There's only the sun that gives shape to the moon

[sovay]

Either I never shook the cold that began in November or I caught some other opportunistic bug in the process of recovering, but I am definitely sick. I made it to yesterday's rehearsal and then I came home, made dinner with spatch, and fell asleep on the couch. I had just finished reading one of my holiday presents from rushthatspeaks, the Strugatskys' thoroughly delightful Monday Starts on Saturday (1965). Awake later in the evening, I re-read three out of the first four books of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) and unhappily I think it was weird for my mood. I slept badly. Today I have done nothing except work for a couple of hours and feed the cats. I don't even seem able to think about or watch movies.

I am feeling alienated by, of all things, an extremely well-written article on millennial burnout. Despite thinking that I belonged to the generation just above millennials, I fall within the age limits delineated by the article; I recognize many of the attitudes, expectations, and pressures detailed therein. I don't argue that I am drowning in no time, no money, no security, no respite, and that it makes me feel like a failure on deep existential levels when honestly I don't think even someone with my problems should have to worry so much and so constantly about just not going broke month after month after month. But I looked at the article's generalizations of the key features of millennial life and aside from the crushing economic horror and accompanying self-despair they were all about as familiar to me as an Instagram filter (I didn't go to grad school because it was expected of me in the American cursus honorum, I went to grad school because I loved what I was studying and was shocked to receive grief from my department for not being more business-minded about it; I have no emotional attachment to a cool job or a job that fits my self-image, just to a job that makes enough for me to live on and doesn't make my life miserable; I don't have a close relationship with my phone or with mainstream forms of social media and I am allergic to the concept of all-hours availability; I really don't worry about curating my life) and it left me instantly feeling that this article was not written to include or to aid me; it envisions a different kind of person drowning; I won't be seen. Probably all this means is that I should not have clicked on the article in my current mental state, but here we are. The bit about the cognitive load of being poor was new to me, plausible, and upsetting.

I concluded a couple of years ago that a pulp style was definitely one of the things that ended up in my own writing before I even thought about such things; it was the similes. There is a lovely note in this annotated edition of The Big Sleep (1939) that Rob got me, about the American vernacular "tall talk" that Chandler alternately condensed or elaborated into the colorful comparisons he's known for. I'm still not sure what to do with this example from The Little Sister (1949): "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight."

Comments

[asakiyume]

I never realized that about your writing, but yes! Yes, your similes do have that quality. And wow, I love that one from The Little Sister

Re: your second paragraph, there may be different types of life preservers aimed at different types of drowning person. I sincerely hope the type that will save *you*--or at the least not add stones to your pockets--is out there somewhere.

[sovay]

I never realized that about your writing, but yes! Yes, your similes do have that quality.

It's a feature of prose styles I like in general and specifically of a number of formative writers for me—Bradbury, Ellison, Sturgeon, Beagle, McKillip, Lee, Yolen, Le Guin, at least three of whom started out actually publishing in the pulps. Lee and Beagle did not so far as I know, but are nonetheless responsible for two of my favorite pieces of figurative language in print, respectively "She saw shelves of cakes like jewels and trays of jewels like flowers and sheaves of flowers like lances and, in an armorer's, lances like nothing but themselves" and "A Winnebago the size of a rural airport filled the windshield."

I sincerely hope the type that will save *you*--or at the least not add stones to your pockets--is out there somewhere.

Thank you. I am not actually hoping for saving. I just don't want more stones, which was surprisingly how this article turned out to feel.

[alatefeline]

Hi. I see you. I believe your experience of burnout and insecurity is valid. I don't conform to a lot of the millenial stereotypes either; I have always been at odds with conformity in general and an image-driven, 2010s-social-media-heavy, 'curated'-life-experience conformity in particular. I found similarities and differences in the article you are talking about. But insecurity, shortness of time, social and economic pressure ... those are really widespread. One comment I saw from a friend of a friend was that her generation felt vulnerable and stressed too. You are not alone.

<3

[sovay]

But insecurity, shortness of time, social and economic pressure ... those are really widespread. One comment I saw from a friend of a friend was that her generation felt vulnerable and stressed too. You are not alone.

Thank you. That's an important thing to hear.

*hugs*

[lemon_badgeress]

yeeeeees. I had to flee that article because I am too old to be a millenial, so I am therefore just a failure because I am. Whiiiiich is also not what it says and yet.

isn't this bit of ocean nice and salty. fancy some tea?

[sovay]

Whiiiiich is also not what it says and yet.

I agree with alatefeline's comment noting above that economic-emotional stress and insecurity are not limited to the under-forties. When a society is exploitative, it exploits everyone it can get.

(It is naturally much easier for me to say these things to people who aren't me, but that doesn't mean I don't mean them.)

isn't this bit of ocean nice and salty. fancy some tea?

I'd love some sugar kelp, thanks.

[yhlee]

Sorry the sick is back; I hope you recover soon.

*hugs*

[sovay]

Sorry the sick is back; I hope you recover soon.

Thank you. It's just gone on for so long that it's stupid.

[thistleingrey]

A bunch of the crushing doom described in that article on burnout also applies to late-stage Xers, and though Pew et al. have moved the line between X and mil a few times, I've always been an Xer. FWIW. There is always productive blur for these absolutist boundaries, IMO. *I* am seen by that article, somewhat. I think it matters that the article is published on BuzzFeed, whose readers are assumed mostly to be life-curators etc. etc.

(I was quite definitely poor during grad school, cog load and all--but I knew it then, so it doesn't sting now.... When one's income pre-tax (because Clinton's forgiveness of grad students hadn't kicked in yet) is 12k/yr and there is no help, one is poor, no question. I guess it'd be ~20k now.)

Also (sorry, hit Post too soon), I hope your health improves soon!

[sovay]

A bunch of the crushing doom described in that article on burnout also applies to late-stage Xers, and though Pew et al. have moved the line between X and mil a few times, I've always been an Xer. FWIW.

I don't generally spend a lot of time worrying about which generation I demographically belong to—it was Generation X for most of my life, now it seems it's arguably Millennial, the whole thing has felt fuzzy to me ever since the baby boom was determined to have ended somewhere in the '60's—so I think it must have been something about finding myself unexpectedly included and then sweepingly non-described that hit like a ton of bricks.

I think it matters that the article is published on BuzzFeed, whose readers are assumed mostly to be life-curators etc. etc.

That makes sense.

Is it useful to you?

Also (sorry, hit Post too soon), I hope your health improves soon!

Thank you!

[kore]

I was kinda incandescent about how a lot of these problems started in THE MID NINETIES, and the Exers were having a lot of these problems -- going to school to try to get better careers, winding up with crushing debt, not able to find a job to pay back the loans -- a long time before the Millennials. It was just that nobody really cared, or at least there weren't a lot of sympathetic articles about it.

[gwynnega]

I hope you feel better soon.

I love that Chandler simile. I'd never thought about pulp similes before; that's really interesting.

[sovay]

I hope you feel better soon.

Thank you. I just want to be writing, and for that I need sleep.

I love that Chandler simile. I'd never thought about pulp similes before; that's really interesting.

The annotation page, in full:

"The hyperbolic simile, like the fedora and trench coat, is now seen as an indispensable element in detective fiction, but this scene still stands out for the abundance and sheer gratuitous fun of its similes, nearly all of them added in the rewriting. Chandler, who said, 'I think I rather invented this trick,' tried it out for his first story, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot': 'It was a beautiful hand, without a ring. Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings.' It's not in his next story, but it returned when he began to hone the first-person voice in his stories of the mid- and late 1930s. The simile arrives in force in 'Mandarin's Jade' and 'Try the Girl' (1937), where even a tough-talking gangster has the gift: 'Act nice and you are as safe as the bearded woman at a Legion convention.'

"Where did the outrageous simile come from? It's not entirely a Chandler invention. We've found it in at least one other LA private eye in the 1930s, Robert Bellem's Dan Turner: 'It was hotter than the hind hinges of hell, and my puss felt like a fried egg,' reads the opening line of Bellem's 'Death on Location' (1935).

"Beyond that, its roots go back to American folk humor and a homegrown vernacular style that stretched from the frontier literature of the Old Southwest through Mark Twain and beyond. The inimitable H. L. Mencken—journalist, cultural critic, language scholar, and, incidentally, cofounder of Black Mask—called this style, characterized by 'wild hyperbole' and 'fantastic simile and metaphor,' 'tall talk." Mencken was known to indulge in it himself with similes like this: 'About as sincere as the look upon the face of an undertaker conducting a nine-hundred dollar funeral'—not as graceful as Chandler's, but cut from the same cloth. A student of vernacular himself, Chandler no doubt was familiar with Mencken's The American Language (1919; much enlarged Fourth Edition, 1936), in which Mencken praised the 'extravagant and grotesque humor' and 'extraordinary capacity for metaphor' of the American mind.

"He Was as Square as a Text Box in an Annotated Edition

"The simile-spouting private eye caught on and is now part of popular culture; indeed, it's what people who don't know much about Raymond Chandler know about his writing style. Chandler complained as early as 1948 about his trick being copied and 'run into the ground . . . to the point where I am myself inhibited from writing the way I used to.' This didn't stop him from generation a whole list of similes for inclusion in The Little Sister, ticking them off as he used them. The Long Goodbye's self-hating novelist rants at himself after using one: 'Goddamn silly simile. Writers. Everything has to be like something else.'

"The device became fodder for good writers, bad writers, satirists, and comedians. 'Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe,' is from the incomparable Mickey Spillane's novel The Killing Man (1989). Jim Nisbet, in The Price of the Ticket (1983), adds a touch of the surreal: 'The guttering sound from his father's throat modulated strangely, as if broadcast from some small, hapless machine attempting to recite a final bit of enigmatic code as it sank into a dark sea.'

"Here are some Chandler comparisons from outside TBS:

"The hard-boiled literature of the 1920s and '30s 'made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tea-room.'

"'My voice sounded like somebody tearing slats off a chicken coop.'

"'It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.'

"'She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight.'

"'I left her laughing. The sound was a hen having hiccups.'

"She had 'makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist.'

"'On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank on the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won't go to bed.'

"'I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.'

"'You're cold as a night watchman's feet on that one, guy.'

"The Internet is as full of Chandler similes as a digital commons might be, if it were a digital commons full of Chandler similes. Too self-aware? How about this lovely simile, from The Little Sister: 'She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had startled a fawn and it jerked away from me.'"

I'd add that I think of colorful similes as a feature of 1930's fast talk as well as hard-boiled fiction. I can hear Joan Blondell saying the nightwatchman's feet line.

[umadoshi]

A lot of that burnout article resonated for me despite a lot of it not being applicable to how my life's gone (besides which, I'm a couple of years too old to be a millennial), but I can definitely see why it's actively not clicking for a lot of people.

And I'm so sorry to hear you're sick again(/still)! ;_;

[sovay]

A lot of that burnout article resonated for me despite a lot of it not being applicable to how my life's gone (besides which, I'm a couple of years too old to be a millennial), but I can definitely see why it's actively not clicking for a lot of people.

The burnout parts resonated acutely. Just the parts about "and here's how we were all brought up and these are our values and here's all the daily ways in which we are vulnerable to this self-commodifying ideology" made me feel like I'd been looking through the wrong window.

And I'm so sorry to hear you're sick again(/still)!

Thank you! I'm tired of it!

[rosefox]

The older I get and the more I look at how people younger than I am are confronted by the extreme uphill of starting careers, the more I think that the absolute best choices I made were the ones where I said "fuck it" to doing what the system expected of me. Every time I quit a job (or sucked at it until I was fired) because I was miserable, every time I dropped out of college because it made me massively depressed, the year I not only quit my job but started a freelance writing and editing career on the strength of three connections and a decent grasp of English—every one of those set me up to be about as happy and successful as any 40-year-old I know. And that's the advice I give young people too: not to try to win or break the system, but to operate orthogonally to it as much as possible.

When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.

Yeah, see, no one I was close to ever really tried to sell me on that. There are advantages to coming from a family of artists and drop-outs. (An advantage that Kit will have: J is the only one of the three of us who actually finished a college degree, and it took him two tries.) I applied to one (1) university because I was clearly supposed to, and certainly everyone in my high school was very invested in going to (the right) college, but no one was hugely surprised when I quit and got a job and was much happier. Some of my relatives succeeded in following their artsy dreams and some failed, but all were very clear on the best path being the one that was true to yourself, even if it meant you sometimes had rodent roommates or other people thought you were weird.

The gut-punches in that article for me were the recollections of what 2003 and 2008 were like. I think 2008 was the year we only paid rent because UI was extended for people like J who'd been unemployed more than a year, and we still had to go through our state senator to get the state dept. of labor to keep cutting us those vital, vital checks. And I don't have student loan debt, but all the credit card debt we're still paying off has its roots in 2003; when I moved to California in 2001, I had $10k in savings, and when I moved back to New York three and a half years later, I'd cashed out a small bit of inherited stock and was something like $20k in debt. Terrible, uncertain times.

There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations.

This has been my M.O. since before the phrase "social media" was coined, I was very good at it and it worked out very well for me, and I have spent the past two years extricating myself from it as much as possible, because it's no longer fun or safe. A thing that's missing from this analysis of it is the loss of the kinder, gentler, slower internet that was discussed in the other piece you linked to recently. Being "LiveJournal famous" was extremely different from being viral on Twitter.

[sovay]

Yeah, see, no one I was close to ever really tried to sell me on that.

Same. My parents were extremely supportive about all stages of college and grad school, including not. I went to my so-called fallback school and had a wonderful time. I went to grad school and expected to have a wonderful time and I think it might actually be an institutional problem on their part that instead I got chronic illness and PTSD. Which is part of what I found alienating about the article. I'm not feeling betrayed by the American dream. I'm just feeling financially desperate and overworked to the point of insensibility and furious about living in a society where I am expected to be proud that I can take the hits and keep moving like some avatar of the Protestant work ethic in which I don't even believe. I don't feel like a failure because I don't own a house. I feel like a failure because I can't get my head above water and I'm too exhausted to do art and I worry all the time that in the event of a catastrophe I would not be able to protect the people I care for. (And I feel like a failure because my brain is always trying to tell me I don't justify the wear and tear on other people of my continued existence, but I suspect some of that would persist even in a context of economic stability. I'd be happy to test that hypothesis, of course.)

And I don't have student loan debt, but all the credit card debt we're still paying off has its roots in 2003; when I moved to California in 2001, I had $10k in savings, and when I moved back to New York three and a half years later, I'd cashed out a small bit of inherited stock and was something like $20k in debt. Terrible, uncertain times.

That sounds awful.

[Tiny Wittgenstein was here.]

A thing that's missing from this analysis of it is the loss of the kinder, gentler, slower internet that was discussed in the other piece you linked to recently. Being "LiveJournal famous" was extremely different from being viral on Twitter.

Agreed. Perhaps you should write about that.

[kore]

I ranted and raved in poor sabotabby's comments about how a lot of the SYSTEMIC problems that are hitting the Millennials now were felt first and arguably harder (because nobody at the time gave a damn) by the Exers, and the way to solve these problems is not by writing some kind of "now I have a framework and feel better even if I can't do anything about it" clickbait article. The hollowing out of the middle class and the loading of terrible debt -- student loan debt, credit card debt, whatever -- on young people trying to get into the middle class has been going on for a while! Elizabeth Warren was talking about it in the nineties!

....and another thing that greatly annoys me about articles like that is it sounds like the author actually has a pretty good life. Meanwhile a lot of people are drowning, and especially poor kids of colour who were told "you have to go to college to succeed" and went to for-profit institutions which were scams and now can't get their loans forgiven. The whole student debt thing is terrible, but that part of it is really fucking tragic.

[sovay]

a lot of the SYSTEMIC problems that are hitting the Millennials now were felt first and arguably harder (because nobody at the time gave a damn) by the Exers

Well, I'm not sure anybody gives a damn about the millennials in the sense that I don't yet see a turning tide of sympathy, but I agree with you that it's a problem that has been building essentially over the course of my entire life.

....and another thing that greatly annoys me about articles like that is it sounds like the author actually has a pretty good life.

I believe her when she talks about her burnout. One of the features of the mode of life she's describing is the ability to look from the outside like everything's ticking along, hitting all the marks, and inside it's all just adrenaline and screaming.

[thisbluespirit]

It is generally best to not click on things when feeling awful, but also hard not to do! I very much hope that you feel better soon! Bugs do tend to jump on when you're already feeling low, but it's no fun. *hugs*

[sovay]

It is generally best to not click on things when feeling awful, but also hard not to do!

I didn't expect to get smacked so hard by it, although maybe I just shouldn't have tried to read anything about burnout while feeling, well, burned out.

I very much hope that you feel better soon! Bugs do tend to jump on when you're already feeling low, but it's no fun.

Thank you! I have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday and in the meantime I am going to try not to stress my system further, whatever that looks like.

*hugs*

[selkie]

I read it and felt alienated and N read it and felt seen; I suspect it may not have been written for Jews reared by their grandparents, wolves, or in your case, minor local deities.

In any case we are poor, my household in the sort of gristle-gnawing-at-the-end-of-the-month way in which rescue never seems plausible or near, and your household in its way, and where did the people before us put the safety net, I want to know.

I feel heartened by your conversations with people elsewhere on this page and now wonder if 'Dreamwidth famous' is a thing to which you can aspire. It seems graceful and gentle and not like the flashbang of twitter or the creepy creepiness of Facebook.

Also: IN MY NEXT LIFE, I AM NEVER GOING TO GRADUATE SCHOOL. FUCK MY TERMINAL DEGREE TERMINALLY IN THE EAR.

*lights a little fire with its shreds*

I leave you with two relevant quotes:
"It is easier for a Jew to pass through the eye of a needle than to..."

and

"Found it. Found a bone."

*hugs*

[sovay]

I read it and felt alienated and N read it and felt seen; I suspect it may not have been written for Jews reared by their grandparents, wolves, or in your case, minor local deities.

I suspect you're right. As we found out in 2016, spatch is capable of feeling betrayed by his country; I am capable of feeling disappointed and frightened, but not essentially overturned.

In any case we are poor, my household in the sort of gristle-gnawing-at-the-end-of-the-month way in which rescue never seems plausible or near, and your household in its way, and where did the people before us put the safety net, I want to know.

They set it on fire in the '80's. And they raised the high wire. And now that's on fire too and the fact that we catch each other is the only thing that saves this metaphor from going totally Triangle Shirtwaist.

I feel heartened by your conversations with people elsewhere on this page and now wonder if 'Dreamwidth famous' is a thing to which you can aspire. It seems graceful and gentle and not like the flashbang of twitter or the creepy creepiness of Facebook.

I would certainly enjoy it more. At the moment I think I'm at the level of obscurity where I can be found by people who go looking and don't get hate mail from the internet for existing, but, hmm.

Your relevant quotes are the best.

*hugs*

[choco_frosh]

I am REALLY sorry if I gave you Lurgi Redivivus.

[sovay]

I am REALLY sorry if I gave you Lurgi Redivivus.

I don't know! I'm seeing a doctor tomorrow. I am just so very tired of being sick.