Release: Tami Devine

The first year I lived in Northampton I used to go to the Smith College library to check my email. One day in the early fall I was sitting at one of the computers when I noticed a familiar face two monitors. Well, I wasn’t actually confident about the familiarity so I logged into Friendster (remember that?) and did a search for Tami Devine who, sure enough, had just started a grad program at UMass-Amherst. I came over and whispered a one word question: “Bard?” It was that moment that we became good friends since, although we sat in the same row at commencement with the other D’s, we never hung out in college.  I miss Tami a lot. Her unique wit and elegance are almost from another era. Tami is one of a kind.

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For those of you Class of ‘99ers who are already thirty, I’m still 29, suckas! It will be that way until October, when I’ll join your pitiful ranks of over the hillers. The casual “checking people’s age out” and seeing where I stand has not left me. A lady on Judge Judy was a divorced mom of 3 at 22. My college buddy is a homeowner and mom at 30. My colleague is a 40 year old divorced mom looking for love on Match. My parents continue to evolve and seek enrichment in their employment and activities going on 60. These numbers, once so damning (remember the “old” Bard students who were like, 26?), now seem such useless measurements.

Thirty meant something different to our parents, who probably had babies + a house + a wedding ring and all that jazz. Thirty seemed to be the arbitrary “I’d like to married by...” date when I was a youngster playing Barbies. In my child mind, like that would give me a whole decade to spread my wings and establish a career for myself GUFFAW!!!! The cruelty of it all, if little me could see me now! I’m Masters degreed-out now, sometimes a caricature of the overqualified & mortified crowd. I’m working similar jobs to those I worked before my fancy degree. But you all know the story. We’re questioning it all. We want better. Some days I wonder why I didn’t go for my MRS degree ...hardy har. Like after all that angsty riot grrling, listening to PJ Harvey + reading bell hooks in coffeeshops, I like to think I’d make a pretty damn good SAHM.

A few years ago one of the issues I was struggling with was that I didn’t feel like an “adult,” and it was all tied up with how my parents kind of never let me be an adult. I won’t bore you with all that now. But I kept going back to that fetal position. While my friends were spreading their wings I was like just dipping my feet in adult life through sublets and vacuous pursuit of internships. There was always a feeling of “if I fail, I’ll just move back home.” I wasn’t really trying, I guess, the clicking life clock paralyzing me into a dull anxiety.

Well, while I wasn’t looking all that kind of Adultness happened to me. I stopped blocking my own life joy. Volleyball - I’ve loved you since age 12 - but art school and glam rock emo boyfriends made me feel like I was a dork for loving you. I got the courage to get out there + play because I LOVE IT. I got two cats, recently a dog, and all that “responsibility” I used to desperately dodge from, I now seem to crave. I’ve met my “Ken” of sorts. That warm glow of family is hard to trade in for some of the ugliness of younger days. But I haven’t said “I do”; and maybe the absence of anything carved into marble is a relief.

One night last summer, I pulled my car over to the side of Route 9 to remove a cat who was struck by a car to its woodsy grassy resting place. That *choice* of putting my compassion into action and experience the grief of the loss of life - whilst blocking traffic- was a poignant moment of connection to my adult self. I’ve had the mildest feeling that something pure and organic was flowing out of me - I didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone else. I’m hoping for the next decade to put that feeling of connection to my true self - and what I believe to be REAL in this world- into action less seldomly. I don’t want to be the passer-by.

“Release” has been my mantra over the past year, and I’ve felt really strongly like I am shedding skin, shedding stale friendships that no longer nourish me, holding me back in their superficiality. There are those who will be left behind in a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again, except in facebook land. As will you too—left behind as people move on, past you.

We couldn’t have imagined it back then, but this is what thirty looks like. I think I’m doing all right...and so are you.

Falling Short of Fourth: Kristin Bott

When I was in fourth grade, my (fabulous) teacher, Ms. Dearing, had a "Shine On" board, which would highlight a different student every week. Everyone in the class would write a note, scrawling something positive about you and cover it in well-intentioned crayon. You would fill up the board with important pictures and "About Me"-type worksheets.

One of these worksheets asked you to draw a picture of you five, fifteen years from "now." In careful Crayola marker, there's a picture of me in my late 20s, which looks strikingly like the rendering of me when I was 15, which is closely related to "me now" at 10. Except: when I'm older, I am standing next to a marker-man, in front of a misshapen marker-house, and I feature a seriously pronounced butt. (Apparently I knew that girls' butts get bigger as they age. Dear fourth-grade me; they're called hips, please.)

By fourth-grade metrics - I'm quite behind on my timeline. I hit 30 next week - and unlike many of my friends and peers, I lack both house and spouse. (The hip-size predictions, though, are spot-on. We're a sturdy people...)

It has been a bit strange to watch the rest of the pack pull away in various senses, engagements announced and houses purchased, pregnancies heralded on the book of face and pictures of little wrinkly-old-men-looking babies triumphantly shared after the big day.

My peers have partners, kids, careers. I was always one of those kids who kept up with front of the class... and now there are days when I feel impossibly behind. All the loveable ones are married. All the serious ones have houses. All the dedicated ones have children. All the focused ones have Job Plans.

Kristin... you're doing it wrong?

But, wait. In between donning bridesmaids dresses and making plans for sewing baby bibs, I've managed to do some things. One and a half graduate programs and some number of stints as a research scientist (field and lab, both). I've been a science educator, labor organizer, non-profit Jill-of-whatever-you-need. Four states of residence since leaving my native Idaho; in each, I've gone from knowing nothing/no one to having community and some "sense of place."

Yes, there have been some number of honest attempts at long-term committed relationships (my own mother "can't keep track of them anymore"... thanks, Mom), with n-1 that have reached the end of their best-functioning term. And, not uniquely, one of the "ends" includes a messy Saturn's return timeline; just before I turned 28, I moved in with my guy-for-life and was teaching college full-time. Six months later, I had gone through a horrendous break-up/move-out and was concurrently working four part-time jobs - it was awful. By the time I turned 29, I had settled into one full-time job and fallen in with a new, fabulous partner (who is still around and still fabulous).

There are moments of panic, when I realize how behind I am - losing at the spouse game, the property contest, the job of producing and/or raising children, of having a single, focused career.

But there are also moments of satisfaction, sitting in my studio apartment, looking out over my home city and over at the mountains, or brewing beer/cooking dinner/gardening/traveling with my guy - where I can't quite imagine doing this any other way.

Hello, 30. You're huge, you're looming, you are impending doom and horrible bouts of navel-gazing. You are a reminder of all of the things I Am Not Doing That I Should Be Doing.

But... you also look suspiciously like other things I've seen before. Like other gigantic impossibilities, summiting Mt. Hood or running a half-marathon, job searching in a horrible economy or completing a difficult graduate program, that were overcome with a simple, calm, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-with-a-sense-of-purpose approach.

Maybe you're actually just another year, and your significance is an artifact of our base-10 number system. I'm with Pamela on this one - there's a lot ahead, and you're just the start.

Dear 30, you don't get to make me feel behind. Dear 30, I'm doing everything exactly as I should be, including all of the rough spots and bad episodes. Dear 30, I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up or whether or not a house, kids, dog, spouse is/are in the plan. But, dearest 30, that's how this is going to work.

And - dear fourth-grade me, I'm sorry to let you down. But, with all due respect, ten-year-olds have a somewhat poor track record of accurately predicting the future.

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Kristin grew up in southern Idaho, a land filled with sagebrush and Republicans. She's lived, worked, and studied in western Montana, southern Arizona, and mid-Michigan, where she met Pamela Roy. When not busily failing to produce children, land a spouse, or purchase real estate, Kristin rides her bike early and often, brews beer, reads books, cooks good food, and maintains a decent garden. She works at a non-profit in Portland, where she lives with three houseplants, four bikes, and multiple rain jackets; you can find her tales of bikes, beer, and breakfast at: http://bikingpotato.blogspot.com/.

The Deciding Incisor: Lauren Johnson

I became friends with Lauren Johnson during our final semester at Bard College. Two days after our graduation she gave me a tour of her hometown of Great Barrington, MA and the campus of Bard’s baby cousin, Simon’s Rock. Great Barrington just happened to be where she had returned for the summer and where I had an appointment to contest a speeding ticket. Since then, Lauren has popped back into my life while visiting a mutual friend when I lived in Northampton, and again more recently in Philadelphia. In addition to being hilariously witty (see below), Lauren is a sweet and sincere friend. If I ever need to hide underground, I’m sure she and Dan will graciously let me live in the backyard of their Jersey farmhouse with the chickens.

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I am sitting reclined in an aquamarine blue dental chair, waiting to be seen by a Portuguese dentist.

I have not been to the dentist for about seven years, and all the brochures of cloud-white toothy smiles placed along the countertops are doing a marvelous job of taunting me.  

For the majority of those seven years, I have led an indulgently artistic and nomadic life bereft of dental insurance throughout the Big Apple, North Carolina, and New Jersey, where, at 29 years old, I got my first flat tire on the road to perfect oral health.

I had pretty much shrugged off going to see a dentist baring anything catastrophic, until I recently showed my husband my front tooth whose gum had been receding pretty steadily after noticing it started to look irritated. The words he spoke while painfully wincing were “Holy crap, that’s like Tales From the Crypt!”

Fine.

I signed up for an in-state no-frills dental program, picked the nearest dentist within the network, and here I am—paper bib clipped to my collar and ready for the worst.

The dentist comes in and we start with the x-rays. After each one, the lead cape draped over my chest feels heavier and heavier, and I imagine thick wads of (my) money being plunged down the toilet.

Next up is the cleaning.

Everything is going fine until she gets to The Tooth. “Ooo!,” she says, completely stopping and turning off the drill. “That hurts me just to look at it.” 

She pulls off her mask, and we proceed to have a heart-to-heart. “Why is it that you have not gotten this looked at earlier?” she tells me in her Portuguese accent. I smile and try to explain to her how tough I am. She looks at me solemnly. “You’re very young,” she says. “You have many good tooth years ahead of you, but you need to take care of this to be sure that will happen.” She says she’ll write me a referral to a specialist (more sounds of dollars flushing), and proceeds with the cleaning. I seal the deal with myself to take her advice, wincing as the electricity shoots down my legs as she finishes polishing the base of said tooth.

At 29, I never thought I’d have to start dealing with something so geriatric sounding as receding gums. And though I tend to laugh this sort of stuff off (along with things like gray hairs and how delicious prunes are), this time it’s a bit more awakening. It’s made me nervous. Not only have I been thinking about it constantly and having dreams of my teeth falling out, I’ve also resumed one of my old nervous tics of biting the insides of my cheeks. 

Gross!

When I see the specialist my dentist referred me to, what a mouth-show they will get!

All kidding aside, the timing of this instance could not be more appropriate. I, like many other of my late-twenty-something friends, have been musing about the new decade we’re entering into, and comparing our lists of Top 10 Things to Do Before I’m Thirty.  I’m pretty sure “Pay Attention to your Dental Health” will trump “Lose 10 Pounds,” and “Become a Model” (Quiz: How many models have a horror show host gumline? Zero!). However, I must say, as I grow longer in the tooth (sorry, had to), it will be learned moments like these that I’ll stow away to help me make more self-informed, wise, and adult decisions as I turn 30, 40, 50…

Existential Crisis, Please Go Away: Timothy Sylvia

After being part of the Cape Cod underground music scene in the mid/late-90's, it's nice to know that there are still good people fostering the local scene and documenting its history. Tim Sylvia is one of those people. I didn't know him really well back in the day, but I can still picture him right up by the PA as my band Social Virus played our final shows at the Orleans Juice Bar. Tim was always super supportive and enthusiastic of our music and other bands we played shows with. In addition to playing in a number of bands himself over the years, Tim has been setting up shows, running a distro, and putting out records through his From the Heart Media. A compilation of Cape Cod bands, past and present, is currently in the works. Music communities everywhere need more Tim Sylvias.  
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Warning: This could get messy.

I'm 28, and I'll be 29 in August. At 28, my life is not what I was expecting and/or hoped for. Probably a token and reoccurring statement. Go figure. All I know is I want this existential crisis to go away. I guess that's what you call it. In the current scheme of the news and events of the world, it's hard to decipher if the doom you are experiencing is because of how scary the world is, or because you're actually experiencing a personal existential crisis. I'm having a hard time, that's all I know. If you're a young, creative, or generally just a forward-thinking person, regardless of any standard, I think you are aware of what I am saying. 

Where do we go from here? What can I do? I don't need to touch on specifics. Too many thoughts, too many questions in my head all the time. Anxiety. Do you think the existential crisis 30 years ago was what it is today? It seems like mine is possibly the worst that could come out of my family history. Look at me?  I can't even keep it together. What I'm trying to get at here is I have a hard time even reflecting on myself at the age of 28, because everything I'm personally thinking about is much bigger than me. Existentially I mean. I need to be more selfish, in my own head at least. I need to be more creative. I need to be less afraid. I need to try and be HAPPY! I guess I can try to reflect on myself.

Let's start with my health. I'm a 350 plus pound man with diabetes. Yeah, I know. I've got to do something about this. I really do. That one sentence, I guess... is my whole real existential crisis. If I don't do something, I may not even exist. That's definitely the most important something-to-think-about sentence in my whole life. I'm always working on it. I swear.

Love, will I ever find you? I'm already very damaged by you at 28. Every time I experience love and it goes away, I just feel more lonely the next time I find you gone. Alone and hurt. So hurt. So hurt that I'm afraid of you. I swear I'll never let this happen to me again, every time. Very cautious about you, love.

I don't consider turning 30 a milestone at all, however what one might have accomplished by the age itself. I guess the only standard for this is set by you, and anyone's opinions you value or take into consideration. Like your parents. I oftentimes think I would have taken bigger, more personally risky and controversial leaps of faith had I not worried about what my mother would have thought about what I was doing for the last 28 years. I guess that makes me a momma's boy, too regretful, and more boring than a family-less me would of been. Which are two things I doubt my mother would have wished for me. I love my family, and I love you, Mom.

Some things I want by the time of my 30th birthday are to be out of my head more often. I want to be healthy or healthier, anyhow. I want a better world to live in, with my help. To take bigger leaps. Huge leaps. Last but not least, I want to be out of this existential crisis. The keyword, and I think the general consensus and theme about turning the age of 30, is change. I need change, we need to change.

Demobilizing at 30: Ben Webster

I know Ben Webster through the Wooden Shoe. He has been the driving force for our weekly movie night, bringing his cinematic expertise and political savvy to the series. Ben is equally friendly as he is brilliant (as you will soon discover), and I'm sure one hell of a librarian too.
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It is worthwhile to reflect on life’s milestones, and when hitting the big 10-year intervals, it seems obligatory. Everyone approaching 30, as I did last month, is barraged with outside inquiries. I will pass. This personal reflection is valuable, but I have done it in private, so will try a different tack here. Perhaps a prejudice hardened over three decades is that against gratuitous public navel-gazing; I believe you used to be able to call it petty-bourgeois individualism. Instead I want to sketch a few thoughts relating the anxiety (or fascination?) of turning 30 to our particular moment in 21st century, postfordist capitalism. 

First, a common-place condition at 30 among people I know is a declining material standard of living vis a vis our parents. 30 is a convenient generational marker; it is generally the age when people are supposed to couple off, have kids, and take out a mortgage; it is often about the age our parents were when they had us. Much is made of the supposed moral failings of my generation, always referencing how many of us have boomeranged back to living in our folks’ basements. This is mostly bullshit. We can look instead on the sweep of capitalist restructuring from 1981 to today, in short hand, neoliberalism. This has meant the decimation of social services, stagnation or decline in real wages, rise of debt as a means of maintaining consumer spending and worker discipline, deindustrialization in the US, and the crushing and marginalization of people’s movements. If 30 is the new 20, it has little to do with immaturity, and everything to do with a political economy particularly harsh on young adults. Whereas stability could have been expected by a hard-working, educated 30 year old of generations past, now un(der)employment, crushing debt, and precarious living conditions are the norm. Many of my peers have desperately returned to the university or half-baked entrepreneurial gestures, usually only buying time until the next round of bills come due. The current global crisis has only tightened the screws. This obviously provokes anxiety when middle age is around the corner.

The ideological notion of 30 and of the 30 year old self may continue on autopilot, but the material content is probably gone for good. Yet the flip side (and, historically, one may argue, the root cause) of neoliberal restructuring is the expansion of alternative, autonomous strategies of social reproduction. We may include here collective and co-housing, subversion of the gendered division of labor, independent food production, alternative child-rearing, all-ages venues, etc. The left and its milieu continually elaborates and experiments with these practices, many of which insinuate within mainstream society. The barriers between age-determined divisions, ie 20's & 30's, “student “ or “parent,” tend to weaken. In other words, through the autonomous delinking from capital’s ascribed practices of reproducing labor, we decalibrate age from the standards of capital. 30 as a fetishized, anxious omen- a superego threat to remain passive and isolated, ie successful in capital’s eyes- is possibly weakened by collective rejections of capital’s structuring of our psyches, bodies, and lives. The categories (child, young adult, middle age, senior, 20's, 30's, 40's, etc.) of the life cycle read about in psychology and sociology text books, I conclude, are as much positivist suggestions for subordination to capital’s domination as they are physiological/psychological realities.

So although much of the significance of turning 30 has to do with individual perception, I also feel that it has a small ideological function and material relation to the world. My specific perception of turning 30 in 2011 is inseparable from the cycle of struggle which I began contributing effort to in high school. I suspect this is true of all those coming of age in a movement. Seattle went down my first semester in college, I reached drinking age in time to drown my sorrows during the invasion of Iraq. My participation in the dynamic cycle that is now commonly called the alterglobalization or global justice movement, its evolution and waning, is inseparable from my sense of adulthood, of communal fullness and isolation, of confidence and insecurity. Calendar age loses its hold involved in a movement in close contact with senior citizens and high school kids working for common goals. The waning of a movement hurts and drains, but new expressions of resistance always emerge. I’m no longer a student activist, but now a union member spoiling for a fight, to take one example; Seattle and Iraq are hazy memories, but Egypt and Wisconsin revitalize. If aging and its milestones are associated with resignation, cynicism, and declining expectations, then vigorous collective struggle for a better world may be an elixir of youth. Perhaps my optimism won’t hold up, but this is what I strive towards at the very least as I enter the cultural phenomenon that is one’s 30's.

My Next Great Adventure: Wedge Wegman

I think we all have those people in our lives that we wish we could see more of, whether they live in the same neighborhood or on the other side of the globe. Wedge Wegman is one of those people for me. I met Wedge in Philly in the Fall of 2009 when Wooden Shoe Books was moving 2 blocks down South Street to its current location. She had a pickup truck out front that a group of us loaded up with boxes of books and other remnants from the old space. Since then, Wedge and I have become friends through our mutual love of punk rock and baseball. She is one of the most generous and inspiring people I've met in Philly and since I've recently moved down the street from her, I'm hoping we'll see a lot more of each other.

Check out Wedge's company Sickening Thud Productions, online at: sickeningthud.com

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How can I be writing about turning 30?  I still feel like I’m a teenager sometimes. Like I’m fresh out of high school and ready to make my own way out in the world.

But, then it hits me. I’m almost three decades old. Fuck….I still have anxiety dreams about forgetting my locker combination and getting lost on my way to history class. You’d think that by now the dreams would have shifted to some real life anxiety, like getting hit by a car while riding my bike. But, no, my mind hasn’t wrapped itself around the idea that I’m an adult.

I cried on the night before my 13^th birthday. I had no desire to grow up. NONE! And a 12-year-old me thought that on that annual day around 6am I would magically become an adult. By the time I graduated high school I figured adulthood would find me when it wanted to. So, I stopped worrying about it.

While I waited for that inevitable day of maturity, I started my life. Instead of fretting about the unknown, I enjoyed living. And somewhere along the way, I forgot to be scared to grow older. Because it doesn’t mean I have to grow up.

And I absolutely refuse to grow up.

What does that mean, anyway? 60 years ago, if you hadn’t married, spawned, and bought a house in the suburbs by 30 then people wondered what was wrong with you. But today we see more and more people living the single life, going to school for multiple degrees, traveling the world with nothing but a backpack…..things that would have made our great-grandparents uninvite us over for the holidays. 

What is the standard of maturity in our society today? Most people I know would agree that, for a HEALTHY adult, you reach maturity when you no longer rely on someone else to care for you. At least I’ve accomplished THAT in my 30 years.

My mother worries about me. I know she does, even though she tries to deny it, because she buys me socks and underwear. (One important lesson I’ve learned in life is to ALWAYS accept a gift of socks and/or underwear!) But, I pay my bills and I keep a roof over my head. Not growing up doesn’t mean that I can’t take care of myself. I just might not have the life that my parents think I should have built for myself by my 30^th year.

I’ve kept my cat alive for 3 years now. That’s got to count for something, right?

Remember that time when anything was possible and you were gonna do EVERYTHING and go EVERYWHERE!? Well, I still get that way all the time. There’s just so much left in the world to visit and experience.

I’m not bothered about turning 30. Fuck, if Fox Mulder was able jump on moving trains full of aliens when he was in his 30’s, then I’ve got nothing to fear. BRING IT ON! My 30’s are just my next great adventure. The next chapter in my story.

Lately, I’ve been hearing some chatter from the Evangelists on the street. It seems that they believe their savior is coming back to town on May 21, 2011. But, I’m here to set the record straight. Jeezus is not coming to take anyone up to their everlasting utopian bliss. He’s coming into Philly to celebrate my 30^th birthday. I invited him because he does these neat party tricks and I won’t have to spend much on alcohol.

It’s gonna be one hell of a shindig!