Took an unexpected nap this afternoon, which is extremely rare for me. I almost never doze off. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing (sometimes, it would be really nice to be able to doze off), but the truth is, for as long as I can remember, nearly every time I have gone to sleep, it has been a deliberate act
One exception : when I was a little kid, I would doze off any time we were driving in the car at night. Even if everyone was talking, but especially if it was quite. Something about being in motion soothes me. Maybe the movement outside eases the movement inside me and some sort of equilibrium is maintain, like equalizing air pressures inside the cabin of a jumbo jet.
But when you get older, there’s just too many times when you can’t just take a nap when you need one, and so I learned to suppress my urge to sleep until it was the “right time”.
A lesson I learned too well, I think. Our instinct is to find a safe place to sleep. But I have a fundamentally broken sense of safety. It’s hard for me to ever truly feel safe, even when, as now, I am all alone in the apartment and there is nothing here which, rationally speaking, is a threat.
It doesn’t matter. I guess this is when I feel the most safe, but even now, there is a big part of me that is always in restless motion, like a shark endlessly swimming in the dark depths of the ocean, always vigilant, always moving, because to stop is to die.
No wonder I have a weird relationship with sleep.
So anyhow. I did doze off today. I was playing a video game and slipped right into Morpheus’ sweet embrace (Mmmm… Lawrence Fishburne hugs). Quite rare for me, but I think it’s a good sign that I was relaxed enough to do that and feel good after.
I am still pretty sleepy right now, to be honest. I really need to get out into the sunshine more often so that I can develop a normal sleep schedule. This napping throughout the day can’t be good for me.
Sure makes life go by faster, though. Yay.
Sorry about yesterday’s blog entry, by the way. I realized after I wrote it that while I had a lot of fun making it and trying to figure out how my tablet’s speech to text system worked, it was probably not nearly as fun to read, and for that, I apologize.
I’ve done a little research and found out that the default speech to text on Android devices is quite primitive by modern standards. And here I was, thinking it was a miracle of our times.
So I will likely go look for a cheap or free app that does the same thing but better, and see if I can truly type by talking. It’s something that could be extremely useful, especially if I am out and about, because it would be way easier to just dictate a quick note rather than find someplace to put the tablet down and then type on the itty bitty virtual keyboard with my big ol’ fingers.
Of course, I could just record a sound clip of me talking, but then I would have to transcribe said note at some future time, and I know damned well I would never get around to it, lazy sod that I am.
Much better for it to go directly into text. I am a text based dude, when it really comes down to it. Stringing those 26 magical letters into words and sentences and paragraphs and stuff.
I still find it amazing how just 26 symbols can turn a slice of dead tree into a medium for projecting another person’s thoughts into the theater of your mind. The written word is an amazing thing and those who write what others may read hold an extraordinary power in their hands.
That’s why I like it.
Unrelatedly, check out Microsoft’s latest bit of marketing.
Brilliant move on their part to use the current surge in nineties nostalgia as a way to spin the rather sad joke that is Internet Explorer as that great old thing from a simpler and more innocent time.
Retro nostalgia software. It’s an interesting concept. I have to admit, there’s some software from the past that I miss, like Xtree Pro.
But being a video game junkie, there are limits to the nostalgia. Sure, there are tons of great games in the massive library of every video game ever, but I would still rather be playing something modern.
The real reason I wanted to link that video, though, is that it has a strange effect on me.
It makes me incredibly uncomfortable.
Weird, huh? But I have figured out why.
It’s because it is a concentrated dose of nostalgia that comes after my own nostalgia. Nostalgia for a youth that came after my own.
And as such, it really drives home the point that my youth is over. There is a whole generation that has grown up after my own childhood and they are now old enough to look back at a decade in which I was an adult with the misty rosy glow of nostalgia for one’s childhood.
It took that ad to make my discomfort with nineties nostalgia acute enough to force me to figure out just what was going on with it.
This is the first wave of nostalgia that does not include me. The first that looks back to an age that does not seem that long ago to me, and yet an age when I was definitely past my salad days and on to the main course.
It makes me feel old in a very deep and powerful way. Life really does just keep stumbling forward no matter what and eventually, it will leave me behind entirely.
Man that sucks.
I have mixed feelings about nineties nostalgia too. There are three things in the mix.
1. Like you, it seems weird to me that people are nostalgic for something that was after my childhood, after the world lost its innocence, and it makes me feel old and like time is passing me by.
2. For the longest time, the nineties were the enemy. I missed the eighties: the culture, the fashion, the cartoons, the toys, my old friends, and just being in high school and not having the pressure of university or job-hunting. My life started falling apart in the nineties (late June 1991, the day after the grad party, to be exact). If you had asked me between 1991 and 1997 whether I’d be nostalgic for the nineties in the future, I would have been downright offended. There was a corny song from around 1993 that went “reluctant to find he’s stuck in the nineties.” I think it was actually about boomers who missed the sixties, not Xers who missed the eighties, but that one line stuck with me.
3. I am experiencing nineties nostalgia. In fact, it started around 2000, when I saw the Vanilla Ice movie Cool As Ice (1991) on TV. Then I missed the simpler, more innocent time when we all tried to do the Macarena. And Street Sharks. The other night I was in the car and the radio mentioned that Canada won a medal in snowboarding in the winter Olympics, and I thought, “Hey, remember the Ross Rebagliatti marijuana scandal? Good times.”
Mostly just specific things like that, rather than wishing I could go back and live in the nineties.
Of course I miss being in my 20s, and all the health and beauty advantages that come with youth, but I still remember that I wasn’t happy for most of the nineties.
The whole weirdness of nineties nostalgia also caught my attention in online animation fandom. I started noticing a large number of kids (they’re 30-somethings, but they’re still kids to me) who pine for nineties cartoons. There are more of them than there are people who miss eighties cartoons—even people my age, who should be the right age to appreciate the eighties.
Now, to some extent, I can understand why people who were born in the eighties would miss nineties cartoons. Despite the overall decline in animation, nineties cartoons did feature some pretty good writing, acting, and music, and even the animation wasn’t too bad at times, provided it was Japanese animation based on American designs and those designs were not too cartoony.
So even allowing for the childhood-nostalgia factor, I can completely understand missing things like X-Men (1992), Batman (1992), The Tick (1994), or Spider-Man (1995). Depending on your tastes there’s also the later Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles seasons (1990–1996), Street Sharks (1994), Mega Man (1995), Gargoyles (1994), Superman (1996), Battletech (1994), and so on. They all have redeeming qualities.
They were not as well-drawn as GI Joe (1985) but still very watchable.
And everyone likes anime uncritically at some point. I can forgive liking Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Pokemon, and the rest, if you’re 13–19, and just the fact that the animation is so dramatic and well-constructed is blowing you away.
But on the other hand, if they thought nineties cartoons were great, they should be absolutely mesmerized by eighties cartoons. And yet it’s the forgotten decade. No-one will admit how good those cartoons were.
I partly blame hipsteritis. If something gets praised enough, no matter how good it genuinely is, there’s going to be people who have to prove how unique they are by not liking it.
Take Jack Kirby haters, for example. Not just people to whom his art doesn’t speak—that’s fine, we all have different tastes—but people who go out of their way to say that Kirby didn’t really contribute all that much to comics, or he had no artistic ability at all, or he wasn’t fit to shine Stan Lee’s shoes. There’s no legitimate reason for saying things like that.
Originally (before they apparently all vanished), there must have been people my age who praised the eighties cartoons so much that these contrarians had to respond. And that’s one source.
The other is the problem of the Baby Boom versus the Baby Bust and the Baby Echo.
The generations before mine are not going to see the beauty of eighties cartoons because they’re still hung up on Bugs Bunny and Superman cartoons from the 1940s. It becomes an article of faith that the artwork couldn’t have been any good because it was a toy tie-in. And they’re the largest generation, so they continued to have a say even when their turn was over.
The generations after mine, if they’re dishonest, are not going to admit the animation was better in the eighties because it’s too old, and sometimes the writing was corny. It becomes an article of faith that the artwork couldn’t have been good because Grimlock said “Me Grimlock!” and Seaspray talked like he was gargling. And these people also outnumber us.
And of my generation, the majority stopped watching cartoons after junior high school and therefore are not invested enough in the originals to care what Michael Bay does with them. Of the remainder, some have internalized the anti-eighties propaganda, and are unable to examine the animation on its own merits.
So one thing I will have to be careful to never do is unthinkingly attack later decades of animation. And if good animation comes along in a later decade, I will have to acknowledge it, even if I don’t like the dialogue or the acting.