Historicity...Facticity...Thrownness... Temporality...Geworfenheit...the condition of having been born into a situation, thrown into a particular place and time - having one's Life conditioned by these unique, random, haphazard, non-repeating individual factors...Born into this year - this decade - the 1960s for example...growing up (for the most part) in this other decade (the 1970s) in a particular location, California, the west coast, in a particular milieu, the suburbs, with a stable family, on a quiet street (a former orange and walnut grove), with enough water and rain (or so we thought), on the edge of the desert, east of Los Angeles, a valley surrounded by mountains, a sleepy agricultural town with a college or two, during an uncrowded era of fast-moving freeways, a corner enclave of ranch homes, uphill from a dairy, a familiar mountain, a horse farm and a dried out river bed, in a neighborhood full of kids on bikes and roller skates, during such and such a time, a postwar age of capitalist prosperity, for a motion-obsessed world, expanding, exploding, more people arriving, with new construction, and western migration, hippies near the coast, a whiff of the midwest inland, children and grandchildren of hardscrabble types, mom-and-pop storefronts, with good jobs, taking wholesome vacations, plentiful churches and WASPy affiliations, our own youthful provincial obsessions (beaches, swimming pools, tetherball, skateboards, bicycles, tennis, hide-n-seek, street football) and a particular vein of technology (gas-fueled cars, newspapers, Polaroid cameras, movie theaters, television consoles, LPs, turn-tables, land-lines) and assorted cultural references, signs of change (JFK, conspiracy, anti-war, long-haired, free speech, nightly news, counterculture, rioting, war footage, Hollywood, Beatles, country western, black power, underground, loosening morality of booze and pills, sex, awakening, birth control controversy, psycho-therapy, closeted, dress codes, surveillance, CIA, covert operation, divorce rate, revisionist health craze, country club, beauty icon, golf revolution, crime spree, women at work, serial murders, populist revolt, late-night radio, church scandal, decline of institutional, Supreme Court, job rate, approval ratings, short wave radio, liberation movements) all of this bouncing our minds during unconscious sleep ...In such an environment, the events can seem frozen even during a time of change...During such childhood, a necessary tunnel vision takes over and the frame of reference is constricted on purpose...We think in terms of seasons - summer with its eternal "endless summer" promises, the fall when the winds take over...and winter, time of Rose Bowl and Rose Parade...the rainy season of February/March and an early early Spring arriving with orange blossoms and rose bushes in bloom...
Prologue - > We are fortunate to live in a time, or so it is said, when we of the future no longer feel the burden of gender to such a degree as in previous ages; nowadays there is no pre-established norm or "role" for us to perform or hold onto like a chain about the neck. There was a time, of course, and not so long ago, when men were de facto expected to be tough strong, resilient, athletic, assertive... and which to judge by the role models in movies and popular culture which we could add on silent, stoical, protective, while no great shock was registered if there should be a woman or more than one who in some degree was known (also through popular culture, movies, novels, songs, etc. in comparison with her male counterparts) as: soft, demure, flirtatious, sociable, wise, and to which one might add on: practical, prescient, intuitive, gregarious, solicitous, nurturing and perhaps multi-tasking, socially-aware, loyal, resilient . With regard to the males, unfair
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