My Formerly Hot Life (7 page)

I do not miss being the center of attention—it’s a lot of pressure, actually—but I do miss feeling relevant. If there ever was a “them,” people I didn’t know who might nonetheless be interested in my comings or goings or thoughts or feelings, I am now 100 percent certain that “they” couldn’t care less. My friends and family, of course, remain interested in my point of view, and occasionally someone who is marketing a butter substitute or a new depression medication may ask me to fill out a survey. But I no longer have a sense that what I or my friends do is of vital interest, that it represents a rumbling under the surface of society that some writer might notice and remark upon as indicative of a new, potentially significant wave of thought. Mind you, it wasn’t as if I was called upon for my blinding insights on a regular basis, but I felt in-the-mix enough that if asked, I could add to the dialogue. Now I am simply off the radar of relevance.

But now that I’m over the shock of being seen as irrelevant by the nebulous “them,” it’s no big deal. Most of the time, many younger people, especially the hip ones, seem to
me overly conscious that they’re being talked about, which strikes me as more energy than I want to devote to such things. The less I think about what “they” think of me, the more time I have to think about what will make me and those who matter to me happy. Being a Formerly might look a teensy bit boring, if the observer applies only a cursory glance, the same kind of cursory glance that determines that a woman is no longer hot if she’s older. But from where I sit, there’s nothing boring about being a Formerly. And “they” won’t know that until they get to be one themselves.

All this being said, I’m not completely hopeless when it comes to current music. If a song is a national phenomenon or gets the Christian right all worried that our children are being recruited as lesbians, it’ll penetrate my distracted, disorganized consciousness. Still, by and large, the only things on the new music stations that sound familiar to me are the snippets of “old school” tunes that are sampled within the new releases. I’ll hear a Michael Jackson riff or the back-beat from a Grandmaster Flash song and for a second my heart leaps—
I actually know that one! Check me out!
Then the singer’s unfamiliar voice returns, and I see it was just a tease. Later, when the 20-year-old rapper appears on
Live! with Regis and Kelly
(what he’s doing on that show I have no idea, but then again, I’m watching it, and I have no idea why) I’ll find out that the stanza I knew was included because it was by his mom’s favorite artist.

Television is a bit easier to stay up on than music and
movies, especially because I’m often too pooped to go out in the evenings, and the advent of DVR technology means I never have to miss an episode of
The Office
or
Mad Men
. As a Formerly, I’m included in that pocket of pop culture—even targeted, because I presumably have money to spend on BMWs and FedEx and the other stuff that’s advertised during the breaks. (Hey! Is that Queen and David Bowie singing “Under Pressure” on that Propel water commercial? Why, I know that song! And coincidentally, I’m suddenly parched. …)

My friend Josie, who has been in bands since she could bang two pots together, takes it especially hard when one of her counterculture icons starts shilling for corporate America. Swiffer tends to score the best of old-school pop, but the list is endless. To name just a few, you can hear Iggy Pop for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Digable Planets for Tide and Squeeze for Dentyne gum. I get why Josie finds it disheartening, but we’ve all done things we never thought we’d do (mini-van with built-in DVD player, anyone?). I don’t think you can blame an aging rocker for wanting to cash in on a past hit. People have to eat, especially Iggy Pop.

What gets
me
is that Madison Avenue seems to think we Formerlies are soooo easy—and evidently we are! It galls me that I am, in fact, more likely to be favorably disposed toward a product if I associate it with a cool tune from an era when I was cooler than I am now. It’s like crying at an obvious tearjerker—you feel manipulated and a little idiotic, while at the same time validated, if in a backhanded
way.
I know, let’s get these ladies to associate our vile, smelly depilatory with a time in their lives when they weren’t working 55 hours a week and then coming home to follow a child and a dog around with a sponge before collapsing in bed with still-hairy legs. If the song speaks to them, they’ll unthinkingly grab it as they shop in their usual harried fugue state
. The songs in these ads still speak to me. It’s just that before, when a song like The Cure’s “Pictures of You” spoke to me, it said,
How precious and ephemeral is love
. Now it says,
Run out and buy an HP printer
. (Yes, I own an HP printer.)

I’m beginning to understand that the pop cultural divide between a Formerly and someone who is not is vast, and is as much of a marker of the passage of time as any facial wrinkle or income bracket. Our facility with computers, of course, is a big, thick line in the sand between Formerlies and those that were born later. Formerlies are once again “tweens” vis-à-vis computer technology: too old to have been immersed in it when our brains were soft and absorbent, and too young to ignore it entirely, at least if we want to earn a living and function in society.

Occasionally I run into a (usually male) Formerly who still thinks it’s kind of neat that he is not charmed by technology, and proudly declares himself a luddite. (The original Luddites, of course, being artisans in Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution who felt they were being replaced by the advent of machines and so sometimes torched textile factories.) Nowadays, it strikes me as plain lame: There’s nothing cool or intellectual about not knowing how to do something.
The IT guys sure don’t want to hear about it and I highly doubt it will get you laid.

When I was in college, few people had their own computers, and if they did, they were awkward, hulking behemoths with tiny glowing amber screens, and people had to bring their floppy discs elsewhere to print things out on that paper with the holes on the sides. There was something called a computer lab, but I never went there, having heard horror stories about senior theses vanishing into the ether just hours before they were due. People only a few years younger than us had computers in high school, but my contemporaries and I typed our papers.

I’m not proud, but even today, after years of using Macs and PCs for work and muddling through a blogging program for
formerlyhot.com
, my first instinct when I get that spinning rainbow beach ball of death (Mac users will know what I mean) is to smack the monitor, take a nap and hope that the problem resolves by the time I get up. There’s a chance I’d be that way even if I had my first keyboard to drool on when I was a toddler, like my daughters did.

But for the longest time, the sense of not knowing enough on a basic level to address even the most minor problem myself made me want to scream with despair. Sometimes I’d go to the “help” menu and find that I lacked even the vocabulary to look up my problem—“the little hand thingy won’t turn back into the arrow thingy” wasn’t in the index. It felt like I was being asked to learn an entirely
new language, one that I didn’t have the time for, and one that would not enable me to order delicious food in a foreign country.

I’ve gotten more adept through sheer exposure, but even now, decades after MS-DOS, when something goes wrong in a big way, and I’m told that there is a new driver (I have no idea what that is) I can download to prevent the problem from occurring in the future, I feel like smacking the monitor again, because I know I will need help even with that. I hate feeling like I’m not adept at what has become as integral a part of daily life as putting a key into a lock and turning it.

A Formerly friend of mine, Rachel, who runs a magazine website, did make me feel a lot better about my tech reticence, though. “I started at a website at a time when no one knew what they were talking about,” she said. “I saw behind the curtain, so I know that it all started as a bunch of people totally making it up.” To an extent, that’s what’s still going on, which is probably why there’s an “update” every few weeks that you need to avail yourself of. Granted, Rachel is technically inclined, but her attitude—that there’s no way to know everything, so you shouldn’t feel bad if you don’t—is one I’d be wise to apply to anything that feels like I’m too much of a Formerly to dip into.

But don’t for a minute think that I’m an Andy Rooney–like dinosaur who can muse for an entire segment about how many wristwatches I own but never wear or who asks for my emails to be printed out for me so I can read
them in hard copy. Unlike the stereotype of folks my mom’s age, I’m not fearful or dismissive of technology, even if I don’t see it as the extension of self that younger people often do. The problem is, I am barely able to find the time and the presence of mind to learn what I need to know to make the technology I already have do the minimal things I ask it to do, let alone explore the next generation of gizmo and all of its many features, the ones that the guy at the store assured me I could have so much fun with.

Fun. Hah! Let’s say I somehow miraculously have four hours budgeted for fun—fun for me primarily, not fun for the kids that will also be enjoyable for me. There are about 700 things I’d spend that time doing before learning how to use a new handheld device that I will probably drop in a Portosan at a Cheetah Girls concert. Coffee and a pedicure with a girlfriend I haven’t seen in months; a massage and a leisurely trawl at a bookstore; seeing a movie with my husband that’s not by Disney/Pixar. You get the idea. That’s another way you know you’re a Formerly: if you simply want your gadgets to do the three or five things you need them to do and do them properly.

Of course, there are tech-minded Formerlies who are interested in technology for technology’s sake, just as I’m into clothes beyond the fact that they cover my naked body. And I love that, in part because they can explain it all to me when I’m about to smack my computer. But I’ll always be clawing my way up the learning curve. All of this technology made its appearance when I was already a grown-up and had
everything well in hand. It basically stood there like a stubborn child with its lip out and insisted I drop everything and learn how to use it. In the early 1990s, someone who didn’t check with me first decided that cassette tapes were no longer good enough and that everyone had to convert to CDs. Remember that? It seems quaint now, but aside from a gnarled mess of an overplayed love mix from a high school boyfriend, I didn’t understand why I had to go out and buy CDs of the same music I already owned. Now that there’s a new thingy I supposedly must upgrade to every other week, you can see as I might be a bit annoyed.

One could argue that another sign you are a Formerly is the degree to which you are thrown for a loop when websites you like are “upgraded” beyond recognition. My Formerly friend Melissa O., who ran the site for a magazine I used to work for (but nonetheless is stymied at having to make a conference call, which makes me perversely happy), says that after a redesign, people Formerly age and older are less likely to come back. “Even if the site is better and easier and clearer, she’s thinking, I can’t find that one thing I used to love to do. A teenager will take the time to visit again and explore.”

Well, exactly. Not only does that teenager have far more time to screw around on the Internet looking for neat sites than I do, but if surfing the web is not part of a Formerly’s job or something she finds relaxing, odds are, she’s online to stay in touch and do her business. I mainly go online to read news and blogs, to shop and to get information for stories
that I’m working on. The only pure fun I have is on the massive timesuck that is Facebook. And predictably enough, when they redid their site after I’d been on for a few months, I felt like someone had come into my house, rearranged my underwear drawer, hidden all my everyday bras and panties and replaced them with wedgie-inducing thongs and impractical lingerie that was for someone with boobs that stayed up all on their own anyway and so didn’t need it.

I whined about it a fair amount (on Facebook, of course, because there was no way I was going to learn how to use another social networking site) and many Formerlies agreed with me. Others accused us of being resistant to change, and told us to get over it. They weren’t wrong. I did sort of feel like I was turning into my grandparents. They’re gone now, but they used to become terribly anxious when their routines were disrupted. I kind of understood why even when I was a kid: They’d lived long enough to know what worked for them, and they didn’t relish any added challenges. When the little things, like getting in and out of your gigantic mauve aircraft carrier of a Lincoln becomes more difficult, some valet changing your radio station can be unnerving. Until you find the Perry Como station again, it feels like someone has fucked with your sense of reality just a little bit. And if the Publix runs out of your favorite brand of gluten-free dinner rolls, that can knock you flat on your ass for a good half hour, and require a therapeutic rehash (or several) with your wife of 50-plus years.

I’m not set in my ways to the degree that my Lincoln-driving,
Florida-living, gluten-free-roll-eating, Loehmann’s-shopping, Bronx-transplanted grandparents were. But I’ve got enough on my plate that when the things that are supposed to be relaxing require that I read instructions, I get cranky. It took me fully three months to not miss the “old” Facebook, and then they changed it on me again. I know I’m supposed to roll with it, but becoming a Formerly is change enough for now.

A
s long as there have been TV sitcoms, there has been the goofy TV dad trying to appear cool for his kids by using ridiculously dated catchphrases, or rendering current catchphrases ridiculous simply by virtue of the fact that he’s using them. The can’t-miss message is, once you’re a Formerly, you should stop saying things like “It’s da bomb,” “Fierce!” or, worse, “Talk to the hand,” because you’re only highlighting the convention center–sized gap between you and the young person you’re trying to connect with.