Man Against The World

It seems like just when you’ve mastered (or think you’ve mastered) one concept in life or piece of technology, someone else ups the ante and comes up with something else for you to worry about.

Take for instance, blogging. OK, so I’ve had a blog elsewhere for a couple of years; not like I ever wrote much to it, but it was there… waiting for me… to actually stop working long enough to do something about it, I suppose.

Now comes MySpace.com. OK, so it’s owned by a big corporate mogul… why should that bother me? I’m a conservative card-carrying Republican party member, and big corporations should be right up my alley, right? For an eastern-seaboard Republican, I hope my fellow Republicans would forgive me for being a bit “California liberal” on this particular big corporate culture point… even though it was the California liberal “dot-com” culture that ultimately caused the demise of a friend’s really excellent job in IT, which caused him to fall back on what he wanted to do over 20 years ago — medicine — but I digress.

The MySpace culture seems so pervasive right now.  My friend talked about hearing people way younger than him talking about their MySpace pages “this” and their MySpace pages “that”. All this culminated one day a week ago when someone asked him for his MySpace address, the same week when one of my 20-something patients asked for mine… and when I balked, the patient was all like, “Oh my GAWD, doctor, why don’t you have a MySpace page?”

To which I replied, in typical not-thinking-before-speaking “Dogbert’s New Ruling Class” definition of inDUHvidual style, “Oh, well I just never got into all that Facebook thing much.”

To which this person whacked back, “But it’s not ‘Facebook’, it’s MySpace.”

Now you have to realize one thing… my friend and I aren’t too far apart in age, and while I consider myself a bit too old to quickly embrace all the new social media, he’s an early 40-something trying to educate the young new nursing professionals who most likely just graduated from high school and went right into nursing while still living with Mommy & Daddy (or some modern adaptation of that) and who probably had Mom/Dad/Grams/etc. pay their way through college, and who don’t have to work unless they want to have some hand money for, say, unlimited text messaging on their Razr phone… or the latest Kanye West download for their 920 GB iPod… or more of the drugs that probably helped them survive nursing school.

So, when these kids (that’s the only way I can describe some of them) tell me about why don’t I have a “MySpace” page, what do I do? Get online and sign up for one, that’s what I do… so as to not be outdone by my juniors who will no doubt end up making more money than I ever will by virtue of the fact that they’ll probably be still working when I’m dead (unless they die first of say, smoking… or drugs… or listening to Kanye West downloads).

So, putting this thing together with all the other stuff I have to do, like treating patients, teaching, rounding in local hospitals, and family/synagogue commitments, I am finding just enough time to breathe, let alone to pimp out my new-found MySpace page, sold-out as the whole thing already is to the big NewsCorp culture. If I had decided to listen to my father (G-d rest his soul) when I was a kid, I’d probably be solidly in the Murdoch camp, probably running around embedded in some US or British platoon in the middle of Iraq if I wasn’t already a weekend anchor for some TV news outlet.

It all feels like a “man against the world” type of thing.  Those of you old enough to remember, will recall the song from the band Survivor (which incidentally, I was listening to before ‘Til Tuesday). Just when you’ve got one thing down, something else rears its head. No sooner had I mastered the art of a novelty of an online textbook that my medical students are now getting into so I won’t have to explain why page 412 of my 812-pound tome of an actual book isn’t the same as their page 412 on their laptops, here comes this kid wondering why I don’t have a MYSPACE PAGE!?

OK, so here I am… and hopefully between the gasping breaths I take between work, work, work, soccer practice, work, soccer game, work, synagogue, work… I’ll have time to keep things like this up… because I surely don’t want to upset my 20-something patient who is no doubt scouring MySpace for my page.