Turning into our parents

Yesterday the blogotwittofaceosphere was all abuzz over the Oscar nominations. Over the past couple of years, I've gotten completely away from going to the movies, something I used to love. Part of that was economic - a night at the movies for two cost more than a month of Netflix and Hulu combined. While we enjoy the experience and the movies at Spectrum8, the other theaters around are unpleasant experiences, and the few times I think we should go out, there's never anything I want to see. (How much do I sound like my parents now). And so while all this Oscar buzzing was going on, I realized that once again I had not seen a single movie they were buzzing about. In fact, I think I had only even heard of one of the movies.

Ultimately, this is how we turn into our own parents. It's partly accidental, as over time there are just too many new things to keep up with, too many things to pay attention to, and too few that we actually need to know to get through life. So things like texting emerge, and we ask, "Isn't that just email to your phone?" and the kids shake their heads. (It is, by the way.) Or the latest thing that replaces that last latest thing comes along, and you're just not ready to move on ("I just got ON Facebook!")

It's also partly intentional, because, as always, so much of pop culture is just crap that fills the time. And there are so many gems from the past that need to be read, watched, listened to, it seems like there's no time or room for the cascade of the new, which is unculled and untested. Occasionally something marvelous suddenly catches my eye or ear (Florence + The Machine) and I'm actually a little bit plugged into the zeitgeist, and sometimes I hear something at the skating rink that doesn't actually offend me, and I'm forced to ask the main (or perhaps emergency backup) teenager who it is, and it turns out to be someone with actual talent (Adele) that I chose to ignore because she was just one more one-named singer.Again and again I hear the names of actors and actresses whose work I'm absolutely unaware of, and I find that I don't really care to figure it out. I know there are such things as Ryan Reynolds and Megan Fox, and that's exactly as much as I know.

My willful ignorance, however,  cannot overcome the absolutely insidious omnipresence of  Khardashians, which I view as truly a sign of the end of days, or at least an admission that we no longer require our entertainment to be in any way entertaining, just that it be on and omnipresent.

So, this is how we turn into our parents. Turns out it's not entirely accidental.