kerstyn.blog

Strange things have been happening to me lately. People I do not really know have, totally unprovoked, asked me about what I think has changed in my career field and what I think is up next. People I slightly know have asked me how I find events, how do I always know what’s going on, have seemed surprised to hear me say that I went somewhere on a whim a few years ago and met some people there and then somewhere down the line I wound up with some information about local house shows and that one time I got myself invited to a stranger’s birthday party where everyone thought I was the couple’s artist-in-residence. I caught myself making a restaurant recommendation to a friend in a different city and realizing I had been there thirteen years ago so I had to warn them to see if it still exists and they paused, confused that even been in that state because I didn’t grow up there and didn’t go to school there and it wasn’t exactly a vacation destination.

Now I want to pause to tell you, this is not a post about feeling or getting old.

People, really mostly my coworkers (who have tended to be older than I am), have previously accused me of trying to “act old” when they catch me whining about something I did years ago being obsolete now. My response to them is that I can’t help it and it is easy to feel old at 30, actually, given the large amount of social messaging about how you turn into a dust cloud with a dizzy fly wobbling out once that clock strikes midnight. That said, I can hear them groaning, and that’s not what I wanted to write about anyway. The thirteen-years part here is just framing.

I have a long memory. Some friends say theirs feels like re-recording over the same VHS tape, but even today I made a reference back to a prior conversation in the summer (it’s January, hi) and the other party commented on my recollection when to me it was just a natural contextual data point to pull on. My recollection is not perfect and it usually remembers weird things more often than useful things, but it is very important and necessary to have a long memory if you want to feel self-righteous about being correct about things three years after someone is snide to you about your hobby or opinion or point of view that you likely only shared because they asked about it in the first place.

This blog post is not about feeling old, it is about being a hater. It’s also critical to understand that when I say “being a hater” here, it is not about being negative or chronically seeking the downside of every situation. It is about how I’ve decided the “do or do not, there is no try” Yoda-quote sticker I put on my facebook wall in ~2008 is being mentally papered over with a new belief that, actually, trying is the only thing there is, and the long arc of my personal history is starting to maybe bend toward an internal payoff as I’ve built up many years of trying things. It’s about me trying to avoid resentment, and the belief that smugness in hateration is a lesser evil.

The easiest and clearest example to pull on is music, and DVDs, and Spotify, and the local library. Three years ago I got annoyed (because I am a hater) that Spotify kept, in my opinion, gobbling up podcasts and making them Spotify Originals with some sort of restrictions on how to listen to new episodes (either only on Spotify or on Spotify exclusively for some time before wide release). It activates my hateration to think about how “podcast” is a riff on “broadcast” but was for your iPod so it was a podcast but it was supposed to be broadcast via RSS feeds, and so every podcast is supposed to be catch-able with any RSS collector. It’s the whole point that is the podcast, a file, beamed out to wherever, like a radio broadcast you get it, you get it. I was also, for no real reason beyond an interest in annual projects and broadening my horizons and being a Music Enjoyer, embarking on a goal to listen to the Rolling Stone top 100 albums from their 500 Greatest Albums list and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell had just pulled their music from Spotify (true acts of hateration and holleration if you ask me!!!) in response to Spotify funding the Joe Rogan podcast. That year I actually did a few things: I started trying out a different music service, I started trying to track down and organize my CDs and DVDs again, and I started returning to digging around in bargain bins for disc versions of things I like and want to have available all the time.

Many people were mad about this.

It really genuinely shocked me, mostly because I already hang out almost exclusively in nerdy, introverted, weird, and otherwise countercultural spaces, but you must believe me when I tell you: three years ago when I started this, people direct messaged and @ pinged me to tell me all sorts of things like that cancelling my Spotify subscription wouldn’t matter anyway, that it was weird to make decisions because of what Joni Mitchell says (ummm ok we can just dismiss that one out of hand), that people don’t make laptops with disc drives anymore (I think that was the first year I even had a laptop in several years, I got one for Christmas, my desktop that I built myself has a disc drive and so does my xbox connected to the tv whereupon I watch things)….the list goes on. This was typically in response to me saying something like “I’ve been really excited to request things through inter-library loan for my silly album project” and “I found a cool used and new media store with DVD bins for $2-5 and have been really enjoying spending half a day there once in a while digging around! I got the first five seasons of Supernatural for ten bucks!” The sense that people were pushing back on me Having A Nice Time was all-around just startlingly weird and kind of aggressive behavior to enforce that I should, I guess, just….not….try things or spend my own money on items I want to have. As someone who doesn’t really do a lot of clothes, trinket, or tech shopping, and doesn’t ping other people to tell them their massive unplayed bought-on-sale Steam libraries are stupid, this genuinely reshaped how I saw a lot of friends, forums, and friendly acquaintances.

Anyway, now that we’ve established that, the reason I’m here now: at time of writing, for the last month or two I have been experiencing the utmost, thrilling, full-body-excitement jitters of watching people ask in those same spaces what people are doing to divest from Spotify and also in some cases from Gmail, Facebook, how to get into in-person events and find local music. I recently read and enjoyed Mood Machine, an entire book about how Spotify has strategically tried to turn subscribers into checked-out half-listeners in order to fluff playlists with commissioned music without anyone noticing.

In the intervening three years I’ve done that album listening project, I’ve done a movie watching project, I’ve continued to be in book clubs, I’ve volunteered at local events, and as much as I am very excited to share all of the fun things I’ve learned (requesting inter-library loans, searching worldcat, finding local publications that write about local theater and music….) I confess I’m also absolutely fully stoked on the rare occasion that the people asking are the same people who were giving me a hard time before. I’ve been keeping it to myself, though (well, until now, but the only way I keep posting here is believing that no one reads it.)

One of the harder skills I’ve had to learn is when to actively choose to release a memory I have when the other person obviously has zero recollection, and this has been giving me a lot of opportunities to practice letting go. You could say (pushes up sunglasses) I’m trying to get better at forgetting. I guess I’m realizing (in my old age????) that it’s a lot more fun to just try things and help other people try things and that we can try them together instead of dissuading people from trying my thing because I enjoy getting there first.