Usher Says it Best

Why the Title?

This blog has gone two whole posts without an explanation of its purpose.  If this was a document for my line of work, my supervisor would have slammed it back in my face and told me to learn how to structure a report.  But, it’s not and I’m sure my audience will forgive me. 

I’ve entitled it “Neither Here Nor There” and described it as musing on life in transition. While I won’t likely write explicitly on transition and lack of permanency in every post, I think my generation is all about change.  A lot of us are having to make a decisions without much certainty in our daily lives.  For example, maybe ten years ago, having a masters degree from a well-respected school meant that you could safely bet on a solid job.  Today, that is hardly the case.  Another excellent example, I dare you to find a twenty-something that hasn’t moved less than five times in the since starting college.  I’m sure even a generation ago, moving around was pretty frequent, but not quite as common as today.   Since moving out to go to college, I have resided at over seven different addresses (not counting moving back and forth to my parents’ house and a summer commuting from Temecula to West LA).  The latest of which was a move to the other end of the state to take a short-term job. Talk about transiency.

Baby Cousin Campaigning for Obama 08

And I don’t just mean transition in a negative sense.  My generation likes change. My generation elected President Obama for his promise of change.  That change (or transition) was about hope.  A persistent, fervent expectation that things will get better.  A lot of us think that we need to change how humans interact with our environment.  We are the generation who thinks news that is over 5 hours old, is just plain out of date.   And some some ways that might be a good thing.

We have had all this inconsistency thrust upon us by the economy.  There just aren’t as many opportunities for us, so we have to settle for less than ideal and change our lives around frequently to deal with it.  I have a theory about how we are handing all this change.  I was in 7^th grade in my yearbook class, when I saw the images of the planes going into the Twin Towers.  That changed my life and my perspective on what it meant to be a citizen of the planet Earth.  My generation saw the harsh reality of that global tragedy.  That day opened our eyes to the rest of the world and that someone way on the other side of the planet can directly influence our way of life.  That one event I think also impassioned my generation to be more globally conscious.  We no longer just want a job where we can make enough money to buy our burbs house and have a nice car.  We want to make a difference.   We have this sense of bigger than ourselves.  That is how we deal with the difficulty of this period of transition.

Here’s a  little illustration of what I’m talking about.  Not exactly the same point, but related.  Take it away, Usher & David Guetta.