More "twee" thoughts

I gave a short exam this morning and found myself mulling this over more while the students were taking the exam.

There are definitely what some people see as drawbacks to the "twee" interests. I know some people find cute stuff kind of nauseating, and as I remarked, some aspects of it (like the Wes Anderson movies, with their sort of painfully, self-consciously curated props and sets) seem a bit precious even to me.

But I also admit I love finding that quirky interesting thing in an antique shop and bringing it home and looking at it and thinking about what its history was. And surrounding myself with older objects (ESPECIALLY if they have some family history; I have an old radium-dial alarm clock (it doesn't run accurately and, anyway, the ticking is so loud it would keep me awake, but I still like to keep it) that came from my paternal grandparents.) And I mentioned the quirky jewelry before. And books. The author of "Twee..." comments that one of the ways to fit in with the movement is to "read a lot.....preferably alone."

I will say it makes me wonder how many of my "quirks" are ones I have self-consciously (or perhaps unconsciously) "curated" - played them up and made them more noticeable. The whole idea of preciousness and self-consciousness does bother me a little bit; it starts to feel "phoney," to use a Caulfield-ism.

Another concern is the apparent focus on escapism, and also the desire to keep 'childish things' in your life. I wonder if perhaps the infamous Slate article - no, I'm not going to link to it - where the author flatly said, "If you are an adult and you read Young Adult literature, you should feel bad." And the whole bemoaning the failure of certain generations (I remember hearing it about my own) to "just grow UP already."

The thing is, my frustration with this is two-fold:

1. I am grown up, dangit. I carry a heavy load of responsibility. I work full-time at a fairly challenging job. I always have stuff ready on time (like exams, lab material, etc.). I always pay my bills well before the due date. I remember meetings. Shoot, I remember people's birthdays and send them cards. And I do volunteer work. And what's more: WHEN I SAY I WILL SHOW UP TO DO SOMETHING I DO. (this is a sore spot with me; in some of my past lives as a volunteer leader of stuff I had so many people flake on me). Yesterday, at the lunch, the head of the Bereavement committee came up to me and hugged me and said, "I can ALWAYS count on you." And I take no small pride in that, that I'm dependable and responsible. (Side question: what would a "cutie mark" for responsibility even look like? I mean, if that's my special talent and all).

2. "Adult" life is not really all that so very appealing. Turn on a news channel in the evening and it's either a commentator yelling at the camera, or a woman with too much eye-makeup on trying to stir up panic about some person who may or may not be missing. Or it's sitcoms with jokes that even my inner 12-year-old blushes at. Or it's dramas where people die in sad and scary ways. (As much as I like the team interaction and the mystery-solving aspect of "Criminal Minds," I find it very hard to watch, because of the mass-murder aspect).

Spitz, in his book, referred to children's picture books and noted that in the past, many of them were written with the express purpose of putting nice pictures into children's heads so that nightmares and imagined boogeymen wouldn't show up. Well, the boogeymen of adulthood are all too real: ISIS, antibiotic resistant tuberculosis....the list can go on. And I admit, I love escapist stuff, whether it's a gentle Victorian-era novel or a Miyazake movie or "Gravity Falls" or the My Little Ponies comic books....because in a way, they do put nicer pictures in my head than what the evening news does. Oh, I know all the bad stuff in the world still exists. The thing is, there's not a great deal of a point in my thinking about a lot of it, because I have so little control over most of it....I am not a pharmaceutical researcher, so I can't be racing to try to discover a new antibiotic that will fight MRSA. Yes, I can be careful in my daily dealings to try to avoid *getting* MRSA, but beyond that, being worried about it doesn't help me much (and might even hurt me).

I don't know. I'd much rather flip over to "Sarah and Duck" on Sprout. Even if it is aimed at under-6s, still, it's cute and mildly funny and it's British so there's that tiny cultural difference to make it cool and interesting.

And I still have a lot of picture books or "children's chapter books" and I do look at them occasionally. An example: Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm. My brother and I had a hardcover copy of this book when we were small: a huge gorgeous book with nice drawings of pretty animals and a mostly-gentle narrative about them and their lives.
(Mostly-gentle: there are references to cats bringing "presents" of chipmunk tails, and dogs that had to be put down. I guess some of the Amazon reviewers were bothered by that but I don't remember being so, as a child: the old cat we had died, and I understood that, it was a part of life.)


I actually bought myself a copy some 10 years ago (well, my copy is paperback but that's okay) because I wanted my own copy and I thought the one my brother and I had had got worn out. It turns out it didn't, my mom found it again and asked me if I wanted it or if I was okay with her passing it on to my niece. I kind of laughed and said I had bought my own copy and that I really wanted Sarah-Jane to have that same nice experience of the Maple Hill Farm book....I can actually recapture a tiny bit of that childhood feeling, that sense of being safe and the world being a big wide wonderful place, and all kinds of possibilities being open ("Maybe when I grow up I'll own a farm like this one!")

In some ways, I was a lot more optimistic as a child. Or maybe less likely to see the consequences. (I was thinking about hobby farms again recently, and how it might be fun, as a retirement project, to raise alpacas or something....but the vet bills. And how hard it would be if I had to have one put down because of illness). Perhaps, as I mused before, kids are more resilient than we give them credit for - more resilient, perhaps, than tired old adults, simply because kids haven't seen enough of life to know, "Oh, this story is going to end like they all end."

But yeah. Wanting to hang on to a little bit of that, or maybe to try to recover some of the happy-go-lucky quality I had as a child (as much as I ever had; I was in some ways a more serious child than a lot of my peers). And to push the bad stuff I have no control over to the very edge of my consciousness.

I will admit, I wonder sometimes "how long can you keep this up? It's already ridiculous for a 40-something to still keep stuffed toys on her bed." And I still occasionally hear in my head the echo of the incredulous response of someone whose opinion I valued at the time: "You're buying a watch with Eeyore on it? What are you, EIGHT? That's not going to help you at all when you go for job interviews."

Well, I don't know. I got a job, and tenure, and made full professor, all while wearing an Eeyore watch. And maybe, I don't know, maybe the rules of what's appropriate are being rewritten and no one will think it a big deal in the future that someone in her, I don't know, fifties, still likes to watch cartoons or wear t-shirts with Snoopy on them or things like that.

And anyway, it seems very small to me (to go back to that anti-YA-lit Slate article) to judge someone harshly on an aesthetic choice that does not affect you in any way. Yes, I complain about the people who text, text, text in the grocery store, but that's mainly because they either ignore their children (and the child gets upset) or they run into me because they fail to see me. But I don't care WHAT you read. I don't particularly care WHAT you watch on television, though I'd hope that lots of people also watched the shows I liked, so they'd stay on the air.

I don't know. As much as some aspects of what Spitz dubs "Twee culture" are problematic to me, there are also an awful lot of aspects of it that make me happy and make my life better.

It'll be interesting to see what the rest of the book has to say.