If that little piece of pseudo-introspective bullshit bit was true, I would make it my life's goal to whisper the name of every person who has ever lived at least once. I thought about this while laying in bed a couple of weeks ago and did the math. Let's say I can say one name every two seconds. Multiply it by thirty and and then by sixty. I'd be at 3,600 names an hour. Multiply that by nine and a half hours a day because I am have the reputation of a hard worker to maintain and five days a week because we're in America and I'm not working in a sweat shop. We're at 171,000 a week. How many people have lived on this earth? God knows I will probably butcher their names considering all the languages that I'm not familiar with. Hell, I'm considered bilingual and I can't even read half of the names in those languages correctly. How many Alan Lins will I come across? I'll read it for the kid who dominates Google when you type in my name. I'll read it for all of them.
Do you remember wanting to grow up so bad? By old I mean 12, obviously, because being in your 20's meant that you're ancient. How are the 90's not ten years ago? When I was in my teens, I watched so many films. Are there better breeding grounds for drama than celluloid strips? Plot lines weaving through each frame, intertwining with each other through themes and motifs. Some end up resolved while others don't. I remember thinking, "Damn, people are fucked up. Is that how adults are?" Then I would scoff and turn the movie off as soon as the credits start. These days, I sit through the credits-- and it's not because I have suddenly found an appreciation for the production assistants or grips (even though I really should, considering I majored in Film & worked on High School productions.) These days, I stare blankly at the screen with my eyes unfocused as the credit roll because everything is so relatable. You know you're in trouble when movies speak to you just a little bit too much. When the drama becomes yours to live, you know you're in it thick.
So many aspects of adulthood were thrust upon me this year, and it's every bit as vulgar as the innuendos that you can come up with. Too many deaths, too much responsibility and transitions and rites of passages. Wait. So how deaths qualifies as "too many?" Well, I guess one is enough and more just kind of overdoes it, no? In the cultures that I've been raised on, there's no defining event that declares you a man. Especially not Taiwanese culture for that matter, which is why you have so many kids still latched on (the teet, duh.) Is that why thirteen year old Jewish boys have Bar Mitzvahs? That way if the Mom and Dad come across a shitty blog entry that their kid posted to deal with growing up, they can say "Hey, you got a Bar Mitzvah. Shut your mouth and deal with it." I think they're onto something, this four-thousand year old religion. Who would have thought?
