That'll Leave a Mark

You can quibble about the details. You can say that you have characteristics that don't fit neatly within your own cohort. You can protest that they are  generalizations, and there are as many exceptions to the rules as there are adherents. But research has confirmed them time and again, and the broad strokes are not in dispute.  

The Greatest Generation encompasses those born in the first part of the century who lived through the Great Depression, and includes those who fought in World War II. Their labor and hard work laid the foundation for the country we know today. They begat the Silent Generation, those born between 1925 and the mid-forties. As much as any group, they were the originators and shapers of what we consider 20th pop culture, with pioneering musicians, filmmakers and artists. Next came the Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964, a group that wanted it all and would settle for nothing less. In their minds they are still in high school and college, children of Watergate, Woodstock and Vietnam. Their kids are Generation X, born 1965-1980, who grew up in dual income households and came to accept divorce as a normal state of affairs. Their touchstones were video games and music videos. Millennials, those born 1981-1996, came next, the first group of digital natives. They grew up with security top of mind, with 9/11 and gun violence shaping their views. Lastly, Gen Z, including those born after 1997, is the most racially and ethnically diverse of the groups, and with the oldest in their early twenties, just starting to make an impact.  

Each group is defined not simply by the years in which they born, but by the trends at the time in parenting, technology, and economics. Additionally, their shared experiences help shape their outlook. Those include world and national events, pop culture phenomena, and moments of trauma and accomplishment that united all regardless of social strata. The assassination of Kennedy, the Beatles, the first iPhone, Watergate, man walking on the moon: each produced a "I remember when" moment, bringing a shared experience that helps to link all in the cohort.   

For the Silent Generation that means generally a belief in conformity and a strong desire for traditional family and family values versus speaking out and rebellion.  Contrast that with Generation X, whose members have a strong skepticism for existing institutions and tend to be independent and self-reliant. And Boomers grew up with increasing prosperity, and expect that their standard of living will only continue to go up.   

Each generation also has certain scars that grew out of reactions to some of the major traumas of the day. They manifest themselves in habits which have become ingrained over time. Depression origins and wartime shortages resulted in the Greatest Generation being generally frugal. While many were eventually able to live a prosperous lifestyle, they are always watching costs and minimizing expenses. Meanwhile, Boomers came of age during the energy shortages of the 70's. They remember gas lines, rarely leave a room without turning out the lights to conserve power, and would rather put on a sweater than turn up the heat.  

And what about where we are now? While the effects of the pandemic have varied depending on location, socio-economic group and occupation, any number of side effects have made a lasting impression. And that means that long after the virus is in the rearview mirror, certain behaviors will be ingrained. It is likely that anyone who comes through this experience - and that means every group noted above - will in the future always have a hidden stash of toilet paper. They will be more likely to wash their hands after contacting any surface that could contain germs, and more likely to clean and disinfect high touch areas in their own spaces, be it homes, cars or offices. And rather than try and get close to people, they will be less likely to cozy up when it's possible to keep apart, as social distancing becomes muscle memory.  

So don't be surprised when your grandchildren, should they be here or yet to come, wander into your house, open a closet, and yell out "Gramma, why do you have so many rolls of Charmin?" All you'll be able to do is shake your head, and start yet another sentence with "Well, back in the Pandemic of 2020."

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is learning not to touch his face. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Living in The Matrix

The year was 1982, and I was sitting in a movie theatre in New York City with some friends watching a new science fiction movie. "Tron" starred Jeff Bridges as a programmer who gets sucked into a computer. There he finds that the bits and bytes he's been so casually moving around on the screen as motorcycles and people existed for real in a parallel world. Deleting was death, and inserting was life.  

Some thought the story incoherent, others thought that the images, which combined live action and early computer animation, to be rough and unpolished. But I remember being mesmerized. Partly it was the technical wizardry of creating a world on the screen with live actors and a computer-generated universe. But it was also the concept, where inches away from the screen where we typed was an entire ecosystem that was constructed not of wood or metal but of keystrokes.

Not even two decades later the concept was pushed even further with "The Matrix." In this 1999 classic, Keanu Reeves plays a hacker who is recruited by a secret group that shows him that he is living a simulation inside a machine. Far more polished and sophisticated than "Tron," it showed both advances in the technical state-of-the-art as well as a leap of conceptional structure that was breathtaking, though Jeff Bridges' lightcycle still looked like more fun.

These two movies come to mind as it seems as though we are all living in some offshoot of those imagined worlds. To be sure, for the past dozen or so years our lives have been including more and more online elements, from shopping to entertainment to social interaction. We may not have been fully inhabiting those electronic worlds, but they moved from being an idle curiosity to a being a significant factor in our day to day existence.

Then came March. The pandemic forced us all to stay at home, interacting only through our screens. It's as if we inhabit them, and all of our relationships, activities, entertainment and more is just so much air. Yes, it was already under way. But Professor Scott Galloway of NYU postulates that the pandemic was a super accelerant, taking trends that might have taken years to manifest, and compressed them into a time frame no one imagined or even though possible. But here we are, talking not of being burned out by the commute, but stressing out over back to back Zoom calls. And our lament about limited bandwidth pertains both to the pathways in our brains and the electronic pipes coming into our homes.

In the early days of computers, some systems worked by ping ponging information back and forth between a pair of disk drives. One place I worked named all their drives after famous comedy duos. So you could have a project living on Lucy and Ethel, or Dean and Jerry, or Bob and Bing. I recall a conversation that went something like, "The graphic sequence explaining mortgages? If it's not on Bud and Lou, check out Stan and Ollie."

Now we've moved from disk drives in our homes and offices to everything residing in the cloud. Even if you don't understand how that actually works, you probably get that you when you save a picture or document or project, your local keyboard and screen are basically a window or remote control into some far away device. You send it all off into the ether, and somewhere there is a computer that makes it all happen. On a current project, the guy in charge has a number of his pieces of equipment configured exactly that way. Rather being physically in his studio they exist in some Amazon computer center somewhere. And in a nod to those ghosts in the machine, rather assign them numbers or colors, he has dubbed them after characters from "The Matrix" namely Neo, Trinity and Morpheus.

Are they just names? Or are they sentient beings, digital servants that actually exist, not in flesh and blood but in bits and bytes? Does Neo know Siri? Do Trinity and Alexa ever have lunch? Is Zoom merely a video conferencing platform or a yenta extraordinaire? Perhaps it is true, with a nod to Joni Mitchell, that we really don't know clouds at all.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is amazed what he can do in his slippers. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Maskccesories

When you got your first cell phone, what's the first thing you did? Sure, you called your mom, your best friend and your spouse, and said "you won't believe where I'm calling you from!" But after that you started shopping. You needed a case, a charger, a screen protector, things which you not only never needed before, but which you didn't even knew existed before.

Since that time your phone has become as much a part of your everyday carry as your wallet or your keys. But now there is a new "must have" accoutrement, whether you are dressing up or down, going to the store or office, meeting with friends or family. Not the latest piece of high-tech gadgetry, but rather the most low-tech of solutions that cuts across every divide we have, from race to income, gender to religion, region to nationality. Whether you like it or not, at least for the foreseeable future, your every outfit will be accessorized by a mask.  

Much has been written about the best kind to have, whether surgical grade or HEPA filter-capable or full-on respirator. Experts are divided, but the prevailing wisdom is the best one is the one you will wear the longest. After all, if you keep it dangling around your neck, it's more fashion than function. In this case doing something is more important than doing nothing, even if your solution is more Lone Ranger than Darth Vader.

Beyond that, if you're going to make a piece of cloth part of your life, what can you do to make it you? If in the beginning function was all the counted, we've now moved on to making a statement. After all, the face of the mask is, well, your face.  Whether it is demonstrating your support for your favorite team, your love of flowers or your goal of being a Mandalorian, it is the new first impression people have of you when you finally reconnect in person. And woe to the guy sporting a Yankees logo on his kisser when he walks into a Mets meeting.

But beyond the mask itself, a whole cottage industry has sprung up to accessorize the accessory. To be clear, you should be wearing it whenever the situation warrants. Still, a gal has got to take a sip of water now and again. Do you let it dangle from an ear or bunch around your neck? If you're of a mind, perhaps a mask necklace would be of help. Like a similar sling for your glasses, it hangs your mask around your neck where it's easily retrievable. They are available in almost every material imaginable, from silver to leather to silk, and decorated with pearls, stones and other shiny stuff. The biggest issue, especially if you do indeed do the same with your glasses, is not strangling yourself.  

Or maybe you hate the pressure masks put on your ears. If that's your headache, so to speak, you might consider an ear protector. These devices stretch across the back of your head, and the ear loops attach to it, increasing the comfort factor. If you are a glasses wearer, you can get small "mask mates" to put on the earpieces, so you can attach to mask to them vs to you. They come in every conceivable design, from flowers to the Bat Signal to my personal favorite, mini-donuts.  

And when it's not on your face? There are pouches to keep yours clean when it's in your pocket or purse. There are clips to hang them from your sun visor as you drive between wearings. And there are organizers to hang by your door at home, bringing the same order to your collection as you do your car keys.   

Is all this necessary? After all, once we get the virus under control, whether it's in 6 months or a year, all those masks and their accompaniments will be thrown out or relegated to a bottom drawer. On the other hand, experts say that another pandemic is not a possibility but a probability, with the question being not if but when. Or as a writer wrote about his weekly column, you can look at it as if we're standing under a windmill: just when you are happy to have ducked a blade and stand up, you realize that there's another right behind it coming for your head.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford prefers masks that go over his head. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Safe DIY

Maybe it's because you don't want people in your home. Maybe it's because you can't get to your normal salon or stylist. Maybe it's because you no longer go past that Greek bakery on your way to work. Or maybe it's simply because you're just bored. Whatever the reason, there are probably innumerable things you used to have others do for you, and now have decided that it's just easier to do it yourself.  

Actually it's not that it's necessarily easier, but given the current circumstances you've been forced to make the switch. After all, how hard can it be to change the washer in the bathroom faucet, or trim the bushes in the front of the garage, or to cut your spouse's hair? Bill the plumber, Andre the landscaper and Sally the stylist do it effortlessly. Well, now there's water all over the floor, the bushes may never grow back, and your husband has taken to wearing a baseball cap to cover the bald spot over his left ear. Hopefully your kid didn't need anything more than a splinter removed from his hand since March, or now you'd be calling him Lefty.   

To paraphrase the mantra of Second Amendment fans, idle hands don't screw up plumbing repairs, know-it-all homeowners with no training screw up plumbing repairs. And so perhaps best to leave the skilled work to the professionals. Still, idle hands need to be kept busy. For sure they can work on a jigsaw puzzle or play a video game or bake some bread. But they can also be constructive, and as long as life, limb and major property damage are not at stake, a little DIY project is not a bad idea.   

These days lots of folks have rediscovered a craft or hobby they started and put aside years ago. Open that bottom drawer or look in the back of your closet, and you're liable to find the beginnings of a scarf or the start of a scale model of the Eiffel Tower or a photo album with 3 pages filled that you started before something came up. Well, now nothing is coming up, so time to drag it back into the light of day and knit one, purl two.  

And if you never had the time, well, now you do. All those hours that used to go into driving to work or school or PTA meetings is now free and fair game. And with an expanding number of offices and activities not opening till next year at the earliest, per Malcom Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, you'll be well on your way to mastering the accordion by the time it's safe to put together a polka band.  

The big question is what to do. Maybe you've sampled a bunch of time killers, and not found any really captivating. Part of that might be because you don't have the right materials: stuck at home, you have to work with what you've got. In that vein, The New York Times published a guide to making jewelry. But no need of polished stones, glazed ceramics or precious metals here. A little string, some glue, and the pages of the paper itself will suffice, though their guide to making a paper-bead bracelet felt more like a third grade summer camp project than a hobby.   

But you likely have plenty of other materials to work with. All those Amazon boxes are like a giant set of blocks. You can make a coffee table for the kid's room or a chair for the basement. You likely have been loading up on and eating staples like peanut butter. Fill one empty jar with dirt, another with rocks, and you're well on your way to a set of free-weights. And your twice a week order of Chinese takeout has yielded oh-so-many containers to used for an indoor herb garden that will yield basil long before a vaccine is ready.  

There's an old saying that you don't play the hand you wish you had, you play the one you are dealt. Sure, it would be nice to learn how to make custom curtains with handpicked material. But since shopping in person is a questionable activity, go with what you have. It may not be room darkening, but that bubble wrap does diffuse the light quite nicely.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford made new organizers for his desk. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Ala Can't

When you were a kid, your mom put a dinner plate in front of you with what she thought was a well-balanced meal. There might be some chicken, maybe a potato or rice, perhaps a bit of broccoli or green beans. It's not necessarily what you would have picked had it been up to you, but, well, mom was the boss and the nutritionist. And if you wanted any shot of getting to the ice cream, you had to eat it all. 

As you got older, you were able to pick and choose what you wanted. You passed on the spinach, had an extra helping of steak, added a stick of butter to that baked potato. It might have led to an extra pound or two, maybe some complexion issues, but you were young and invincible, and no one was going to tell you what you could eat. Besides, what difference did it make in the long run anyways? 

Well, welcome to the long run. And now you recognize that, to paraphrase a popular refrain these days, eating has consequences. And so maybe you cut back that serving to a single portion, switched to low fat yogurt or learned to like salad. But you still didn't like beets, and damn it, no one was gonna make you eat them. 

That's usually not a problem. Whether you are eating healthy or not, watching your weight or not, binging or not, if you are making your own meals at home or ordering in a restaurant, you can select the things you like and ignore the things you don't. Hate cauliflower but like zucchini? Partial to lemony things but not big on spicy? Like berries but not peaches? A fish man/woman vs a pork chop person? Yours to prepare/order/eat as you see fit, no explanation or excuse needed. 

But not always. As we slowly return to some semblance of regular life, or more correctly, learn to navigate the changed landscape that will stand in for normal for the foreseeable future, we are going to have to make adjustments. There are several situations where before we took for granted our God-given right not to have radishes on our plate. Not anymore. In the interest of public health, you don't have to like it, but you may have to look at it. 

All those instances where you got to select what you liked off of a common table are likely gone for a while. No more buffets, no more salad bars, no more dessert tables. Likewise, no more platters of hors d'oeuvres, bowls of chips and guac, or plates of fully loaded nachos. If double dipping was simply unsanitary before, now it is positively life threatening. Whether your group event is capped at 10 or 20 or 50, there will be no wait staff passing trays of mini quiches. Rather everyone is likely to get their own little assortment: a single meatball, a single stuffed mushroom, a single garlic shrimp. It will look less like a party, and more like a still life, though I don't recall Caravaggio painting "Pig-In-Blanket with Carved Carrot Flower." 

And swapping with your buddies is probably also a thing of the past. If you were on a flight or at a meeting or working a project, you might have been able to select the headline act of a boxed meal that also contained an assortment of other courses. If you were like most, the first thing you did was take out all the different little containers, and examine them, a process that recalled lining up your baseball cards or Barbies. 

Depending on the lead the supporting cast would vary: the chicken came with pasta salad, while the roast beef was accompanied by a tomato and pepper medley. But what if you weren't partial to peppers? No worry, you could trade with a friend. But no more. The old saw was "you break it, you bought it." The new one is "you touched it with your unsterile fingers, it's yours, no sharesies." Mom may not be watching if you eat it or not, but that container of eggplant with drizzled tahini sauce will be staring at you as you pass over it to wolf down the strawberry cobbler next to it. The bottom line is that we no longer live in an ala carte world: now it's ala can't.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford eats most things on his plate. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.