Episode 18: I Turned 18!! (11/12/2020)

Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Join me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Generation Z.

Today’s episode: Turning 18 on perhaps the most chaotic day of 2020 to date.

I’m writing this the day after my birthday, but you’re listening to this at least a week in the future, and I have to ask… how are things? How are you? The more time passes, the more I realize that there are more unknown unknowns than we will ever be ready for. I’ll explain that concept later. But first, I turned 18! And this is the 18th episode! 18th birthday special! Can you tell I’m excited?

Obviously, any expectation I had for my 18th birthday was thrown out the window some time in August, I think, when I seriously realized that we were in this for the long haul and there’s no way things are going to be normal by November. I let myself be sad about it for a while, and I think that’s important to do, and eventually I was inspired to get creative and make this birthday as tolerable as possible. From then on, any planning I did was based around the question made famous by Marie Kondo: Does this spark joy? If it didn’t, then into the trash it went. Buying my twin clothes and shoes off her wishlist? Nah, it’s Legos time. Trying to plan something with my friends that would end up being stressful and underwhelming? No thanks, we’ll cover the house in an unreasonable amount of decorations and balloons for the whole week to distract us from… well, you know.

It’s important to mention that my 18th birthday landed the day after Election Day, which means several things. First and foremost, I couldn’t vote, which has made me furious ever since I realized it when I was in 10th grade. Second, I was pretty sure that the day after election day, this year, was going to be one of the most stressful, confusing, and chaotic days of the year. If we knew something, either way, there was going to be a lot of emotions and conversations and arguments. If we didn’t know anything, there would be rampant misinformation and anger and confusion over what was happening. Of course, the more likely outcome, and the one I expected, was that we wouldn’t know anything useful for the presidential election by November 4, and that’s exactly what happened.

Of course, misinformation, fearmongering, and desperate attempts at fact checking filled every news and social media platform. A video surfaced of a protest at a polling location where poll workers were counting absentee ballots of people chanting, “Stop the count! Stop the count!” And this brings me to an unknown unknown: that counting votes would become politicized.

What do I mean when I refer to an unknown unknown? Well, there are plenty of things we don’t know about the future. We don’t know who is going to be elected president in, say, 2032. But that’s a known unknown, we know that we don’t know who will be president then. The COVID-19 pandemic is another example. We didn’t know about this particular virus, sure, but epidemiologists, scientists that study diseases like this, made predictions years in advance that a viral pandemic was likely to happen at some point. That’s why a pandemic response team and plan were developed during the Obama presidency. Unfortunately, the half of the country for whom racism isn’t a dealbreaker elected a president who doesn’t believe in science, so the pandemic response team and plan was dismantled. The point is, the pandemic was a known unknown. We knew it could happen and probably would, just not when or how or what. What was an unknown unknown is the politicization of masks. We could never have guessed that when masks were recommended to the general public, opinions on whether or not you should wear a mask would become so closely tied to political beliefs that you could accurately guess a person’s party affiliation based on whether or not they were in favor of masks. That’s what I mean by an unknown unknown.

When prominent political figures like, you know, the president, speak out against counting votes in a democracy based on counting votes, something is definitely wrong. I have yet to see an actual argument with reasons behind stopping the count. The only arguments I’ve come across have been, and I quote, “Lies! #Trump2020,” from an Instagram comment, “Stop the count! Stop the count!,” from a video taken where absentee ballots are being counted, and, from the president himself, “Stop the fraud!” Exactly what fraud needs to be stopped remains unclear. Instead of actual discussion, there’s just a lot of yelling, which is as accurate a representation of 2020 in the US as I’ve ever seen. Everyone is just yelling, and I can’t for the life of me figure out who they’re yelling at or really even what they’re yelling about. Needless to say, this made my birthday rather confusing.

Before I move on from political talk, I just want to say that if you’ve seen the president yelling about taking the election results to the Supreme Court, that’s misinformation. He can’t take election results to the Supreme Court. That’s not how the Supreme Court works. It’s not just a big court for anyone to use, cases have to come from the state level, so if he wanted to contest the results, he’d have to challenge it in each state, following those individual state’s rules for a contested vote, and then follow each case through the state’s court systems and hope to appeal each of them all the way up to the Supreme Court. Which, just saying, isn’t going to happen. Michigan doesn’t even have a set system for contesting an election result. Because, you know, it isn’t supposed to happen.

Anyway, moving on. I wanted to improve my podcast setup, since I have a little microphone, cheap earbuds, and a laptop, so the one thing I really, really wanted for my birthday was a good set of headphones I could use for podcasting. I did some research and sent a variety of options to my mom, and she ended up getting one for me, which is super exciting. I actually wasn’t planning on writing or recording today, but I was just so excited to try the headphones that I had to record something. The model I have now is an Audio-Technica ATH-M30x. Before you ask, no, I have no idea what it stands for. I’m not super familiar with audio jargon yet, but all I really needed was something loosely noise-cancelling that wouldn’t leak audio and make the sound weird and compressed, and all the reviews and recommendations said that these would do that for me. So, here we are. Moving on up in the world!

Speaking of which, I got an email from a transcription service today asking if I wanted to pay them to transcribe my podcasts for me. If you don’t already know, you can read along to my podcasts at www.fastfactsforgenz.wordpress.com, where I post the loose transcription of the podcast. It’s a lot of work for me, but typically I write beforehand, and I only have to listen back and transcribe in certain situations. The service transcribed a sample from one of my episodes for free to see if I liked it, and I have to say that I did not and I won’t be paying a computer to listen to me and write what I say any time soon. Not to say that people shouldn’t use it! The time vs. money trade off just isn’t worth it to me right now. It was fun to get an email about the podcast though. That always reminds me that I’m doing a real thing, despite the fact that I can see my analytics and I know that all of you listen to the podcast. I don’t know who you are, just that you’re there, and that’s fun.

I haven’t had a lot of time or brainspace for deep reflection recently, for reasons that should be obvious by now, but I do want to spend a little bit of time thinking about coming of age right now. In the media, teenagehood is about partying, about romance, about sports and music and making stupid mistakes that you laugh off because you’re kids. And then, once that’s over, you’re an adult. Suddenly in the workplace, maybe married, maybe kids, and the in-between time is completely ignored. Legally, of course, I’m an adult, but I’m no more of an adult than I was two days ago. I’ll never magically know what I’m doing or understand everything. Nobody does. I think I’ve talked about this before, that society tells us that these are the most important and best years of your life, and that’s simply not true. I’m not leaving behind all the experiences and thoughts of my younger selves. Like I talked about last episode, I am my younger self, and my younger self is and always will be me. So yeah, I’m an adult now, I suppose. I’m going to finish high school. I’m going to go to college. I submitted all my college applications on Monday, if I remember correctly. That’s the expected, the known.

There are also things I don’t know, of course. I don’t know exactly what I’ll major in yet. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do after college. I know what I want, but I don’t know for sure what will actually happen. Maybe I’ll get a pet. Maybe the podcast will blow up and I’ll be famous. Probably not, but that’s the thing! I don’t know. But all those things, as exciting as they are, are somewhat mundane. There are a lot of bigger unknowns as well.

I don’t know what will happen to the election. We’re in the middle of the biggest civil rights movement in the US since the 60s, and I don’t know what will happen to that. It’s a revolution, to be sure, a cultural and social revolution. But I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps it will be a political revolution as well. My mom and I were talking today, and she posed the question, mostly rhetorically, “how are there so many white men?” The answer is that there aren’t “so many” white men, they’re not the majority of people, but they do hold the power. And we know both how and why there are so many white men in power. So maybe it will be a political revolution, a surge in BIPOC representation in government. What part will I play? That is an unknown.

There’s a lot we don’t know. That’s the whole premise of the podcast, right? Everything I’ve named so far is a known unknown. I’m sure there will be many, many more things that will be surprising, and that we never could have predicted.

The unknown can be scary. Unknowns are fundamentally scary, right down to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for whom the unknown and the dark meant predators and danger. But as long as I try to learn, which is the reason the podcast is here, I’ll be able to take on the unknown, step by terrifying, challenging step. And I hope you’ll come along with me.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. If you have any ideas for topics I should tackle in the future, you can reach me on Twitter @FastFactsPod, and be sure to follow this podcast to be notified whenever I release a new episode. This is Callie, signing off.