Ba Ba Ba Ba Barbara-Ann

I recently had an interview (another firm that decided it didn’t want to hire at all as soon as they met me) where they asked me what I would like to be questioned about. My interviewer, a rather dashing man, helpfully added that, “It’s no fun if you have no clue about the topic,” just to boost my confidence, I suppose. The only answer I could think of at the time was pop culture. And I turn up my nose at quite a lot of that too. Considering the fact that they didn’t hire me anyway, I realise now that I should have overcome my inhibitions and said it: “Ask me anything about pop culture.” And if he dared to ask me about some horrible single that’s topping the charts I could’ve sneered at him and refused to work with someone with such an awful taste in music.

Pop culture is such a wonderfully unnecessary social construct that I can’t help wanting to waste all of my time on it. The connection between two people who listen to the same music or love the same TV show is instantaneous, maybe more so than two people who grew up in the same neighbourhood. The more obscure the reference, the stronger the kinship you feel with the person who was able to identify it.

Lately, however, it’s started bothering me that all my conversations are an awfully tangled mess of pop culture references. I can’t for the life of me remember the last time I went an entire day without alluding to anything that I came across through popular media. For someone who, as a rule, avoids social networking sites like the plague, this is a real bummer. This means that if I was cut off from the internet, television, reading material and my iPod for a few weeks, I would have absolutely nothing new to talk about. Oh, the horror!

But let’s think about the alternative. Let’s assume for a moment that I wasn’t quite so obsessed with music, movies and suchlike and that I had “real” conversations with people. Exactly how would these conversations go? Would I talk about my feelings? The meaning of life? Idle gossip? I’ll take pop culture any day. Don’t kid yourselves. We’re not Einstein reincarnations. It is time to accept the fact that there is no life beyond youtube.