My Trip to the Library and Other Musings
Just got back from the library, where I began studying for my GREs. There's something about hanging out at the library and either studying or reading that I've always enjoyed. For some reason it has always made me feel either like I'm accomplishing something or that I'm more connected with what's going on, the latter usually stemming from reading the latest issue of The Economist. The sample GRE that I did (minus the essays) was pretty challenging. I thought I was a pretty well-read guy before taking it, but managed to find several words where I didn't have as much of a grasp on their meaning than I would have hoped. A few examples (at the risk of looking foolish to some of you out there): mansard, crepuscule, motile, lachrymose and quiescence were all words that I just looked at thinking, well, not thinking much actually -- that was the problem. Thanks to a handy (in the sense of useful, certainly not compact and available -- they were two very large volumes) Oxford dictionary, I ploughed through these words and found their meanings.

There's something academically pure about going through large dictionaries in the pursuit of the meanings to obscure words. Maybe I've seen too many lawyer (or general university) movies with characters romantically portrayed amongst piles of open books, in their passionate pursuit of knowledge. But that leads me to my other topic that I was thinking about in the last little while -- characterization.

It all sort of happened when I was reading "What Color Is Your Parachute?" -- a book prompted by countless urgings of Izzy to think about going back to school, and finally moved into action by the resignation of Charity to study law at Northwestern. There was an illustration of a small girl kneeling down by her bed, presumably saying her prayers. For some reason I connected this in my mind with a series running in the Wednesday edition of the Chicago Tribune about the stages of a woman's life, and sort of came up with the following thought. Everything that we see in the media about what it is to be a certain age is created by people likely not of that age themselves. This is more likely to happen at the extremities, of course. But it made me pause to think: What does it mean that all of the images created on what it is to be 'youth' (for instance) are created by people who aren't youth themselves, but are only looking at what it was in hindsight.

Hindsight, after all, is 20/20, and is completely different than what it is to go through it. Right now I'm 25, and I can see clearly how I'm different from when I was 20, and how I've matured, etc. But at the time, I was just me, as mature as I was going to get. Of course there are many other aspects other than maturity that I could talk about, but I think tit is the easiest example. But what the whole thing means is that we have people creating the media with a representation of the age completely in hindsight, but which is being consumed by people of that age as 'representative' of what it is to -be- that age. Needless to say there has to be some interaction between what it is to be that age and what it is represented (in hindsight) as, otherwise the youth would not accept it as valid. But still it follows that the injection of the representation will change what it is to be that age, or at the very least, the expectations of what it is -- and I think that's where some problems lie.

I really haven't got much past that point, but I thought it was an interesting mental toy that I'd share since I've been playing with it off and on for the last week or so. Have a response or comment? Send me an email or sign my guestbook! :)

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