rekkidblogga

But I digress

A friend at work recently celebrated his 33rd birthday. Or at least he said
he did. Kind of. What he actually said, when I asked if his birthday weekend had been a nice one, was something like "Well, yes and no." And when I said "Sorry to hear that. I was hoping it would just be a 'Yes,'" he continued, "I spent the weekend thinking about how old I am now." I told him I can absolutely relate. I turn 34 on June 19 and every year since I turned 30, each passing birthday gives me pause to wonder where another year has gone and why I feel like I haven't really taken full advantage of it. It's hard to believe that I've been out of high school now for 16 years when 1990 doesn't seem so long ago. I wonder where my youth went.

The truth is that I know exactly where it went. It went to college for a ridiculously long time - far too long, honestly. It went to work weeknights (after sitting in class all day during said extended college tenure) at the record store. It worked weekends instead of having fun. It never took vacations when it was still young enough to go out and party until all hours of the night. It spent that time reading cement block-sized English lit tomes in order to get good grades so that someday, when it finally graduated from college, it could grow up and get a job. Now it's pretty well spent and it doesn't mind going to bed at 9:30 on a summer night, something that would have been unthinkable when it was a little kid in the '70s or early '80s - or even when it was a teenager in the late '80s, a 20something hipster in the '90s.

So my friend and I commiserated about being old and apparently lame compared to all the teenagers and 20somethings surrounding us these days. It's their world now; we just take up space in it. But we gave ourselves credit for one thing: Doing this - blogging.

The Birthday Boy agreed with me when I posited that the now-30somethings of our generation (The Generation Formerly Known As "X" - a tag which I've always hated) have always been willing to put it all out there. Before the internet came along (during our heyday), we were cranking out 'zines like fools - publishing our own homemade manifestos on anything and everything, the crummier-looking the better. We embraced e-mail like parents embrace a long-lost prodigal son or daughter; it was as if the mothership of EZ communication came down to us, beckoning us to spend even more of our days hacking away, yammering on about... about... well... whatever in newsgroups like alt.tv.x-files. We could spend literal hours online, defending our position that Mulder and Scully had been having an affair all along during the series run. Don't believe us? Check our website: www.xphiles.com. Now we IM each other, we text message - we do all that. And yet we, one of the smallest generations of the 20th Century, still feel this great need to share many of our thoughts publicly, in complete sentences for much bigger age groups to read.

Maybe this continued sense of misspent youth that just keeps slipping away, a year at a time with each swiftly passing June, is why I've been listening to my first real rock star crush, Rick Springfield circa 1982, all week. I miss the days when all I cared about was Rick, the radio and rollerskating - in precisely that order.

posted by rekkidbraka @ 7:54 PM