postloserism

The Red Sox won the World Series for the second time in, like, 90 years. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that by now, around here, even if you have absolutely no interest in baseball. Which is fine by me. I'm not really into sports but, like religious beliefs, I respect the fandom. In fact, I'm a little envious of that kind of passion. Sometimes I wish I was that into something. I guess I'm passionate about art. It's kind of like having faith in God, riddled with doubt of course.

Anyway, I was too busy hanging out with my niece and nephew this weekend to catch any of the World Series games. When we were inside we watched Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network, and the Disney Channel instead. There's a whole segment of popular culture completely foreign to me and probably most adults somewhere between childhood and parenthood. Did you know Billy Ray Cyrus is on a Disney Channel show with his real-life daughter Miley Cyrus, who plays Hannah Montana? Well, she plays herself, kind of, and in the show, also plays the persona of Hannah Montana. Seems there's a very fine line between reality and fiction in kids' shows. I was so confused that I had to ask my niece and nephew about four times for clarification. Wait, so Miley Cyrus is her real name, and she really is the daughter of Billy Ray and wait, she's also on Hannah Montana? Wait, so she plays herself playing Hannah Montana in just the one show? Ohhhhhh, okay. And on other shows, lots of actors go by their first names, like Drake Bell (a.k.a. Drake) in Drake and Josh. And then Mindy, played by Miranda Cosgrove, has her own show, iCarly, in which she plays a different character. That happens a lot on the Disney Channel (which is why I thought Miley Cyrus might be on two different shows). It's like kid-friendly Saturday Night live skits, spread out over the entire week's schedule of shows.

But I digress. On my drive home from central Connecticut this morning, I caught a bit of their 9 a.m. segment, which is BBC News in Boston, but a program called "Where We Live" in Connecticut. You see, Connecticut is on the "front lines" of the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry so it's not surprising that they'd be talking about the Boston Red Sox on a show called "Where We Live." Anyway, they had various Sox fans talking about the recent win, how this win differs from the 2004 win and the lifting of the curse, etc., and one of the speakers addressed the difference between the two in the sense that the younger fans in '07 don't have the same sense of hardship and that under-dog quality that an older fan had three years ago, after waiting for the win for 86 years. And I thought, wow, that's kinda like postfeminism and the complaint that a younger generation of girls and women are coming of age, and in New York, for example, beginning to make more than men, without an adequate education about the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers (or older sisters, for that matter). Hmm, maybe baseball and art have more in common than I thought.

And then I remembered how New Englanders are just gluttons for misery.