Yes, it's a freaking phone. Trust me on this.
She thinks I’m crazy, but I’m just growing old.
Despite its reputation for having such a marked gender imbalance that it’s often called “Menver,” I spend more time with women than men in this town as of late. Well, truth be told, I don’t spend much time with anyone human, given my academic demands and the solitary work at hand. It’s an event when I put down the laptop and books and step outside to do anything other than walk the dog. When I am with people these days, I tend to be with one of two women in my social circle who are also in school, and therefore have similar schedules while simultaneously being able to relate to my own experience and time restrictions. Misery loves company and all that rot, only we’re really not all that miserable. It works out pretty well, actually, and it helps that they’re a couple of really funny bitches who share my quirky view of what is wrong and right in the world. The interesting part is that both women are old enough to be my daughters, which is weird to say, because, really, I’m not that old. Not even close. Honest.
Shut up. Stop laughing.
….
One of these friends is in her early 20’s, but has the comportment, maturity, and gravity that I have to say far exceeds my own. She blows me away daily. The other is firmly ensconced in her mid-20’s and has the blazing intellect and vision, biting wit, and sophisticated sense of humor I love coupled with an easy-going and self-aware goofiness that outpaces anything I have. And I’m a freaking goofball. It helps that I refuse to grow up in all the ways that are important. I’m no 20-something, but I remember what it feels like to be young and love to laugh.
Both women are very comfortable in their own skin, know what they want from life, and have the ambition, drive and smarts to give as good as they get. They’re fighters, they’re hard workers, they’re wicked hilarious, and they’re very well-schooled for ones so young. They’re wise beyond their years, and I’m truly impressed with both of them. And I don’t mean that in a condescending way at all. They’re two of my favorite people in the world, and I love that the age difference seems to be a non-issue for us. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t notice it, and they don’t seem to, either. From my point of view, we have a relationship of equals, despite the fact that they are just finding themselves and stepping out into a world that is their oyster, while I’m setting foot into my own middle ages and looking over the rise at the downward slope in the road. It shouldn’t work, but it does. I have just so been enjoying their company, that I really had myself fooled into thinking there were no differences in our experience. This week, however, the universe body checked me repeatedly with reminders from these friends and my students that I’ve been around a lot longer than I sometimes realize.
Nothing says, “damn, bitch, you old” quite like getting the blank stare of nonrecognition from a younger person in response to a pop culture reference that you’re sure everyone in the room will connect with thanks to a collective memory. The silence that meet the words and terms and jokes and phrases that drop from your mouth with such natural ease is deafening and time stretches out before you like hours as you realize the decades that actually separate you from your listener. I imagine it’s how a comedian dying on stage must feel. You don’t want to follow up with condescension, but you want to explain your reference in the hope that maybe the issue is one of miscommunication on your part and not the fact that your dinner companion just was not alive or, gee, I don’t know, not yet potty trained, when whatever event, show, song, presidential debate, etc. you just mentioned happened along.
In the past week, I have been met with the blinking look that says “Uh…huh?” in my efforts to engage on Benny Hill, Deep Throat (yes, including the Watergate version), and at least one other major pop culture moment from the 90s that everyone my age would expect everyone in the industrialized West to recognize, but that I can’t remember right now because, well, the kids are right and this bitch is apparently actually old fo’ reals. Despite wracking my brain, I cannot recall what it was. I think it was something from Seinfeld or another television show that was equally huge and momentous. Trust me, it was shocking. I had every reason to gasp at the blank stare I got — at least from a Gen X point of view. These reminders where like getting a bucket of cold water dumped on me from above, and the water was only made icier by the fact that my hike and brunch today with a 35 year-old girlfriend was a series of each one of us easily and effortlessly picking up what the other was laying down as far as references went. Our quotes varied from Ivan Drago to Dr. Peter Venkman without missing a beat. It was pretty delicious. A conversation like that is on par with good sex with a long-term intimate partner even when it’s with someone you just met. Hell, like really hot sex, sometimes it’s even better with a stranger. But anyway…
Ok, so maybe my generation lives in the 80s, but we know a good pull when we see one and rarely miss an opportunity to jump in and make one. The pop cultural tete-a-tete is a rush for all of us and can often parade as instant intimacy. And that’s just the thing. Therein lies the defining difference between my generation and the one who came after. Generation X makes its meaning in being referential. It’s how we communicate with each other. It’s how we form our own self-identities. Everything boils down to shared experience. In the words of Blackalicious’ Gen X anthem Make You Feel That Way, “Rakim? KRS? Hey, I had that tape.” We all seek that recognition from one another. It’s our secret handshake. The fact that my friend can drop a line from Rocky IV and I can reply with another from Ghostbusters and be understood without so much of a blink of an eye is the essence of the Gen X experience. It’s what we’re all looking for from each other, and it serves not only as a bonding ritual for each of us as we sniff each other as we each seek to build relationships with adults whose wheelhouses are similar to our own, but it grounds us in an era that has seen more rapid technological, social, cultural, political, and economic change than any in nearly a century. It helps to have a touchstone when you’re screaming through the universe at a million miles an hour. Pop culture is how we cope.
Granted, Generation X did not invent the importance of pop culture references or shared experience. Our Boomer parents most certainly defined the concept of lived generational identity as is captured with comedy and poignancy in the 1989 film Parenthood when Diane Wiest’s character Helen is shocked to learn that her teenage daughter is pregnant upon returning home from a date with her younger son’s teacher, George Bowman:
Helen: No, no, no, no. I’m too young to be a grandmother. Grandmothers are old. They bake, and they sew, and they tell you stories about the Depression. I was at Woodstock, for Christ’s sake! I peed in a field! I hung on to The Who’s helicopter as it flew away!
George Bowman: I was at Woodstock.
Helen: Oh yeah? I thought you looked familiar!
If you haven’t seen Parenthood, put this blog down and go watch it now, so we can all continue on the same page. No, not later. Right now. It’s important. I’ll wait right here.
All done? Ok. Good. Let’s continue.
To be fair to my Millennial friends, it is not their fault. They just were not there. Why would they get all of my jokes? Why would I expect them to have been there when they weren’t born yet? They’re still young. It’s their world now, and they’re still writing the script. They’ve got their own culture. I just get that reality check from time to time, and I see the humor in their eyes and imagine the horror in my own whenever the gulf opens and I get a reminder of my age and experience. I don’t hate it, though. I revel in my place in life and wouldn’t trade it for the world. I just can’t expect to have everyone speak the same language. If Saussure is right, our language is based on the relationship between the signifiers we chose to create our signs — and references should be no different. Barthes would argue that it’s all part of our myth building processes, and Gen X gets off on the myths.
I have to give the Millenials in my life credit, though. They try very hard to understand me and where I’m coming from, in fact. They’re eager to learn, in fact. Some of them even seem to worship our references and use them as the basis for their humor. Talk to any Family Guy fan in his or her 20s, and you’ll see what I mean. That show is wall-to-wall Gen X pop culture references, thanks to the masturbatory writing style of its creator Seth McFarlane, and the Millennials just eat it up. They are craving a shared experience that their generation has been denied through the individualizing and niche-ifying media and technology of their youth. They’d trade their iPods for what I have in a heartbeat, and in my experience, many of them are dying to rub up against me. Want to understand what I have and maybe even get a little of it for themselves. It’s why my past classes almost invariably included a discussion about what a rotary phone was and how it worked and what it was like to use one whenever the image of one came up in a documentary I showed in class. The conversation goes from rotary phones to television with dials to what it was like to drink Coke out of a glass bottle (it’s like drinking beer out of a glass bottle). It’s why screening this to put this into proper pop culture and historical context always lead to a class discussion that caused my students to want to discuss it and other references like it for a week in my office, on my AIM chat, via email, and anywhere else they could find me because they had always laughed at the latter without ever having seen and understood the former. Getting the whole story changed them, and I appreciated that. They wanted to learn. Wanted to learn. Wanted to soak it all up. Most importantly, they wanted to use and apply the myths. That’s been a lesson for me, too.
The lesson is that bullshit debates like this are useless wastes of time that don’t get us anywhere, except to get me pissed off. Generational infighting seems to be a new thing, and it’s stupid. It’s a lesson that makes me consider who I am and who my friends are and how we can better communicate. It serves to drive my research. It also causes me to laugh at myself when I realize that I’m not as young as I used to be, and that’s ok. I’ve got my Millennial friends to help keep me on my toes and to help keep me from growing old without a fight. And every time some 20-something asks about my research and replies with “Generation X? Why would you want to study those old folks?” because she thinks I’m one of her tribe, I take it as a compliment, despite my own fervent generational pride . Thank you, 28 year-old. Thank you.
bittersweet distractors 