The age of relevance

My daughter has been waging a fresh battle to get Snapchat. Amy and I somewhat naively assumed we'd be afforded a slightly longer respite from this kind of battle. After all, we had been experiencing a period of relatively peaceful coexistence after the Great Instagram Campaign of November 2014, which resulted in a multipage Camp David-style social media treaty, enforced over the last year as if our kitchen were the Hague. (Sample line: "I will not pretend to be someone I’m not or exaggerate who I am in an attempt to make people like me or my posts.")

But here was another social media invasion on our shores. And unlike Instagram, which I already had some handle on, my knowledge of Snapchat was derived entirely from a Buzzfeed article entitled, "An Adult's Guide to Snapchat." Not a great place from which to begin a fresh round of negotiations.

Cut to a few nights ago: Amy and I are sitting under the covers, going undercover. We each download the app to our respective phones and set up our respective identities. (Amy, always a bit smarter about these things, registers as a twentysomething with an inscrutable screen name. I give my real name, my real age.) Then we start trading disposable texts, photos, and videos. (Note to those of you parents who try this at home: That feedback you hear is because Snapchat assumes you are not actually 3 inches away from the person to whom you are sending a live video.)

Despite the fact that I've spent the last three years building digital products, and am downloading and trying new apps with a fair amount of frequency, I found myself completely befuddled by Snapchat's user interface. I wondered aloud whether it was intentionally designed to repel anyone over the age of 20, kind of like those ringtones that students can hear but teachers cannot. 

"Am I just getting old?" I ask Amy. 

It's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately. And it's on my mind today, because my friend Patti told me that I had to keep writing this blog, but only if I stop referring to myself as "an old dog." 

It's hard to explain my relationship status with my age. It's complicated. I don't feel old yet, but I don't feel young anymore. And I do feel acutely aware that there is a road and it will end. It doesn't make me sad exactly, but it does make me want to live the next chapter with greater intention. And it makes me deeply, consciously grateful for each day I get, each conversation I have. I don't take time for granted anymore. I don't take people for granted anymore.

Snapchat did make my brain hurt, the way my father's new iPhone makes his brain hurt. But just as I was beginning to wonder if that signaled the true beginning of the end of my youth, I flashed back to a moment in 1994, on a sidewalk in the East Village, when Jennifer Baumgardner was trying to explain the World Wide Web to me. Jenny and I were the youngest editors at Ms. Magazine at the time. She was a year younger than me, and far more tapped into the zeitgeist, which is why she had thought to attend a World Wide Web workshop hosted by Echo NYC. "There's this thing called a home page," she said, and I could feel the synapses in my brain straining to make new connections in order for me to visualize what she was describing.

In 1994, the very concept of the Internet made my brain hurt far worse than the Snapchat UI. I was 25 then. Maybe it has nothing to do with age. Maybe this is just what happens to your brain when you try something new. 

After all, in some ways I feel less old now, at almost 46, than I did 10 years ago when all of my Gen X peers suddenly woke up and realized we'd been displaced as the "young ones." That's when a steady stream of thirtysomething leaders came to companies like mine in order to have consultants explain "youth culture" to them. I was one of those consultants, but I was also one of those Gen Xers, and I felt no more in touch with youth culture than my clients. I was simply better at making forays into Youthland and coming out with actionable insights.

Today feels different. I have an intimate connection with someone in every generation. I have family members, friends, and colleagues in their 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, and 20s. I have a teenage daughter. I have friends and family with newborns, toddlers, big kids, tweens, teens, college students, and college grads. I am one degree of separation from every living age group right now, and I actually feel pretty in touch with their lives and needs.

So while I do sometimes feel creaky—yes, my muscles ache today from yesterday's surf lesson—I do not feel out of touch. I feel like I have entered the Age of Relevance, and I'm just getting started.

And unlike the Age of Innocence, the Age of Relevance need not have an expiration date. My cousin Pauline stayed relevant right up until the day she died at 108 in 2008. I remember the afternoon when I came out to her. We were sitting in her apartment in Chelsea and I was feeling scared even though I knew that as a vegan and a lifelong Democrat, she'd probably be more open to my sexual orientation than most centenarians. "You know, Julie," she said to me. "If what I read in the New Yorker is true, then it seems like most of the interesting artists, writers, and thinkers are gay. I think you'll be just fine."

I think the key to staying relevant is simply staying open—to new people, new ideas, and new experiences. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do here. I can feel the synapses of my brain working hard. Those muscles may ache a bit tomorrow, but it will have been worth it.

This old dog

I think maybe I thought I'd sleep better right out of the gate. If nothing else, I was hoping to finally make good on the long-broken promise I've been making to my mother about getting a good night's sleep. 

But there was the heat. It was the kind of swelter that first chased Amy and me out of New York and into the cold embrace of Karl the Fog back in the summer of 1996. With that kind of heat, my daughter couldn't sleep, Amy couldn't sleep, I couldn't sleep, the dog couldn't sleep. My daughter eventually got drowsy, fantasizing about body pillows made of soft, moldable ice packs. The dog pawed insistently at his bed for a while—thinking perhaps a cooler surface could be found if only he could just break through the fabric. Then he sighed loudly, several times, to alert us to his displeasure and eventually settled down. Amy and I read our library books. (OK, she read her library book. I read Facebook; my library book made me sneeze.) And eventually we, too, dropped off.

But my sleep was light, erratic, and interrupted. I was anxious, and then mad at myself for being anxious when I'm supposed to be relaxing. Truth be told, I was scared. In 7, 6, 5 hours, I would be zipping myself into a wetsuit and attempting to surf. In the ocean. With an instructor, Carlos, yes. But in the ocean. Surfing. Me. And seaweed. And sharks. And my contact lenses, which seem to be breaking up with me these days. And Amy, thank god for Amy. But Amy and the ocean. The cold ocean. With the waves that tumble you around and around. And the water that gets in your nose and your ears. And my body—my aging, out-of-shape, sleep-deprived, asthmatic body. 

When, eventually, I made it to the dreaming stage, I dreamed of dogs. Old dogs. A dog named Bob, whom I used to know, may he rest in peace. And a dog named Conan, who walks around the park the way I feel when I walk around the park—young at heart in many ways, but more salt than pepper, and definitely a little worse for wear. When I woke up, I wondered if my subconscious mind had been attempting to make a pun. Something about old dogs and new tricks. But maybe a dream about old dogs is just a dream about old dogs. 

All I know is that for all the agitation of the night before, the moment when I stepped in the water this morning, all the fear ran right out of me. The weather was perfect. The waves were perfect. Even the seaweed was perfect. The wetsuit kept me warm, and the cool ocean kept me refreshed. Carlos joked that when you fall doing anything else, you feel bad but when you fall while surfing, you just laugh. It's true. I let out little chortles every time I forgot to bend my knees and went flying off. Face first. Butt first. Hands first. I fell a lot. And I laughed a lot. And I rode a couple of waves too. Two of them. They were magnificent. 

I never realized that you could be awful at something and love it. Deeply, deeply love it—in the same way you love something you are amazing at.

I am terrible at surfing. And I am now addicted to it.

This is why I live in California. It just took me a while to find out.

This is where I cleave you

I've always been a nerdy fan of the Janus word. Also known as a contronym, this lexical oddity manages to mean one thing and its opposite. Like dust—as in adding fine particles or removing them. Or oversight—as in monitoring or missing something. These words are two-faced, just like the Roman god for whom they're named.

Of all the Janus words out there (truth be told, there aren't actually that many), my favorite one is cleave. Here's a word that means to be very strongly involved with or attached to—that is, to cling. And yet it also means to sever by way of cutting—to split. 

It's the perfect word, with its perfectly contradictory definitions, for this moment in my life. This week is the start of a 16-week leave (cleave?) of absence from a company I love in order to try to remember, or perhaps simply discover, who I am outside its walls. It's a chance to refresh and reboot, to think and write, to meet with old friends and discover new ones. Along the way, I'll be rejecting some old habits and rituals in favor of new ones. I'm just not sure what those new ones are yet. 

Today, the first official day (after a weekend and Labor Day), I bounced back and forth between clinging to the familiar and splitting from it. I woke up at my usual time, walked the dog, and got my daughter off to school—familiar. Then my partner and I sat in our backyard and did some meditation together—definitely new (and let's not underestimate the power of finding new things to do together after 21 years of being in a relationship). I had breakfast with a wonderful friend and former colleague and talked shop—familiar. Then I accompanied another wonderful friend on her Tuesday morning routine, as she picked up day-old goods from local bakeries and delivered them to an organization serving those in need—definitely new but soon to become familiar, as I fell in love with the organization she works with, Foodrunners. I've stopped the flow of company email—new. But all day, I've sneaked peeks at colleagues via my Facebook feed—familiar. I'm writing—familiar—but for myself—new.

And so it goes. Today, I'm winding up. We'll see where I wind up.

Janus, it turns out, was the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. Sounds like my kind of guy.