One of my new favourite places to shop online is torrid.com. Torrid is basically Hot Topic for larger women like myself, and I don't know how I didn't find out about them sooner. Granted, they make the kind of clothes I wear when I'm having a social life versus when I'm in my professional life, and I've only recently begun having a social life again, but you'd think I would have heard something about them. My one visit to their store in Toledo, about a month ago, was a real eye-opener for me; I'd like to keep going there, but unfortunately the store is in the super-mall east of here that started picking up all the youth-related violence after Southwyck Mall closed down, and I try to avoid going there. That leaves me to shop Torrid's selection online, which isn't quite the same thing (especially when it comes to clothes), but it's been fun to buy new clothes and see how they help open up parts of my personality that have been dormant for a few years.
Of course I get e-mails from Torrid, and in their most recent e-mail they proclaim that "The Grunge Look is Back." Having lived through the original grunge craze back when I was in high school, I can't call what Torrid is selling grunge -- they're basically using plaid in more modern applications -- but nonetheless it does get me thinking back to my high school days, when the popular music scene finally started producing artists whose material I liked (although I moved towards Björk and folk-rock, I did like grunge a lot). I can still remember turning on MTV during spring break of my senior year and John Norris saying that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide; I don't know if it was quite a Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin moment for my generation, but it was at least close to it.
What really bothers me, though, is that we're in the last year of the '00s here, and I really don't know how to characterize the decade. The '80s had the invasion of the synthesizers in pop music, Michael Jackson and Madonna, big hair, yuppies, and all the stuff inspired by Miami Vice. (Most of those were the reasons why I got into rap back then.) The '90s had the grunge look and the Seattle sound, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and the relativistic morality embedded in the television and films of the decade. Coming up on the dawn of 2010 here, though, I don't really know how to characterize the music of the decade, who the two or three most important artists are, and what the fashion of the decade was. The politics and morality were certainly easy enough to catalogue, but given that I was in college for pretty much the entire decade, you'd think I'd be more capable of knowing what popular trends in music and fashion were. Given that I try to use popular culture as a way to make my teaching more accessible to students, it's even more troubling that I keep drawing blanks. Maybe I need to wait a few years to see if the culture itself helps define these things, but in the meantime I don't feel good about my inability to grasp these fundamental elements of the culture most of my students grew up in.
Coming from the early days of the Internet Age, I'm used to basing my e-mail addresses and other contact information off of my real name (sean@..., sshannon@..., seanshannon@... and so on). Back when I first went to Antioch, my e-mail address, as was all students' there, was based off of my real name, and I couldn't request it be changed to firedancingspirit@... or something like that. When Dad was first able to access the Internet through his old CompuServe account, his address was based off of his CompuServe ID number, which was about as easy to remember as a phone number, without the convenience of area codes. Although the age of vanity e-mails soon came, I guess I'm kind of old-fashioned, and I kept picking e-mail names -- and the domain name for the .org -- based off of my name. More than once I've had people tell me that they'd think someone as imaginative as I am would come up with something more creative. I guess maybe now that I'm in the work world (or at least as close to "the work world" as academia ever gets), though, maybe it's a good thing I stuck with identifications that don't carry any potentially risky baggage.
As I've written before, though, this comes with its fair share of risks. My Yahoo! Mail account is based off of my real name, and it's the one I tend to use whenever I don't want to give my .org e-mail address out for fear of getting a lot of spam. This was before the spam filters on my server and my computer became better than those on Yahoo! Mail, though, so I'm having to rethink this strategy. Unfortunately, I've found that having such a "simple," easy-to-remember e-mail address on Yahoo! Mail means that many other people will also give it out as their e-mail, either accidentally or on purpose. Honestly, I'm beginning to expect it's more of the latter, as my Yahoo! Mail account is quickly becoming unmanageable from all of the spam I'm getting. Even with as much of it as the servers filter out, maintaining that e-mail is becoming more of a hassle than it feels it's worth to me.
Perhaps the worst spam of all I get on there is the political spam. At least one of the organizations I get spam from is because of my own actions -- a particularly beligerent Democratic recruiter coaxed that e-mail out of me in 2004 trying to get me to support John Kerry's presidential bid -- but I also get a lot of junk mail from Republican and conservative and Christian groups that I know I never signed up for. (I'm also on the mailing list of this one Democratic politican in Virginia for some reason.) Ironically enough, that e-mail address is also the same address I use for the political e-mails I want to get, so I have to sort through the e-mails I get from Ralph Nader and the Green Party as well, and Yahoo! Mail sometimes flags those as false positives for spam. (For those of you who were on Obama or McCain's e-mail lists during the campaign, I don't know if you're still getting e-mail from them or not, but Nader's been sending regular e-mails continuing the push for a single-payer health care system.)
The biggest punch line in here, though, is the content of the e-mails I get from all the various political organizations. Setting aside solicitations for donations -- a necessity of our political system in its current incarnation -- my Green and Democratic e-mails are pretty much all about substance, trying to inform me on various issues and get me involved in them. On the other hand, many of the Republican and Christian organizations that send me e-mail also try to sell me stuff, ranging from life insurance to miracle cures. Some organizations send me more sales stuff than political stuff. Ultimately, all politicans are salespeople, trying to sell me on their vision of how the city or country or world should be, but when you use an ostensibly politically-minded organization to try to get me to buy these material items, it just strikes me as absurd. Unfortunately, given the current state of American politics, it probably doesn't seem so absurd to most of you.
When I said that I wanted the Red Wings to exit the playoffs early, I should have known that the universe would take that as a sign to get the Wings all the way to game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and then to have them lose in a real heartbreaker. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the universe threw a whole bunch of bad stuff at me right before then, so the Wings' loss really didn't affect me that much. That being said, between the way the NHL is going as a whole, and the Red Wings are going in particular, my enthusiasm for the Red Wings is just diminishing more and more. There was a time when I could craft my schedule around Red Wings games (and Hockey Night in Canada), but it feels like that time has passed now. My interest in sports has been diminshing a lot these past few years, but now I can barely be bothered to glance at the previous night's Tigers score.
This isn't true with just sports, either. Over the past couple of weeks I downloaded a lot of games to my Wii using the Wii Points I got for my birthday earlier this year, and I just can't seem to be bothered to play them much at all. Even the sequel to Final Fantasy IV -- which remained my favourite game ever even after I played Final Fantasy VII for a while, and the first video game to ever make me cry -- has gone mostly unplayed for several days, even though I've had next to no responsibilities over this holiday weekend, and plenty of time to play video games. The number of video games I've bought but never even put in my systems to test out is growing to truly appalling levels, and I've even gone so far as to buy games for systems I don't own yet. It feels like my buying habits have yet to catch up with the changes in my life that have seen things like sports and video games -- and yes, as much as I hate to say it, this blog -- to the wayside.
Unfortunately I can't talk too much about the changes in my life recently, but suffice it to say that for the first time since I was in school, I actually have a social life. I feel like I'm making stronger bonds with people than I have in a long time, too, and I'm getting the opportunity to figure out some things about myself that I never knew before. Given how I am about self-knowledge, you can imagine what a cool thing this is for me. I can't deny being kind of fearful, though, given how I've messed up situations like this in the past. I finally get a nice, long break from teaching after this month is over, and I'm hoping to use the next couple of months here to try to reintegrate things into my life that I've let slip for a while now. That should mean more blog entries, but it won't, for example, mean paying more attention to sports. This blog still serves as an important outlet for me and a way of connecting with people; I just don't feel that paying close attention to sports is doing me much good any longer.
Labels: hockey, personal, sports, videogames