I was in class this morning, and I turned to the woman sitting next to me to ask her what day it was. I had decided in the previous moment that even though it kind of felt like Friday, it must actually only be Thursday. Boy was I wrong. It's Friday! And since I've already let two Fridays slip by without posting anything, and I'm always trying to improve my number (number of blog posts written), so here I am with your once-upon-a-time regularly occurring feast of cultural-analytical acumen!
Which brings up the usual problem of my really pretty thoroughly having checked out of following much pop culture at all. And I'm not quite up to the task today of giving a truly personal account of coming unplugged from mainstream culture. Except that, for instance, now I know that the American tv show The Office takes place in Scranton, PA, which I learned yesterday while doing some important research about Scranton. So that's where I'm at, culturally, dabbling here and there, but mostly wondering what's going on in Scranton. A kind of metaphorical Scranton of the heart, but Scranton nonetheless.
So once one realizes that they're in such a place--this figurative Scranton--one must then take the adjoining metaphorical coal mine tour, to really see what one has going on in the deepest recesses of one's supposed cultural vacuum. And then you realize that it's inescapable. Only with years of practice, for instance, would I be able to expunge all the Simpsons references from my worldview. I was just talking last night, in my still-far-from-fluent German about creative choice and one's mother tongue. Like, it wasn't up to me that I speak English. And my parents could have raised me multi-lingually, but they didn't. So here I am, more or less stuck with English, and sometimes bored by it, so always trying to make it interested again (or learning other languages, which can then inform back onto my mother tongue).
And in the same way, I guess once upon a time I started watching, say, The Simpsons (though I had pretty much stopped keeping up with new episodes by the time I got to college, back in 2000), but I don't really remember why. Except I thought it was funny, I guess, but I can't actually recall the day when suddenly my brothers and I became the thorough devotees that we were (though I do know that it was extremely aided by syndication, with the massive number of repeats being the ingraining force behind the total reference-making ability that I have through the first 6-7 seasons of the show). So, even if I made the choice to watch the show, I was definitely massively influenced just by syndication alone. And that hardly seems like my choice.
So there's all this cultural stuff, then, constantly replaying itself in syndication in my personal version of the zeitgeist. So then, is it ever really possible to actually fall out of touch? What if I move to Scranton?
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