We’ve inherited several assumptions about life.

Some day you will have a nice home to call your own.

A spouse and a baby.

Travel. You’ll spend money on stuff you don’t need. Stuff you do need.

There it is. Life. As a consumer.

I don’t know if I ever thought much about it as a child, other than assuming It would happen eventually. Indeed, being the fringe, red-haired, counter-cultural type, I didn’t even envision spending $10,000 on a wedding. Which I still hope I don’t do. But "grown-up life" did happen. Just in a very different way. I don’t have the house, the money (though, I’m working on it), or the spouse. And I’m finding that most of the post-modern gen doesn’t either. For one reason or another. So, why are we different from our parents and their parents?

These last few weeks I’ve stumbled upon several articles that have caused me to ponder how traditional roles crash up against the Gen X and Y protective casings. Those plastic-clam shells that frustrate the Old.

In The Washington Post’s March story, "My House. My Dream. It Was All an Illusion," reporter Brigid Schulte interviewed an immigrant woman who made a really bad decision. She and her husband bought a $430,000 home in Alexandria, Va., that they couldn’t afford. Through the manipulation of a friend and mortgage miscommunication, the Ortiz family found its dream of home ownership ending in foreclosure. 

She didn’t read the small print. If you are ignorant and manipulated, the things that once meant stability can be taken away.

When I was a beat reporter in a small town in the middle of Nevada, I worked with a guy who, upon hearing any news of business manipulation, would say: "burn it down." He meant burn down the institution. I think that’s what post-mods have been doing. It doesn’t work for us. So we burn it all down. In many ways, that leads to creative re-growth.

But, sometimes, in very few instances, it leads to utter shit. Most the time (not all the time) our parents have one thing up on us. They know how to communciate. With each other. And I don’t mean via email or text messaging.

Relationships. A relationship. The thing everybody wants but nobody can keep. The plot twist (or conflict) in every movie. My Yoplait. Your Powerbar. Emily Yoffe’s March 20th Slate.com column argues that couples should wait until after marriage to have children. The age of single parenthood began about 25 years ago, I think. Many of us dreamed of "finding the one." Instead we got pregnant. And someone ditched out. Why is that? Yoffe blames a lack of commitment. She has a few impressive statistics. She says that the institution that many Gen X and Yers call "archaic" is actually a social structure that benefits the couple and offspring. Yet, I really wonder if our age, raised on convenient yellow cake and instant gratification pudding, can make that commitment. Not, I believe, when we are manipulated into relationships. Or when wants and needs are miscommunicated. Or when conceptions of love and marriage are completely misunderstood and relational wisdom is gleaned from pop culture. And all of that is the norm in this age. 

Finally, a bit of sage advice for the struggling consumer in this declining gilded age. Tighten your belts. My grandmother used to say that. I don’t think we know the meaning of the phrase.

Becky Ann Bosshart

From Lunch Weekly:

Author of French Women Don’t Get Fat Mireille Guiliano’s guide for women in business, exploring issues of balancing career and personal life, risk taking, career advancement, leadership, branding, etiquette, mentoring, communication skills, and personal relationships…

Is anyone else tired of being sold the myth that French women are just perfect at everything? Don’t get me started, especially on Mireille Guiliano, who strikes me as completely full of merde.

From The New York Times—naughty fun with science: 

In her previous books, "Stiff" and a follow-up, "Spook," Mary Roach set out to make creepy topics (cadavers, the afterlife) fun. In "Bonk," she turns to sex, covering such territory as dried animal excreta used as vaginal "drying agents"; a rat’s tail "lost" in a penis; and a man named William Harvey, patent-holder for a rolling toaster-size metal box outfitted with a motorized "resiliently pliable artificial penis." In short, she takes an entertaining topic and showcases its creepier side.

And then she makes the creepy funny.

And guess what? It’s illustrated!

Also from PL:

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s El Juego del Angel (The Angel’s Game), a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind set in 1920s Barcelona, combining a love story, a mystery, a fantasy and an exploration of literature…"

The Shadow of the Wind was incredible, so I cannot wait for this one.

From Boing Boing—the trouble with finding good occult materials (and getting the evil eye from a skeptical librarian): 

Cecile Dubuis wrote a master’s dissertation for University College London titled "Libraries & The Occult." I’ve only read bits of it, but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems. From the dissertation: "The occult seems to be one of the least considered subjects when it comes to classification. This can often result in materials being divided among other subjects such as philosophy, psychology and religion. This can make it difficult to find occult materials."

I remember seeing something on Wit awhile back about the same subject, with some help from the New York Public Library:

The New York Public Library has an extensive collection of materials on the occult. The General Research Division collects a wide range of topics including esoteric magic… spiritualism and witchcraft. There are particularly strong collections on divination and Theosophy. The Science, Industry and Business Library collects materials on alchemy and flying saucers. Books on oriental mysticism and yoga are collected by the Asian and Middle Eastern Division. The Slavic and Baltic Division collects, in the original language, the works of Russian mystics, such as H.P. Blavatsky, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture collects titles on voodoo, santeria and related topics.

Parapsychology, the branch of psychology which deals with the scientific investigation of paranormal or psychic phenomena, is collected by the General Research Division.

It may not be the ideal collection, but it’s an ordered beginning. I’m sure scholars were already aware of it, but to the occult laypeople, dig in.

The U.K. Telegraph has an interview with Isabel Allende, my own personal Sheherezade, about her new memoir, The Sum of Our Days:

…she was once told by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that she was possibly "the worst journalist in the country," incapable of objectivity and prone to invention. "Wouldn’t it be better to turn to writing novels?’"he suggested.

The rest of us will never be both insulted and set on the right path by one of the greatest poets. Our simple lives are so inferior.

Finally, a startling, upsetting, but eye-opening new nonfiction book. From Salon:

During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.

"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," writes Skinner.

There’s just nothing else to say about that.

Jennifer Leblanc