I'm getting old

I suppose that's the conclusion one begins to draw when popular musicians from one's high-school days start dying off.

(Yes, I'm referring to Prince. Even though 57 is awfully young to die. And also, he was only about 10 years my senior....Apparently he had had the flu and got bad complications from it? That's the hypothesis right now, anyway.)

I dunno. It's complicated; I was not really a fan (then again, I was not really a fan of ANY current pop music when I was in high school - I had been raised on WCLV and my parents' Beethoven albums so I mostly listened to classical music if I was given my choice, but I also had developed an interest in the antecedents of rock, especially the vocal style sometimes known as doo-wop). But Prince was "there," just like some of the New Wave bands like INXS, were "there."

(I do remember some of my friends pointing out some of the raunchier lyrics Prince produced. As I was and am still somewhat of a prude, that may have been why I didn't listen to a lot of his music, but even I realized he was musically gifted).

But despite that, I think actually Prince had appeal to teenaged girls because he presented a "bad boy" image but he didn't seem really ALL that bad - I mean, he was a little tiny guy, like 5' 4", and he wore guyliner before it really became a thing. So I think there was a sense that behind those lyrics about s-e-x there was someone kind of shy and sensitive and.....and we could totally have been wrong about that and we might have run away if he had shown up in person and been an actual-factual adult man, but the idea was that there was a sensitive soul in there.

And yeah, from some of the stuff I've read and also some commentary in the past day, apparently he was a notoriously shy person. (Funny. A lot of performers are. I am shy, at least in the sense of "Take me to a party where I don't know anyone and I will stand up against a wall and not talk unless someone talks to me" but I can get up in front of a class and teach with no problem. I suppose teaching is a sort of performing. But I can also be talkative in situations where I don't feel like "Everyone else knows everyone else already" or "but there are far more interesting people than me here; why would anyone want to talk to me?" For example, in the dining car on the train, seated with three strangers, I can handily keep up a conversation - secret is, most people like to talk about themselves so you ask them where they're going or what they do - and I admit to actively feeling disappointed when they sit there and dink around on their cell phones and won't interact)

Edited to add: Charles posted this quotation, from a 2009 interview that Prince did:

"It’s a hurtful place, the world, in and of itself. We don’t need to add to it. And we’re in a place now where we all need one another, and it’s going to get rougher"

And while I don't know the full context of that, yes, that is something I've often noticed and felt: there's enough pain in this world as it is, so why try to add to someone else's? I tend to think we're put here to try to alleviate others' pain when we can.

Also, people are tweeting various things - someone posted a (redacted to protect some details) check for a $12,000 donation that a charitable foundation he was involved with made to a library. I tend to want to believe that people have good impulses and that it's only the baser impulses that make people sometimes behave like monsters of ego (not that I've heard anything about him being like that) so remembering the decent things someone did is nice.

But this HAS been a strange year, with a lot of talent leaving us. (I joked about getting Sting and Weird Al Yankovic to a safe house, but, yeah). I suspect 2016 will be remembered as somewhat of an annus horribilus once it's over. (And from other perspectives: we were asked to fill out a survey yesterday about how we would "prioritize" what categories should be protected in the case of further reductions-in-force. I read the e-mail four times and managed to convince myself it was a HYPOTHETICAL and not an ACTUAL, and also it helps that a colleague on the Faculty Senate polled us in the department last week for lists of things we would want to have as categories. And that this largely arose because apparently NO criteria were used for the previous reductions-in-force. And someone formerly in HR claims that if I haven't received a letter by now, I CAN'T be RIFfed for next year, but....financial exigencies are financial exigencies. She did also remind me I'd be eligible for unemployment and it's possible that would last long enough to the point where I'd be rehired, but.....my nature is such that I'd be out there on Day 1 hunting jobs and probably taking whatever the heck I could minimally tolerate. Something like being a cashier at the wal-mart would make me so sick and so crazy I couldn't do it for long, but I MIGHT be able to do something like stocking store shelves.....I don't even know if there are any jobs in the area specifically for someone with experience in biology. I don't have teaching credentials so even if any of the public schools WERE hiring.....maybe the Noble foundation needs a glassware-washer? Though it would stink to have an hour's commute every day. But yeah. Telling myself it's purely hypothetical and also telling myself I fit the protected categories: I teach classes no one else in my department can, one of the classes I teach (at least) is mission-critical, I get good evaluations, I work hard, I have scholarly productivity and service, I'm not the kind of person who goes "I would prefer not to" and then sits there, passively refusing, when some kind of onerous service task comes up....Though I do have seniority which sometimes actually works against a person.) Things HAVE to get better, right?

Also, I think the fact that I've been low-level sick more than I've been well since late January is evidence I'm getting old. Though hopefully that's starting to turn around and I am now wondering if I got some kind of awful bacterial infection (or maybe even? fungal?) that led to me developing internal hives and THAT was the source of the lost appetite, inability to digest certain things I could in the past, general malaise, and pain.