My life is a mess, and I insist that pop culture is to blame. I've been referred to as a pop culture junkie, but I disagree — the term "junkie" implies a dangerous addiction, a chemical need that must be satisfied in order to function, even as the substance harms you.
I may spend a bit too much time reading Gawker.com, watching television and browsing Pitchfork.com's archive, but popular culture ultimately enriches rather than distracts or detracts from my daily life (give or take a failed high school test or two for the sake of a "Real Housewives" marathon). Still, I always manage to tie my many missteps and mistakes back to it.
That's the crux of this weekly column: popular culture alternately as backdrop, sideshow and main event within the context of my experience at Tufts as a nervous, sweaty wreck. I want this to be a space in which I muse and wax philosophic and try to sound witty (no easy task) as I recount all of the awkward situations I get stuck in, an opportunity for me to laugh at myself and for you to hopefully laugh at and with me too. But any and all storytelling and commentary, everything from my insistence upon following all of Gwyneth Paltrow's advice to my fumbles toward successful friendships and relationships straight out of Woody Allen tragicomedies (or straight-up Ingmar Bergman dramas), will undoubtedly be intertwined with pervasive cultural references.
The inextricable link between popular culture and the fiery wreckage known as my attempt at existence is, I guess, a function of my environment and upbringing. Most of my memories are rooted in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised, and growing up in a city that places such an emphasis on the media only made my initial interest in it harder to ignore.
Pop culture serves almost as a really awesome, sparkly bookmark for my memories. I unconsciously link practically every important experience I've ever had to the film I had seen earlier in the day, or the song that was playing in the background, or the book I was reading at the time.
A mere mention of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers instantly transports me back to a time when I reigned (very, very briefly) over the sandbox. My primary recollections of high school (ah, those long-off days of yore) aren't of all the pimples or disastrous parties or all-nighters or college apps or even my friends — they're of late-night film screenings at a cemetery in the heart of industrial Hollywood, and the Grizzly Bear concert I (mortifyingly and, I'm sure, hysterically) sobbed through at the Wiltern Theatre.
I associate 9/11 with watching Bruce Springsteen performing "My City of Ruins" on the "America: A Tribute to Heroes" telethon. From my Bar Mitzvah throw-down, I mainly recall the DJ and the steady diet of late-'90s pop-rock hits and sanitized gangster rap he fed the crowd all night long.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm a mindless consumer who can't discern value; I do have standards. For example, I refuse to keep up with the Kardashians. And I'm certainly not single-minded in my affinity for pop culture — I plan on majoring in English (and it's not as though we're reading celebrity memoirs in my General View of English Literature class). But it's still movies, books, television and music that are always at the front of my mind.
Writing about my life, and thus popular culture, seems natural, allowing for my viewing and reading and listening habits (which I usually pursue alone unless I attend a movie or a concert) to feel a little less insular.
So here goes. I hope you'll follow along as I bumble and stumble my way through a pop culture life.
--
Derek Schlom is a freshman who has not declared a major. He can be reached at Derek.Schlom@tufts.edu.
