Binge and Purge

It always works like this: I go on a little binge of posts, feeling the energy, making the time.  Then, grading rears its ugly head and demands precedence over all else, and the blog lies fallow and untended for a time.  Sometimes a week or more, sometimes a few days.  This time, it's only been since Friday, but I'm feeling neglectful, so though I haven't finished my current book (Second Nature by Michael Pollan, who will be speaking in town next week) or done any serious poetry reading or thinking lately, I felt I needed to post.

So, I'll pull a page from Trish's book (at Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity) and have a go at a ramble.  Humor me?

Last week, I watched the pilot episode of My So-Called Life.  Though I didn't watch this show regularly in high school (when it first aired), I had enough of a familiarity with Angela and Rayanne and Jordan Catalano (those brooding eyes....) for the show to seem nostalgia-inducing when I saw it on Netflix.  But as I watched, a strange thing happened: I got old.  See, I turn 35 next month, and I honestly don't care.  I have a healthy relationship with my age and don't pine for my lost youth.  It's good being who and how old I am.  So, I wasn't upset by this automatic aging that happened, but I was caught off guard.  The nostalgia was supposed to remind my of high school and connect me to Claire Danes' character with her confusion and searching and identity-trying.  Instead, I watched with a near-constant pain for her, for her anxiety, for the changes that must and should come, and for the way she attempts to navigate her so-called life and family.  I became her mother.  I understood her mom's frustration, her mom's concern, her mom's willingness to put it aside and hold her teenage daughter as though she were 5 again.  I carried those worries as truly as if Angela were my own daughter.  She's not of course, but my 7-year-old will one day be that soul-searching girl who still needs her mother's lap and grates against her mother's rules and pushes her mother's buttons.  I'll be honest: it scares me a bit.  It feels like I should keep watching the show, almost like homework, preparing myself for what's to come.   But I'm not sure I can.  It might hurt too much.

What do you think?