OH, AIM. WE GO WAY BACK. How many relationships have you recorded over time? How many friendships continued, romances kindled, feelings hurt and rejuvenated and cycling all over again? How many sexbots have I encountered through you when my password was hacked? How often have I spent clicking open your vertical portal, windows popping open as the distinctive bloo-do-doop invites me to a new surprise? Late nights in front of the glow of my computer screen were the norm throughout high school, undergrad, grad school. Even now, in the "real world," I cling on to the bit of nostalgia that you offer--that same, unchanging sound that was there when I met my best friends, when I flirted with my first boyfriend, when I had my first kiss. I spent countless two-AMs with you, hiding in my bed and pretending to write papers while I was not-so-secretly hanging out with my friends.
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IT'S SUCH A DISAPPOINTMENT when I hear people tell me, "Oh, I don't read." It's not so much that I want people to read because I want them to contribute to the industry and I want them to buy my books; it's more that I don't quite understand it. Public education has (so far; subject to change any way now) been provided up through high school in this country since circa 1892; literacy rates are at an all-time high, even though they virtually haven't changed in the last ten years and there's still a lot of work that needs to be done in this area, but organizations like Reading Partners (AmeriCorps, so long as it isn't de-funded) tackle head-on. E-readers have provided an unprecedented increase in accessibility to a million books in one little package; libraries remain free (provided you have an address, which is still a barrier for our homeless neighbors but some libraries are actively working to provide for their homeless patrons). I understand that book deserts are a thing, but the people from whom I hear "I don't read" aren't generally in/from book deserts; no, these are people with access to books and people with time to read, if they choose to dedicate/allocate it so.
I have a few theories as to why this is the case, particularly drawing from my own experience with reading, so I'll start with my own reading history: There's something about reading a Harry Potter book in the middle of the summer that never gets old, no matter how old I get. Is it the sure predictability I get from its hardcovers, or the thick jackets smelling like printer chemicals before the dust starts to settle in from years of being proudly displayed on the shelf? Does the book itself know how many times it's going to reincarnate the lives of its characters as it passes from one set of hands to another to another before its designated shelf-home--does it wonder about the people whose lives it touches, whose hands it warms? I took Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in my hands at twenty-six years old, and I read it in a week. I refused to listen to friends tell me how awful it was--how the characters weren't developed enough and it wasn't close enough to JKR's actual voice and how Albus was too whiny and how JKR herself said that H/Hr shippers were right all along. I love you, friends. But shut up.* So-called "Millennials"--the current young-adult generation, folks who typically range from 22-35 (or, at least, that's the time frame I consider)--are typically given a lot of flack for being the "obsessive" generation. We're the first generation to grow up with computers as a commonplace commodity, we take wireless internet speed for granted (anyone remember the horrible screeching noises of dial-up?--relatedly, there's a "Friends" episode where Chandler impresses everyone with his 12 MB of RAM), we complain that our iPhones aren't advanced enough despite the utilization of space-age technology. We're the spoiled generation. Our mothers and grandmothers are the true feminist generation, not us--they had to fight for workplace rights and voting rights and the right to not have their husbands present when they wanted to withdraw money from the bank.
And we? Western Millennial women? What do we have to fight for, with our internet and our video games and our ability to speak freely and have our own religion, to live in the golden American sun* with very few people calling us whores when we wear Daisy Dukes, with our one-bedroom apartments deliberately lacking screaming children if we want, and no one criticizing us for husbandless lives, our ability to climb the corporate ladder if we so choose? We didn't have to weed through all that legislation. There are no laws enforcing women to have domestic lives.*** We can read and write and vote and spend our money however we want. And read we did. Many of us--perhaps even most of us--grew up on Harry Potter, one of the most influential book series of our generation. We grew up loving Hermione Granger, the exemplar of everything a girl should be: intellectual, courageous, ambitious, and kind. She's bullied, and perseveres from it (I remember being extremely satisfied watching Emma Watson sock Tom Felton in the nose [sorry, Tom], and later finding it on the internet and watching that clip on repeat [this was before the days of gifs]). And most of all, she knows everything. She's clever. Really, she's almost OPed. |
PART OF THIS COMPLETE BREAKFASTBlog not recommended for sober consumption. |