I think I put “Happy” in quotes because I was concerned that people would think it was a description of the cat instead of her name? I was nine. That’s all I got.
There was a point in my 20s when I realized something: everybody looked a little bit like somebody else. I don’t mean that I couldn’t tell people apart any more because I was drinking so much (though I can see why you might assume that after reading this post). I mean that I started to notice that every new person I met or saw had some feature — nose, eyes, forehead, facial hair — that looked like somebody I already knew. Like, I’d meet a grip on set and think he looked kind of like my college friend Rob, or I’d have a server at dinner who totally reminded me of my cousin, or I’d see Short Cuts and be convinced that Lori Singer and Daryl Hannah were the same person. And then this thought occurred to me: there weren’t going to be any 100% new faces in my life, because I had met enough people at that point that everyone’s face I saw from then on was just going to look like a variation on somebody else’s that I’d already seen.
This was, needless to say, depressing. Was this a harbinger of my future in general as an older person (you know, pushing 30), that I would slowly run out of new stuff in my life, until everything was boring? Would I start to think my friends’ personalities were also just dull variations on other, earlier friends, so that nothing they ever said was surprising or new ever again? Would every hike I took just feel like some variation on my trip to Interlaken on my post-college trip to Europe in 1990? Like, “Oh yeah, more mountains and trees, ho hum”, forever and ever? Would every new band that came along be just a redo of an earlier one, like going from Pearl Jam to Stone Temple Pilots to Creed? (Some variation of that might actually be true now that every other pop act is produced by Jack Antonoff).
Luckily, this did not end up being the case. At least, sort of. It wasn’t that I stopped seeing resemblances in faces, it was that I stopped expecting to see faces that were 100% new, and basically forgot that that was ever a thing I’d expected in the first place. Similarly, while I did try to consistently seek out new experiences — traveling around Latin America by myself in my 30s, co-directing a feature doc that had us criss-crossing the country and having conversations with and getting to know many dozens of new people, actually dating men before I decided that I didn’t like them — I also stopped comparing everything I did to everything I’d ever done. I recognized, for instance, that while college had been this amazing time in my life that I missed, going back to it in my head was not going to actually bring it back to me in real life. I also realized that questing for 100% new experiences all the time would be impossible — or maybe just nuts, because I guess you can keep upping the ante on that sort of thing if you’re willing to stretch your bank account and your scruples and your appetite for bodily harm the way some people will when they find themselves getting older and unable to handle it, we all know or know of that guy (and yes, aside from Elizabeth Gilbert, it’s nearly always a guy). Instead, I just adjusted my thinking to try to actually experience my experiences as they happened. Now I’m not perfect at being in the moment by any stretch — I’ve said before that I eat too fast, I walk too fast, I suck at meditating, I spend too much time on my phone. But when I am doing something that I want to be doing, I try to just, you know, be there for it.
It’s weird to me how many people don’t want to do that, or maybe can’t. I have an acquaintance who will spend all of her dinner conversations reminiscing with her husband about what they did three years ago, that nobody else at the table was there for. Then I have one friend from childhood who always just wants to talk about things we did in junior high and high school, even when we’ve already relived those experiences many times. I don’t really blame them for these tendencies. Well, maybe I blame the first one a little, it gets really fucking boring listening to her try to remember what exactly she and her husband ate at that cafe in Lisbon in September, 2016. But clearly there is something going on in their heads that makes these episodes from the past more comfortable places for them to spend time in than the present. The reason it’s acceptable for them to do this, however, is our culture’s seemingly bottomless appetite for nostalgia.
I’m starting to understand that my own tolerance for nostalgia is bizarrely non-existent compared to other people. I’ve always craved stimuli, which was no doubt a trial for my mother when I was a kid whose favorite whine was, “I’m bored!” That wasn’t because I couldn’t find stuff to think about — oh, I can spend nearly unlimited time bouncing around inside my own head. But I figured out early on that, without some direction, that generally led to endless mental re-re-re-rehearsals of how I’d redo events from the past that I wanted to fix but couldn’t, or, at best, fantasies about what would happen if I ever met Sting. I knew that, realistically, I was never going to be able to go back and give that mean girl an appropriate retort, and that there was no future in which I would be sitting on that table with Jake at the end of Sixteen Candles, so what was the goal of spending hours thinking about either of these things? (Ten to fifteen minutes, sure, and I did, because I mean, what kid doesn’t have a free ten to fifteen minutes?) Instead, I learned to fill the time when I wasn’t with friends with serial creative projects, like taking blurry photos of my cats (I didn’t realize how much I did this until I recently pulled out an old photo album), and setting up fields of dominoes with ever more intricate patterns and stunts, and building paper models of all the buildings in the Alan Rose books then making weird claymation figures stop-motion around them with my Super-8 camera. Would I have become a filmmaker if I weren’t always looking for ways to keep from dwelling on shit? Who knows. The TV or the record player helped, so those were always on, but weren’t generally enough on their own, and had to be accompanied by something else, like making houses of cards, or homework, or, of course, voracious consumption of fantasy and sci-fi novels. On car trips, my dad would try and get me to look out the window instead of re-reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I told him, “I don’t like scenery.” It just wasn’t absorbing enough for me! Even now, as a grown-up who doesn’t need every moment filled, I am always looking for ways to stay out of my own head — but I don’t think that’s entirely why I disdain dwelling on the past. Honestly, what is more fun than the present, especially when you’re around other people who are sharing it with you? And even if you don’t like those people, wow, scenery! (Which I now appreciate.)
And I know a few of you are thinking, “Wait a minute, hypocrite, what about what you’re doing right now?” But for me, writing about the past, and particularly my past, isn’t nostalgia. Not because I didn’t enjoy it (although I often didn’t), or don’t enjoy writing about it (although, depending on on how much I suck on that particular day, I often don’t), or because I don’t think when I'm writing (although it is a different part of my brain, it seems, that actually gets stuff on the page instead of endlessly considering every sentence before [never] moving on to the next one the way I used to write before I learned, Hey, drafts!), but because I’m deliberately looking for a perspective that I think nostalgia doesn’t provide. I mean, yeah, I’m amused by how I felt I needed to add “In the home section” next to “THE PETS and other animals” to make it 100% clear that there were both sections and subsections to this very, very complicated photo album experience, but I definitely don’t want to go back to that time, which I have no illusions about, no matter how cute Happy was (and look at how cute she was!).
Whereas I’ve written before about how nostalgia has become a national failing, how certain people in this country love to reminisce about “simpler times” that really and truly sucked for most women and people of color and LGBTQIA folks and children and pretty much anyone who wasn’t looking forward to dying young, and how they can get us back there if we all just let them ban abortion nationally and eliminate civil rights protections and no-fault divorce and gun restrictions and child labor laws and voting rights. Because for real, right wing nut jobs — who are also, but the way, actively trying to keep anyone from learning about the past that they want to convince them to go back to — are now unabashedly advocating for all of these things. I even saw a burgeoning movement on Twitter pushing for the abandonment of democracy altogether because the founding fathers never truly wanted it in the first place. (That last part, of course, is true, but it’s rare that you see someone using that argument to support a strict interpretation of the Constitution). History goes in cycles and circles, we know this, and these days it’s looking like there’s a greater and greater chance that we’re going to either literally bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age or find ourselves in a post-civilization climate/AI apocalypse. But does that mean we have to be dumb enough to help those things along?
You can’t go back to a time when things felt new. You can’t be who you were. Believe me, I would like to have back the stomach I had in 1998, but it’s not possible. Sure, our minds are powerful, and technology is powerful, and at some point very soon, we are all going to be able to visit glaciers and rain forests and see polar bears and rhinoceri and poison dart frogs, and maybe even our dead friends and relatives, by strapping contraptions to our heads and bumping into walls — and at some point in the way-too-soon, it’ll be the only way to see any of those things. But right now, before it’s too late, there are people you know and real things going on out there that you can experience on Tuesday, or next month, or in 2024, before it’s too late. So just move on and enjoy the present at the only time you’ll ever be able to actually experience it: now.