Whenever I go to the beach, a part of me is aware that I’m visiting a mermaid graveyard. Perhaps it’s been a while since you read the original little sea-maid story and have forgotten that the sea people dissolve into sea foam when they die. The little mermaid’s dream of becoming human started long before saving the human prince—it began when her grandmother told her the merpeople’s fate. Her dream to become human was really longing to have a soul.
Naturally, whenever I wade at the beach with new friends, I remind them that the sea foam rushing around our feet is former sea maids. But there is another part to that story that I frequently think of too, not at the beach, but in the sky. I usually fly alone so I’ll share it with you since my seatmates don’t know me and might think me odd if I blurt out wild fancies about sea-maids. At the end of the story, the sea-maid cannot bring herself to kill the prince to restore herself to her sea-maid form. Instead, as the sun rises, sealing her fate, she plunges the knife into her own heart and dissolves, not into sea foam, but into a cloud, a spirit of the air. As we fly through the clouds today, I imagine what the cloud-maid’s new world must be like. The ever-changing terrain yet steady air currents might remind her of her lost home in the sea. The different strata seem incongruous to a land-maid like me. In a middle level, the rolling cloud fields rise into towering mountains with cloud castles no less grand than the sea-king’s. But in an upper layer, I see growing darkness with cloud armies amassing on either side of a chasm of gray, not yet fighting but waiting for the first flash of lightning to let loose their volleys of thunder. Yet, below them, a herd of cloud sheep play in a bucolic field, their shepherds too well hidden for my land-maid’s eyes to distinguish from the herd. The tiered terrain must seem less strange to a former sea-maid who was used to things living above and below her. How odd she must have found the terrestrial world with one plane of existence and such weighty gravity. As she glides through the air, does she feel as though she were swimming again? The story tells us that every thousand years one spirit of the air has the chance to become human. The little sea-maid has been a cloud-maid for a couple hundred years now. Perhaps she has a new dream. Or perhaps the fog at night is the once sea-maid creeping down from her lofty home to explore once again the terrestrial world she dreams of.
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Recently, I stumbled on an inexplicably popular YouTube channel. I wanted to like it. The channel shares fun or random facts about a variety of topics. But after watching each video, I asked myself why I had watched it since it wasn’t really interesting or even factual. Later, I’d see the thumbnail for the same clip again and click on it, not realizing until too late that it was a disappointing déjà vu. Scrolling through the comments to see whether others equally underwhelmed, I was surprised to find mostly praise for both the video and the channel.
What the thumbnail picture promises and what video is about are two different things. While I might not be completely lied to, I sense a level of manipulation that turns me off to the channel. The thumbnail represents the two percent of the content I am interested in knowing more about which the videographer left underdeveloped, choosing instead to fill the remaining ninety-eight percent of the video with more or less drivel. If the material isn’t interesting enough to capture my attention legitimately, instead of tricking me into watching it, they could just make the material truly interesting. The other part that frustrates me is the lack of fact. Everything in the videos is presented as researched fact, but most of the information is hearsay, piecemeal data from studies that may or may not be conducted well, anecdotal evidence, and common knowledge that merely pads weak arguments. Yet, I find the comments section filled with people lauding the video as valuable, not just as entertaining but also as educational. Many of these videos are supposedly about personality subconsciously revealed through everyday tasks. But often, the studies they reference are about specific demographics not matching target audience. They ignore things like cultural norms (your stride reflects the culture you were raised in just as much as your personality), education (how you hold your pen reflects how you were taught), and training (how I cut a banana, fold a towel, prepare coffee, and replace toilet paper rolls has far more to do with my part-time jobs in college than with my personality). Perhaps the most disturbing part is reading the comments. After a video about unifying Disney theories (Probably the most unintellectual video I have ever seen, it attempted to argue that the Easter eggs hidden in Disney movies are part of an over-arching “history” of the “Disney universe,” as though the classic fairy tales and modern original stories that were all written by different authors from different eras and regions about different eras and regions were somehow part of a larger unified history.), people actually remind each other of other “factual” connections between completely unrelated movies. For every one comment I saw that logically popped their illusory intellectual bubble, I found ten more illogical confirmations inflating it. Perhaps you wonder why I continue reading the comments. It could be that it’s like a train wreck that I can’t stop watching. It could also be that it provides wonderful writing class fodder for my students to work through the logical fallacies of both video and comments. But, largely, it’s a modern form of people watching, one of my life’s simple pleasures. When I first started teaching, well-meaning colleagues or students’ parents would ask whether I were going “home” for the summer, meaning my parents’ house, a place I’ve never lived since they moved when I was in college. Because I’m single, the other adults in my life do not view me as “home” even after living in the same city for nearly a decade.
As a child, it’s obvious what home is. It’s equally obvious who will share life with you. I knew my siblings would celebrate my eighth birthday with me. I knew they would be there for Christmas and Fourth of July. But, as the youngest child, I watched in confusion as my nuclear family shifted into an extended family. My siblings moved away and celebrated more and more life events with their own growing nuclear families, as it should be. I was left behind wondering how I fit into this picture of family. Eventually, I realized that I was my now own family. I wonder if I should write a parody of the old song “I’m My Own Grandpa.” As a single adult, I celebrate most mile-markers alone or with an ever-changing circle of available friends. I have wonderful friendships, many of which have lasted since childhood or college. But even those have shifted as well as my friends have moved away, married, and had children. I woke up this morning homesick, not for a place or even a time, but for an idea: I miss having built-in people to celebrate milestones with. In the nuclear family or younger single friendships, invitations and planning are not necessary; attendance is a given. I wasn’t sent an invitation to my brother’s graduation or my sister’s wedding. It was a given that I’d be there. My friend Joy didn’t need a specific invitation to my high school graduation or even any of my high school plays or recitals. It was a given that she’d be there. Now, their lives are no longer closely tied to mine; it takes more planning and travel to do life together. Certainly, if I had invited people to join me for my thirtieth birthday, people would have come. If I had invited people to attend graduation when I finished my masters, people would have come. But it wasn’t a given. And I had invitations to join other families for major holidays, but those were pity invites, not a given. Here I am on the cusp of another one of those big milestones, and I wonder who will share in this moment with me. I don’t doubt my friend’s and family’s love. But I know their availability is limited. I know they will be happy for me and wish me well even though they can’t celebrate with me. So, I’m homesick for a future time and place in which my relationships will no longer shift and change, when I will be forever with my Family, and when we will be done with life’s milestones and simply enjoy eternity together. |
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