“OK, Boomer “

“OK, Boomer “

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Sometimes a phrase hits the zeitgeist so squarely that it becomes the mantra of a generation. For mine, it was “don’t trust anyone over 30.” For the Millennials, it seems to be “OK, Boomer.”

Twice within the last two days I’ve heard or read about “OK, boomer,” the dismissive reply young people make to “olds” who don’t get (fill in the blank) climate change, student debt or how to rotate a PDF.  The phrase lit up the Twitterverse, the editorial pages and will be featured on a radio show I occasionally listen to. There are retorts and retorts of retorts.

Here’s how millennial Morgan Sung ends a Mashable essay on the topic: “Saying ‘OK, Boomer’ now is even funnier because of how pressed the Boomers get. And you know what we say to that? OK, Boomer.”

If I’m aware of something like this, I figure it’s probably on the way out. But just in case it isn’t, I will refrain from generational preaching. Because that would just be playing into their hands, you know.

Knowledge Workers

Knowledge Workers

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Like most “knowledge workers,” I spend a lot of time sitting. This is made painfully clear at the end of work days when I move stiff muscles up and out of the building, onto the streets and sidewalks of Crystal City.

A standing desk and an office to stand in has improved this a little. But I still get into my rut, which is too much time on my behind and too little time on my feet.

Of course, those of us who wax rhapsodic about standing desks might sing a new song if we were street cleaners, baristas, or letter-carriers. Too much sitting is a problem of affluence, and that’s something we knowledge workers shouldn’t forget.

Still, I regularly remind myself of the power of movement. Even a quick stroll down the hall for a glass of water can rejigger brain cells. This is also a good time to be thankful for … a job that lets me sit down.

Our Only World

Our Only World

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In his essay collection Our Only World, Wendell Berry writes of the “deserted country” that results from farmers displaced by progress, whether it be Big Coal or industrial machinery and chemicals.

The result is an emptiness most modern people think normal because they’ve never known it any other way. But Berry, who is 85, remembers a richer, fuller, more peopled countryside. A countryside that included farmers who “walk don’t run,” Berry writes.

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’ Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

It’s one of the reasons I walk, too, because it is the gait “best suited to paying attention.” And though the remnants of a once-rich countryside lie ruined all around me, suburban neighborhoods named for the farms they’ve displaced, there is a point to walking even here.

Because when we walk, we feel just a little more like we belong. And when we feel just a little more like we belong … we care a lot more about the place we live.

A Poor Trade?

A Poor Trade?

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By about 4 p.m. yesterday that extra hour of sleep Saturday night was beginning to seem like a pretty poor trade for the early darkness. The angle of light and the gathering shadows were disorienting, coming as they were a full hour earlier than I was braced to expect them.

In short, it’s “fall back” all over again, half of the crazy exercise in discombobulation we undergo twice a year. In this one we gain sleep and lose light — and in the springtime just the opposite, of course.

As an early riser, I technically shouldn’t mind this shift, because the light we lose in the evening we gain in the morning. But arriving home in darkness truncates the part of the day that belongs to us.  I always feel a bit robbed these first dark evenings.

I’ll get used to it eventually; I always do. And then it will become so much the norm that the bright evenings of early spring will seem an assault on the senses, leaving me blinking, as if someone flipped on the lights in the middle of the night.

Candy is Dandy

Candy is Dandy

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Some wild and wacky weather managed to put a dent in the crowd of tricker-or-treaters coming to the house, which meant — oh, too bad! — we are left with a goodly amount of candy.

This is not something that bothers me. In fact, it’s a perfect excuse to eat something I know is unhealthy. How unhealthy? Probably not very, when taken in moderation. 
Here’s the thing: I don’t drink much anymore because wine and beer give me headaches. I don’t even eat much red meat these days. It’s mostly veggies and fruit and grains — positively Puritanical! 
Which means I try not to feel guilty when I settle into an old episode of “Call the Midwife” with a bag of peanut M&Ms.

(I’ve been waiting two months to use this photo. I snapped it in a restaurant restroom in White Stone, Virginia.) 

Charged by Change

Charged by Change

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Night before last, our temperature dropped 40 degrees in a few hours. This morning it was 25 degrees when I woke up. Winter blew in right on time for the first winter month and the big light change this weekend.

I went out for a walk with three layers on … and it wasn’t enough. Time to break out the down jacket and turn on the heat, which has been off since April.

Though in the depths of winter I might fantasize about living in a place where it’s always warm, I never get too far. As much as I grumble about the cold, I like seasonal change, am charged up by it.

So today, on the coldest morning of the season, I will try to concentrate on the difference … and not the deficit.

Dino Walked into a Bar

Dino Walked into a Bar

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The Halloween’ness of yesterday was eclipsed by the World Series win of yesterday … until later in the day, when my office held a party complete with fog machine. There were three folks from one team who collectively dressed as “working remotely” — wearing  robes, slippers and headphones and carrying big bags of chips to munch. They won first prize in the costume competition.

There was a dinosaur, a scarecrow, an Elvis impersonator, a Minnie Mouse and someone dressed as regenerative soil. (After all, I work for a nonprofit development organization with a robust agricultural unit.)

And then there was my fave, because we hatched the plot together, a woman who dressed as the Winrock “mouse” with gray ears and tail … stuck in a sticky trap. The only hitch: this poor woman found just such a creature in her cubicle the very same day.

That’s a little too Halloween for me!

World Series Champs!

World Series Champs!

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Washington, D.C., is waking up late today, pushing snooze at least twice and downing an extra cup of coffee. But as one of the bleary-eyed ones, I can say … it was totally worth it. It was worth it to see the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros to win the World Series, an improbable, come-from-behind victory like so many of the others the Nats have achieved this season.

But this victory holds no future trial.  The team has gone from a 19-31 record in May to World Series champs in October. They have nothing left to prove.  But as the oldest team in the league and the come-from-behind specialists, they have something to teach us about determination, drive and never saying never.

What they’ve achieved most of all, though, is to bring us a hometown pride that’s hard to come by in the Nation’s Capital. We’re no longer the “Swamp,” the seat of dysfunctional government. We’re the home of a team with loyal supporters (my neighbors have been season ticket holders since 2005) and a fan base that transcends partisan divides.

Events like this help people feel like they belong. And more than anything else, it’s the belonging I celebrate today. 

Inner Light

Inner Light

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It’s cloudy and warmish,  a still day made for long walks in the gathering leaves. I won’t have time for such a thing, but it’s nice to dream about it on my short strolls with Copper.

Say what you will about autumn color set off by blue skies, but when it’s gray outside the bright trees seem to glow from within. It’s as if the stored goodness of all those days in the sun are giving something back to us now — something that says, yes, we will fall and crinkle and be trod underfoot; yes, our whitened trunks will be revealed and cold winds will blow — but beyond it is all this radiance.

That’s what it seems like on cloudy days in October when birds are still singing and squirrels scamper to store food and summer annuals cling to life in pots on the deck.

We’ll see how it feels in a few weeks…

In Transit

In Transit

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No matter how crummy the commute — and I’ve had some doozies — the time I spend in transit is usually always interesting.

Take today, for instance. It wasn’t one of the better trips I’ve had from home to office, but it was perfect for people watching, for noticing. It was the usual jumble of humans and locomotion that I’m convinced become embedded in me somehow and pop out in my writing or thinking.

In the parking lot, a man in a Nationals cap and a flowered shirt searched his trunk (full of bags and boxes) before walking to the station.  On the train, I sat next to a man reading a book … a book! And on the way out of the train, I heard one of my favorite buskers, an accomplished violinist, tripping through the fourth movement from Schubert’s Trout Quintet. I gave him a dollar.

Walking from the station to the office, a fellow commuter and pacesetter dropped something tiny. It wasn’t money, but he took pains to chase it down and pick it up. Was it a tiny ticket? An important phone number scribbled on a piece of napkin? No, it was a shred of wrapper from the granola bar he was nibbling (tidily, it seems) on the way to work. It was, in short, a human moment, just one of thousands that occur … in transit.