http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZzmqHJ0gPU

Meet Elizabeth Gilbert.

“By one in the morning on a typical night for example, I’m already up on the bar, dancing to an Allman Brothers song on the jukebox. The brothers are signing, “Sometimes I feel like I been tied to the whipping post.” I tear off my belt and whip the bar to the beat. Then I whip Redneck Lou (who always volunteers), and I do it in such an ironic way that you, the customer, die laughing.

By two in the morning, I have Reuben on top of the bar with me. He’s wearing a Zorro mask I made by ripping off a piece of his T-shirt. He’s wearing a cape I made out of a plastic Budweiser banner. I give him one garbage-can lid, and I take another. We hold them like shields. We have a broomstick, and we begin to sword fight. He shouts, “Die! Die!” People come off the street to watch and then stay to drink.

By three in the morning, Spit-Take Phil has found a latex glove and filled it with beer. He pokes holes in the glove’s fingers and climbs onto the bar. He gets on all fours and tucks the bloated glove into his belt, so it hangs like an udder. He moos. Naturally, I grab two rubber bands and quickly put my hair in farm-girl pigtails. And then I milk him. The crowd is cheering.”

Huh? How did this woman – a former bartender at the infamously raucous Coyote Ugly Saloon – become the depressed, self-loathing suburban wife full of #whitegirlproblems ennui who channeled her pre-midlife crisis into the mega bestselling you’ve-read-it-and-your-Mom-has-too travelogue Eat, Pray, Love?

And why did I – a fellow modern woman who is likewise searching for meaning and truth and purpose in life – find myself to be so utterly bored and annoyed and detached while watching the movie? As enthralled as I was by Julia Roberts’s radiant smile and ever-changing hairstyles?

Well, let’s start with this: I hated the book, too.

Here’s the quick synopsis (10 points if you’re already able to figure out why I’m not a fan!).  Successful writer has a nice husband and a house in the suburbs and suddenly realizes that she wants neither of those things.  Lots of crying on the bathroom floor ensues.  She gets a divorce, she falls in love with a hot young actor, she feels the relationship falling apart, and she sinks even deeper into depression.  Who is she?  What does she want?  What truly makes her happy?  Unsure of these answers, she escapes for a year to India, Italy and Bali with a sweet little book advance to figure it all out.

In Italy, she eats.  In India, she prays.  In Bali, she sets out to find balance but instead falls in love with a charming Brazilian man.  Problems solved, peace found, life appreciated.  And a few years later, gazillions of dollars made.

Now, in all fairness, this book and movie weren’t directly meant for me.  At a 10:15pm showing on a weeknight in the middle of New York City, I was, hands down, the youngest woman in the packed theater (I know this because I arrived during the previews and had to scour the entire auditorium for seats, giving me a good opportunity to check out the crowd. I was late on purpose, of course. Just like I always am).  The opening weekend numbers boasted an older female demographic, with 72% of the moviegoers being female and 56% skewing over 35 years old.  Well, geez. I may be old, but I’m not that old! But apparently everyone else was.

The critics’ reviews have done an excellent job of pointing out the many structural, tonal and moral flaws in the film. Yet I was expecting these flaws – so they were not, in fact, what struck me.  As I sat in my seat, inhaling my Reese’s Pieces and watching the women around me laugh, cry and nod in understanding at Julia’s failed attempts to button her jeans after one too many Neapolitan pizzas, the enormity of the divide between the women of my generation and the women of theirs suddenly hit me harder than ever.

These women were totally able and eager to relate to the idea that, in as early a period as their 30′s, they could have a midlife crisis.  They accepted the possibility that they might soon forget who they are, realize that they don’t actually want what they thought they wanted, and spiral into a fraught web of depression and shaken identity and panic.  They could look across the armrests at their boyfriends and husbands – many of whom were in the theater and looked visibly pained to be so – and think, “Maybe I don’t want to be with this guy?  Do I want this life we’ve created? What would happen if I jumped out of this seat and ran out the door right now??” Whether they were stuck in the middle of a midlife crisis or not, they could envision the eventuality of one and relate to Gilbert’s lost, forlorn, lonely woman.

How f’ing sad, right?

I thought our 20′s were the time for all this?  Everyone says that now is when our lives are supposed to feel like “a black box,” overflowing with issues of “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic…“a sense of possibilities.”“  As a 27-year-old, I’m supposed to be experiencing “unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction.”

Fair enough – I don’t really know exactly who I am and what I want yet.  But are you telling me that I’m going to have to go through this again when I reach Gilbert’s age??  Why should I want to relate to THAT?!

This is the whole goal of our young Millennial generation.  This is why we switch jobs again and again, and why we experiment with the guys in our gaggle instead of getting hitched right out of college.  This is why we insist on leaving our worldly possessions behind and hiking Peru for 6 months, and why we eschew labels and traditions and expectations.  Because we don’t want to have a midlife crisis. We’d like to get most of the confusion and uncertainty and soul searching done now, thanks, so that we can eventually move on and have a wonderful and fulfilling life on whatever path we choose!

We don’t want to be Elizabeth Gilbert. And the suggestion that her journey is something that we, as young women, should relate to and anticipate is actually pretty offensive – seeing as we’re all doing so much hard work right now to figure out who we are and what we want.  That a woman who once got so much pleasure from standing on top of a dirty, crowded bar and whipping her customers is the same woman who was simply shocked and terrified when she realized that suburban wifery didn’t fulfill her…well, that’s just strange to me.  Shouldn’t she have known herself better by the time she made those major life decisions?

Maybe not.  Maybe she had no choice but to fall prey to the very expectations and guidelines that our generation is avoiding.  But the women of our generation spend all day talking about ourselves on our blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and online dating profiles. We are working 24/7 to figure out who we are.  That may make us seem undesirably self-involved and self-important to older curmudgeonly generations, but I must say – Gilbert seems pretty obsessed with herself, too.  And while she was devouring gelato in Italy and paying for a spot in an Indian ashram and biking blissfully around Bali, we’re still finding the time, desire and focus to engage in civic-minded projects and contribute our skills and talents to the betterment of society more than any generation before us. So spare me the “you tech-crazy kids today!” lecture.

Furthermore, the idea that the best way to deal with a crisis of self is to run away and escape the life you’ve built…that’s resonates as another big FAIL to me.  Are Millennials dealing with the ill-timed (for us) recession by hiding under our covers or cutting off our networks or crying to our parents?  No.  We’re buttoning up our sleeves and networking our asses off and trying to innovate with new ideas and opportunities and technologies.  We understand that, sometimes, we need to roll with the punches and play the hand we’ve been dealt.  Not in relationships, of course – only the best there!  But, you know, in life. Like the one that Gilbert is desperately trying to escape.

So this must be why Eat Pray Love – the film and book – felt foreign to me.  Because I don’t want to, or plan to, have a midlife crisis.  And god forbid I do, then I won’t be solving it by fleeing from everything I know and love and have built throughout my life.

In times of sadness and stress, my method of attack will be to stay, to understand myself, to figure shit out. I want to be able to handle the downs because, as filled with ambiguity and confusion and doubt as it may be, my life has been characterized by self-made ups as well.  And ultimately, I want to find my Javier Bardem (YUM) without having to wade through a nervous breakdown first.

This kind of optimism gets me through my troubled and turbulent 20-something days, and I expect it to get me through my entire life – probably in much better shape than Gilbert.

Aug 26, 2010

0 F-YEAH! F-YEAH!