and Art, a vagrant

I have this insufferable rant that only a few of my closest people have heard, but they've all heard it too many times at this point, so I'll share it here for funzies. I won't subject you to the whole thing, just the bullet points so to speak.

It goes: basically, elder millennials are the luckiest, and therefore best, generation. Those born between 1980 and 1985. Let me explain...

Technology has shaken up the world in so many ways, making impossible things possible, but also creating new, fun challenges for humans on a physical, mental, and emotional level. And those blessed elder millennials were developmentally abled at just the right time to match the complexity of each technology when it was handed to them. We weren't adults being given movies and then running away from the train onscreen barreling toward the camera. We weren't forty year olds being handed Pong and having to pretend that it was sooo mind-blowing. We also weren't eleven-year-old kids being given Snapchat and told to go wild. What we were given: 8-bit video games at the appropriate age, 16-bit video games a few years later, chatrooms as we became social in our teens, cellphones as we left the house in cars with our friends for the first time, camera phones after we'd already done all of the stupidest things we would do in our lives, social media as we left college and entered the real world, Instagram and infinite scroll at a point in our lives when we'd already established personalities and also we knew better, streaming as our social lives slowed down and adulthood took over. You get the point. We escaped, for the most part, the pitfalls of being too old to adapt – bots, trolls, fake news – and were spared, for the most part, being too young to know and understand the dangers – Candy Crush, deepfakes, buy-now-pay-later apps. Obviously, this isn't true for everyone born in that five-year window, but at least each of them had a chance. I just happen to fall within this window.

(A digression, I know that elder millennials also ruined so many things in so many ways. Once, when updating an app on my Amazon TV box thingy, the copy onscreen said, "Don't think of this as an update, think of it as self-care." That was us. Sorry. Every IP from every era, especially 1980s & 1990s, being rebooted, sequel-ed, and spun off? That was us, too. Again, sorry. I know we're not great in a lot of ways. We've squandered our gift for sure.)

All that being said, and knowing that I was born in that small window of time that I'm celebrating above, I still complain about being born too late. I feel this deep in my bones. Maybe we've all romanticized the past so much that it seems better, simpler, but I remember reading a poem back in high school and realizing that I was not the only one who thought this. The poem's by Edwin Arlington Robinson and it goes:

Miniver Cheevy
By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
   Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
   And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
   And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
   That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
   And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
   Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
   Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
   And kept on drinking.

This poem spoke to me on many levels. So much so that:

And:

"Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, and thought about it." I thought it was hilarious that internally I felt reluctant to be on the socials and if I had to be, to share or follow friends and networking folks, then I was going to use a tongue-in-cheek alias online. Hence, I became Miniver Cheevy. Even though I was, as I argued earlier, born at the exact right time in the exact right place (more on place next Thursday) as an elder millennial in Pittsburgh, I still eye a khaki suit with loathing (always have, always will) and miss the medieval grace of iron clothing. So forgive me for my earlier rant, even I don't agree with it. And I know that every generation thinks they're the best generation ever. Elder millennials, including me, are not new in thinking this either. But one generation has to be right, right? (Us millennials at least know we are not the greatest.)

indoor animal is curated by a human: Tim Papciak. On Mondays, he shares one link to one music video to help spark creativity in himself and in other creative types. On Thursdays, he recommends a book, movie, show, art piece, or link to some dusty corner of the internet that he believes either 1.) adds to the human experience, or 2.) serves as a coping mechanism in the year 2025. Note: this is not, and never will be, self-help content.