, probably find computers to be less intuitive than you do.  They learned the ins and outs of computing long after they were already adults, whereas Millennials grew up with and around advances in technology.

Though we have yet to see the impact on the next generation, who is being born into a world more wired than ever before, what that generation won’t have is the perspective that Millennials do in terms of how quickly things have changed.  You may have grown up staring at screens, but you also remember how much those screens have changed over the years.  Each of you can probably remember the first time you got on the internet, what it was like to make the switch from dial-up to broadband, and how people communicated before everyone had a cell phone (remember car phones?).  Touchscreen navigation may make perfect sense to you, but you also remember that there was a time when Mario was two-dimensional and pixilated. 

That inherent talent for technology, combined with an appreciation for what life was like before it, makes our generation truly unique.  And if there’s anything to be said about being unique, it’s that other people don’t always understand where you’re coming from.

[Twelve pages of outlines (on topics as diverse as "Fictional Icons of Our Childhood" and "Common Office Personalities and How to Deal with Them") and a section on job advice later (yes, for some reason I was giving job advice)...]

Blogging

There are few activities as wholesomely ego-stroking as delivering a good blog entry.  Though blogs exist on nearly every subject

imaginable, the personal blog – one written about the author’s life – remains a popular way to convey detailed information to family and friends.  Lacking the word count limit of Facebook or Twitter updates, and allowing the author to post pictures within the body of the text, a blog is like a memoir that’s being written and published in real time.

Consider blogging if you are: 

1. Wordy.

2. Excessively narcissistic. 

Consider Facebook if you are:

1. Alive.  Let’s face it.  Everyone’s on Facebook.

Consider MySpace if you are:

1. Stuck in the past.  Let’s face it.  MySpace is dead.

Consider Twitter if you are:

1. Unable to punctuate and/or spell. 

2. Enjoy hashtags.

Consider LinkedIn if you are:

1. Boring. 

2. A nerd.

3. Legitimately looking for a job.  (Unlike most other networking sites, this one does have an air of professionalism about it.) 

[And then there were some more pages, with topic headings like "The Perils of Facebook," "Emoticons:  As Complex as Real Emotions Nowadays," and "Online Fame:  How It Is Both Like and Is Not Like Actual Fame".  I may post more of this in the future.  I really wish I'd known enough to write this book because I'D KIND OF LIKE TO READ IT, MAN.]

Jake Gyllenhaal Likely Never to Recover from His Poor Life Decision of Ignoring Me

Jake Gyllenhaal, the movie star best known for being relevant only when I write about him, has a new rumored lady love, Emily DiDonato, a “model,” who is best known for…absolutely nothing, no one cares. (Truth be told, I don’t care, either. I just like to stick Jake’s name in the title line every now and again to see if hits will spike.)

DUDE, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU.

According to The Wikipedia, Emily is 22, and of course she is, because in the last seven years, I’ve had a crush on Jake Gyllenhaal, and if I’ve had a crush on you in the last seven years, there is a 100% chance that, regardless of your age, you have started dating a 21- or 22-year-old (Jake is a repeat offender since Taylor Swift was 21 when they were going out). (I say “going out” because that seems like what a 21- or 22-year-old would call it.)

Jake, as mentioned in the first paragraph, has suffered from a serious lack of interesting-ness ever since we amicably parted ways about a year ago. Okay, yes, he was moderately pertinent to pop culture again when TaySwift added a dubstep beat to the words of her Hello Kitty diary last year…but that was short-lived.

Essentially, my not caring means he has forfeited the entire rest of his career, because if I’m not around to discuss sock height or deceive French people with idiotic album rumors, then what’s a celebrity to do but try to gain headline space by “dating a model”? (Which is not interesting.) (It’s even less interesting since it’s probably made up.  And if it isn’t made up, it’ll never last, because he’s terrible.)

In conclusion: LEARN FROM THE FAILED LIFE OF JAKE GYLLENHAAL. Never squander an opportunity to have me on your side. Your career will cease to have meaning to the general public, and all of your attempts to regain their attention will be met by radio silence from my end. (Except in this case.) (Seriously, the above picture is what is on his IMDb page right now. That would never have stood in my day. Never.)

Thank you to Kathryn for the heads up on this! ;)

"I'm Your Hell, I'm Your Dream, I'm Nothing In Between..."

TRUE STORY, about a year ago, I stopped listening to Top 40 radio.  Because I felt there were too many misogynistic lyrics in contemporary music.

I mean seriously, I was going to punch out the speakers in my car if I had to sit through another hit ("hit") by some trussed-up male ("male") who wanted to let me know he couldn't promise tomorrow so he'd like me to give everything tonight.

Even poor Carly Rae Jepsen, in her bubblegum glory, gave all the power to her man when she demurely asked him to call her, but only "maybe" (if he felt like it!).  (And he did feel like it, but he took his time with the call, and he gave her nothing at all, but still she took no time with the fall.  Because that's what adolescents [and, admittedly, your author] sing along to these days:  songs in which ripped jeans trump being an asshole.)

But the funny thing is that I don't know that I would have necessarily picked up on this trend had I not fallen into a habit last year of compulsively listening to my iTunes playlist of songs from the 90s.  In the 90s, the lyrics of hit songs fell 180 degrees in the opposite direction.  Can you imagine Alanis Morissette getting away with "You Oughta Know" today?  (Of course not; she'd be labeled a psycho, transformed into an internet meme, and left to rot in pop culture purgatory.)  Or Meredith Brooks having a hit with "Bitch"?  Or TLC getting airplay with "No Scrubs"?  To put this in perspective, we currently live in an era in which even Britney "Oops! I Did It Again" Spears has resorted to songs like "Criminal" (in which her justification for staying with her loser man - described as a "dog astray" - seems to be that he has a tattoo of her name on his arm - "so I guess it's okay he's with me").

Even "frat rock" in the 90s was brutally women-friendly.  Every song Hootie and the Blowfish put out had an innocent ring to it:  "Hold My Hand," "Only Wanna Be With You," "I Will Wait."

What the hell happened between now and then?

Not that long ago, there was a special on PBS about the feminist movement in America and there were two things that stuck with me above all else:  first, that even since I've been alive, things have changed extraordinarily rapidly for women.  And second, most social changes happen in cycles.

It goes without saying that I am better off today as a woman than I would have been had I been born during probably any other era in human history.  It also goes without saying that the changes I've noticed in song lyrics are a reflection of something larger that's going on culturally right now.  Something that has to do with male politicians arguing "legitimate rape" and birth control, and with little girls being sold sexualized clothing.  Something in the way the controversy ("controversy") whipped up by Sheryl Sandberg and her new book has me rolling my eyes.  With a high-ranking job at Facebook (now there's a true contributer to the betterment of society), she was on 60 Minutes last week, first pleading with women to stop "holding themselves back," and then laughingly sharing the story of how, in high school, she didn't want to be voted Most Likely to Succeed because the girls who were voted Most Likely to Succeed weren't the sort of girls who got asked to prom.

I don't know which was more idiotic:  the fact that she joked it off (as if to say, see?  Being insecure in high school proves that women are their own worst enemies!) or that, as the story progressed, her entire counterargument seemed to be that she is now a billionaire and has a husband, so gosh darnit, maybe she was prom-askin' material after all.

In the cycle of feminine power, we are most certainly at a strange crossroads in history.

But the viewpoint from over here, in this corner I'm designating for those girls who didn't give a flying fuck about going to their proms in the first place, is that while the rest of you hash out what it "means" to be a modern woman, we'll be over here actually being them, with our radios turned off, and our iTunes up full blast.

How I Spent My One-Day Vacation

For the first time in a very long while, I had nothing on my schedule last weekend.

Saturday, I got some things done that needed to get done.  Sunday?

The Disney Princesses Jumbo Activity Book is my bitch.

Sunday, I slept in.  I got caught up on three weeks’ worth of Newsweeks.  I out of nowhere remembered the song “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia, downloaded it, and listened to it nine times in a row while lying on my back in the middle of my living room.  I colored a picture in a coloring book using as many of the 96 colors in my Crayola selection as I could get away with.  I opened a window and listened to the rain.  I watched four episodes of Arrested Development.

I thought about how I have a pretty great life.

My landlady, apparently feeling sorry for me after I railed about how much Newsweek in digital format is terrible (which it is – since when do I wait three weeks to read Newsweek?), has started giving me her old New Yorkers.  The New Yorker comes out every week and is a beast of a magazine; some of the articles are long enough to be novellas.  (Actually, some of the articles are novellas.) There’s almost always something in there worth spending half an hour reading, though, and in a recent issue there was a piece about sleep.

DID YOU KNOW that when you are lying in bed at night, trying to drift off but failing miserably, there is a good chance you are falling asleep for short periods of time and then waking up again (and not, as you might think, remaining awake the whole time)?  Furthermore, DID YOU KNOW that prior to the advent of electric lighting, most people did not sleep just once a day?  For much of human history, most people went to bed at sundown, but then maybe they’d wake up in the middle of the night and do some shit and then go back to bed.  (Ben Franklin reportedly liked to use the time between his “first sleep” and his “second sleep” sitting naked in a chair reading.)

That made me feel much better about the way I wake up many mornings around 3:00 a.m. for a brief spot of contemplation before going back to sleep.  (I used to only contemplate how dumb it was for me to keep waking up in the middle of the night, but now I’ve been given leeway to contemplate on how much like Benjamin Franklin I am…sans the naked reading and whatnot.)

Thusly, last night, when I felt tired shortly after the sun went down (even though daylight savings time meant I should have been the opposite of tired), I went with it.

Add “went to bed early in an attempt to stave off daylight savings jet lag” to my list of accomplishments from yesterday.

Do I know how to milk a Sunday or what?

Oh, Boys!

I was recently talking to a friend of mine (who will remain anonymous for the sake of privacy) about a very brave e-mail she sent to someone of the opposite sex who has, for several years now, been less than clear about his intentions.

As we were talking, I couldn't help but be reminded of another e-mail, slightly less brave (though it certainly didn't feel like it at the time), sent a decade ago:

Kara was beyond anxious about setting up a study date with Alan and David for the Cold War final. Though they were the ones who asked her to set it up, she was still horrified that she would accidentally wind up professing her love [to David] when she sent them an e-mail with the details. She managed to talk herself into sending the e-mail to only David, asking him to relay the info to his roommate. But the intense fretting that went into wording the thing was beyond comical. Kara was completely and totally beside herself, and the e-mail wound up being so generic that I could have written it and no one would have known the difference.

In fact, from our posts on the floor, Greta and I pretty much did write it, directing Kara as she sat at my desk. It took her minutes of reading and re-reading to actually send the sucker and for days afterwards, she asked me to assure her that she had not signed the note “Love, Kara.” [circa 2003]

When I found that passage on my hard drive, I laughed and I laughed and I laughed.

Friday will be Kara's birthday.  As is likely too obvious for me to need to state it, her birthday and the anniversary of her death are rapidly becoming ritualized times in my life, both to remember her and to reflect back on the ways my own life has changed since she's been gone.  (Reflection:  Something new for me, right?)

Last year the dates were especially poignant as my college group moved into a new decade, forever leaving her behind in her twenties.  This year their primary sentimentality may come because of passages like the one above and their stark contrast to their contemporary counterparts.  It's kind of like that meme that's making the rounds right now:  

It's funny, is it not?  Because it's true?  But it starts to get a little weird when the 20-year-olds you're hanging out with are yourself and your friends, trapped in words that you compulsively wrote and then protectively hoarded so they could be wheeled out twice a year for the sake of memorial and "reflection."

It's fascinating, really, the difference between the episode quoted above and the one my friend and I talked about last week, the e-mail this time around intended for the exact opposite effect.  At twenty-one, there was sheer terror in the thought of tipping your hand.  At thirty-one, it's simmering exasperation at not openly addressing the obvious.  "Oh, God, I'd die if he knew!" has turned into "I know he knows and I'm sick of him pretending he doesn't."

And yet what hasn't changed is the way we let them get under our skin, the way we reach out to each other after they have, and the way we pour our energy into self-preservation (fear of embarrassment now overtaken by fear of missing other opportunities while holding out hope).

Put that way, it seems like life itself never changes at all, only us.

So here's to Kara's 31st!  To youth, to wisdom, and to the boys who will always drive us to madness as we contemplate what to write them via e-mail... :)

These Are My Friends

They make me laugh. :)