Sorting Hats, Sportsball, The Consolations of Age, and a Tortured Sloth Analogy

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter series. I don’t know a thing about the Harry Potter series. I haven’t read the books or seen the movies and I probably never will. I don’t think ill of Harry Potter, and I wish nothing but the best to everyone who loves it. I’m simply old, and one of the few consolations of age is not caring about things. I hear people talking about Master of None or Baby Driver or Carly Rae Jepsen and it all just washes right over me like a gentle tide lapping at the sandy shores of my perfect indifference.

But. Recently we took the kids to their first baseball game. On our way to Dodger Stadium, my eccentric, academically-inclined daughter Beatrice (see how far I went to avoid saying “nerdy”) made a great show of not liking sports. I don’t particularly like sports either — at least, I don’t follow them or play them or ever get a single pub trivia question right about them unless the answer is Wayne Gretzky, Pelé, or Arthur Ashe, three names I memorized from a childhood Trivial Pursuit deck. But I explained to her that clamorously “not caring” about popular things is a pretty transparent ploy to contort isolation into superiority; that appreciating the passions of others demonstrates real grace, kindness, and security; and that if she ever says “sportsball” in my house, so help me.

(Of course, Beatrice wound up loving baseball, because she loves memorizing arcane facts and rules and that’s half of baseball, and the other half is eating ice cream out of a small plastic batting helmet, and she was there for that, too.)

Recently I interviewed a prominent member of the L.A. goth community (saving that for the alumni newsletter). He had strident if confounding opinions on what is and is not goth. Name any thing commonly associated with goths in the popular imagination and he would immediately reply that that wasn’t really goth. I left our lunch without a clue what goths are, which is a shame since I’m writing a book about them.

Any young person — and especially someone like Beatrice, whose proclivities and personality lie far out of the mainstream — is going to want to define who they are. When I was young, I was so out of touch I didn’t even succeed in being a nerd.

Even though I’m not into Harry Potter, I took Time’s Sorting Hat quiz. Because, like everyone, I love being told things about myself. I want to know which Brontë sister I am, whether I’m an elf or a dwarf, what the lines on my palm say about me. I am perversely proud of even my worst traits simply because they are mine. I will confess to any fault, the twin joys of narcissism and self-flagellation jostling under the cloak of self-knowledge like two baby sloths under a blanket.

I like candles, crockpot recipes, Thomas Hardy, man-buns, ghost tours, babies, seed catalogues, the decorative use of moss, and songs where a guy from Brooklyn plays the mandolin. I like every fashion trend 18 months after everyone else does. I’m a Gemini, an ENTJ, a first-born, an X-iennial. I love any joke that starts “Only Native Angelenos Understand” or “You Might Be An Episcopal If” because I do and I am. (My favorite: “You might be an Episcopal if someone asks, ‘Are you Catholic?’ and you have a more than one word answer.”) My blood type is A-. Just typing that now gave me a little thrill, because I love me and I love facts about me. The thing I love most is enthusiasm, and if you are as excited about Harry Potter as I am about ghost tours, I fully support that.

But there are a lot of crockpot recipes out there, and I can’t keep up with everything. So I am cultivating a pure, perfect indifference to what I can do without. I’m learning not to mind missing out on things, good practice for my eventual exit from this life. I’ve made a gentle, loving parting with popular culture, and popular culture seems to be doing fine without me. One of the tasks of age is to trust the world to carry on — Beatrice and baseball and Carly Rae. I will use what time is left to take online personality quizzes and I will know peace.