Feeling Oddly Sad
Woke up to a FB e-mail announcing a new photo on Tiger's page. Always interested in what people I haven't seen for a while are looking like, I went to the page. It was one of a host of "mobile uploads" covering a museum visit in what looks to be Seattle. I kept clicking and before I knew it I was on a whirlwind tour of Tiger's life over the space of the past seven years. Tiger is amazingly young if these dates are correct. According to them, he was celebrating his high school prom in 2010. That would only make him about 24 right now - even younger than Frank Lee!
It explains a lot. Tiger was/is an amazingly articulate and witty guy. But, there were also a lot of what I had assigned as insecurities: the self-medicating; the internalized homophobia, the rootlessness. For all of his near-constant networking, I never got the sense that he was anything but lonely. Turns out, he was just a "normal" twenty-two year old guy who, if I could accuse him of anything, would be, perhaps, trying too hard to project that he was older than he was.
The sad part came after clicking through some 400-plus photos, and realizing how little impact his time at St. Michael's had on him. I think I counted a total of four photos of people from St. Michael's and they were all from the same event. All the rest were pictures of road trips, live performances, museum tours, and scores of people he had passed along his way to New York City.
The problem - I think - is that St. Mike's was too small for him. And, too old. There is nothing exciting about St. Michael's outside of the ordinary circle of life. People meet (usually, somewhere else) and bring their loved ones to church as a means of staying together, then proceed to having children. And, that's if they're lucky enough to find a suitable place in which to raise children and school them. If either of those two propositions fail to materialize, they move to the suburbs.
Not surprisingly, the people who stay tend to be either very rich or very old. No wonder not many of us wound up on his FB page.
It explains a lot. Tiger was/is an amazingly articulate and witty guy. But, there were also a lot of what I had assigned as insecurities: the self-medicating; the internalized homophobia, the rootlessness. For all of his near-constant networking, I never got the sense that he was anything but lonely. Turns out, he was just a "normal" twenty-two year old guy who, if I could accuse him of anything, would be, perhaps, trying too hard to project that he was older than he was.
The sad part came after clicking through some 400-plus photos, and realizing how little impact his time at St. Michael's had on him. I think I counted a total of four photos of people from St. Michael's and they were all from the same event. All the rest were pictures of road trips, live performances, museum tours, and scores of people he had passed along his way to New York City.
The problem - I think - is that St. Mike's was too small for him. And, too old. There is nothing exciting about St. Michael's outside of the ordinary circle of life. People meet (usually, somewhere else) and bring their loved ones to church as a means of staying together, then proceed to having children. And, that's if they're lucky enough to find a suitable place in which to raise children and school them. If either of those two propositions fail to materialize, they move to the suburbs.
Not surprisingly, the people who stay tend to be either very rich or very old. No wonder not many of us wound up on his FB page.