Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

Now I'm not saying that there aren't any other weird times in a person's life. The last ten years of old age when you've already written your will and planned your funeral have to be crazy, as do the middle "Men of a Certain Age" years when you realize that you aren't young in any stretch of the word any more. But young adulthood, real young adulthood, is truly bizarre. For my purposes I'd like to define this period as ranging from the last couple years of one's terminal education until settling down stage. There are probably other indicators, but this is the the strange vagrant period between youth "being on track" (fourth grade comes after third grade, school follows summer, the people you see every evening around you are your family) and adult "being on track" (one year at your job follows another, you acquire seniority and climb the ranks, the people you see every evening around you are your family). We're unsettled gyps...

First you think you don't need to journal because you blog. Then you think you don't need to blog because you write long email. Then you think you don't need to write long email because you Facebook. Next think you know, you're expecting your posterity to go through your planner for insight.

...but you know? No one's eternal life ever rested on a movie or a pop band. In the words of a pop band that thought they were hot stuff but is now part of the cultural fizzle of the 90s: please don't put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band/ and throw it all away. The sublime of art, it can make you feel, but after that? You have to get up. You've got to start doing something for someone. Art can direct us to places we haven't been before, but there's nowhere that says artists have things figured out better than any of the rest of us. Someone's capacity to write a song that yanks out your heart isn't necessarily correlated with their knowledge of perfect truths that will bring you personally the joy you seek. If you meet Bob Dylan on the side of the road, to paraphrase the 70s book, kill him. Art and film will access in you what you already have. Ranking Pixar films with my sister, we had a stand-off over whether Finding Nemo or Ratatouille was t...