Race, Class, Gender

Saith the contemporary bard:  Storytelling is an art.  Fashioning tales out of your own life experience, a craft.  But seeing your life in narrative is postmodern paradigm.

There was a time during my high school social career that I spent participating in party culture.  In broad strokes, this culture consisted largely of adolescents converging on various unguarded locales for consciousness alteration and pursuant indulgence in less-inhibited behaviors.  Worry not: I’m not alluding to dropping acid in back alleys and forming teen sex cults.  I reference only the ever-so-common (and yes, adolescent delinquency in some form or other is statistically normal) practice of drinking the cheap beer afforded by someone’s fake ID or older sibling and the sophomoric shenanigans that would ensue.

Anyway, at some point it occurred to me that the staple of this entire enterprise was the stories that came out of the evenings spent.   As if in a video game, every night out represented an opportunity to build up your power supply with stories of the wild things you had done, with less points earned for the ones you witnessed but did not participate in.  On the other hand, if you were forced to stay in for the night– or God forbid multiple nights (let’s say you were grounded)– you would lose power.  You weren’t there for it.  You didn’t see it.  And so it separates your storyline from the other storytellers.

After I realized this, or at least corresponding to my realization of this, my enchantment with that region of the high school social spectrum lost its luster.  And as you might imagine, there were some spillover effects for my college experience, too– especially given my participation in the Greek life on campus <that’s a secret, though; don’t out me!>: talk about high school party culture part ii.  But recently, I’ve been reconsidering the value of stories.  How, for example, does knowing that you are participating in the creation of a story affect your behavior in a situation?  Likewise, how does knowing that you are participating in or creating what will become a story for someone else affect the way you approach a situation and your behavior in it?

I’ve spent the past few days immersed in this question, whether consciously or otherwise.  On Saturday, I was a rather unwitting figure in someone’s wedding, a character in their story because they had asked my daughter to be the flower girl.  Ultimately, I was the one thrust down the aisle with the petals.  Today, I breached a social norm by having a hair cut in class <well, quite a bit more than a haircut…> simply to evoke an emotional reaction so that the power of norm breaking would stay with the students watching.  Those are stories that I’ll let eek out over the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I’m noticed that being a conscious actor in your own story makes you want to enhance the experience that much more– whether in the act of participating in the experience or in the embellished retelling of it.  Knowing that what you are doing will be rehashed seems to make it  more meaningful and, in parallel fashion, to heighten sensitivity to the meanings being made.