Inside the Little Plastic Castle

mrissa

It's about knowing exactly what you're going to need and having only that. Not the stuff you thought you might need, or the stuff you thought looked cool when you were twenty and now you're forty-one and you're less sure. Not the stuff someone else thought you might need. And especially not the stuff someone else thought looked cool and it was never really quite right for you but also not wrong enough to get rid of. Just exactly the right stuff, exactly where you can get to it.

Living life inevitably comes with baggage--emotional baggage as well as physical. If you're a person who reaches forty without things and people in your life, that itself is emotional baggage, that itself is a story. Even if you're happy that way, it's a set of things that have happened to you and ways you've reacted. When we were packing up wedding presents into a U-Haul to move to California when I was 21, my uncle sighed and said, "When I was 21, I could just...throw my guitar in the backseat and drive off into the sunset," and I said, "Uncle Pete, I'm a pianist." Which is symbolically as well as literally true; I was never going to be someone who had a guitar and a kit bag for her entire life.

begin quote The second factor that goes into doge is the general principle of internet language these days that the more overwhelmed with emotions you are, the less sensical your sentence structure gets, which I’ve described elsewhere as “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” and which leads us to expressions like “feels,” “I can’t even/I’ve lost the ability to can,” and “because reasons.” Contrast this with first-generation internet language, demonstrated by LOLcat or 1337speak, and in general characterized by abbreviations containing numbers and single letters, often in caps (C U L8R), smilies containing noses, and words containing deliberate misspellings. We’ve now moved on: broadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling. If you’re a doomsayer, the innovative syntax is one more thing to throw up your hands about, but compared to a decade or two ago, the spelling has gotten shockingly conventional. quote ends