Month: March 2017

By S.E. Trotter

There’s nothing quite like the blank, uncomprehending stare of a teenage video store clerk to make a person feel, well, old. Of course, I realize that acknowledging that one still visits a video store doesn’t exactly scream “young” and “hip,” either.

Here’s how the latest confirmation of my non-young-ness unfolded.

A recent conversation around the dinner table about the films of Steven Spielberg led to some Youtube searches after dinner, which led to my nine-year-old begging to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. My oldest son, who is twelve, had seen the film a few years ago; he loved it and wanted to see it again, too.

For reasons unclear, I have somehow managed not to own a copy of this film on DVD. I know I had it on VHS.

I blame the children.

Around the time that my husband and I started switching our movie catalog from VHS tapes to DVDs, we also started having babies. For years, discretionary income that should have been set aside for important expenditures, such as ensuring ownership of all early 1980s-era Harrison Ford films, was gobbled up for items such as impossible-to-close strollers instead. I mean, I still have copies of nearly a dozen Baby Einstein DVDs in case anyone wants to watch a zebra puppet admire Monet’s haystacks to the music of Vivaldi. But no Raiders of the Lost Ark. Shameful.

To my surprise, Netflix didn’t have it either—and Netflix has not been spending its money on diapers, cribs, trips to the pediatric ophthalmologist, and birthday party goody bags, so it’s hard to know Netflix’s excuse.

But I digress.

Anyway, this is how I found myself at our neighborhood video store Friday night, searching not for Mr. Goodbar, but for Indiana Jones.

Now that we have Netflix and a smart TV, our trips to the video store have grown increasingly infrequent. I am almost surprised that video stores still exist. With physical CDs, physical books, physical DVDs, physical newspapers, physical brick and mortar stores—physical anythings—disappearing from the landscape like the infamous Dodo bird in 1662, my affection for the tangible has grown. Hello book, hello newspaper. Hello, actual thing I can touch. Thank you for existing somewhere besides behind a glowing screen.

Getting a Netflix account (it’s all Kevin Spacey’s fault—him and his treacherous House of Cards) had made me feel slightly guilty. Complicit, even.

Visiting the video store assuages my guilt a little. It makes me feel like I’m doing my part to help keep the dodos alive. Throwing the birds a few breadcrumbs, at least, on December 31^st, 1661, as the clock marches to midnight.

I headed for the “Favorites” section. If Raiders of the Lost Ark is not a favorite, then what is? Not Raiders of the Lost Ark, as it turns out. ­­­­­­­­­­Failure to Launch, but not Raiders.

Okay, time to go to the archives. I searched out in the general populace, for movies that start with the letter “R”. Nope, not there either.

Finally, it was time to ask a clerk.

“Do you have Raiders of the Lost Ark?” I asked the ten-year-old behind the counter. Okay, okay. The clerk wasn’t really ten. She had to be eleven, at least.

“What?” She asked.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Readers of the Lost Ark?”

“Raiders.”

“Readers?” Again with the readers. What would readers want with a lost ark?

“Raiders. You know. With Harrison Ford.”

Nothing. No recognition fired in her matter-of-fact eyes, no smile of understanding crossed her unlined face. It was as if I was speaking in tongues.

“Indiana Jones?” I tried.

Nope. Nothing.

Oh dear God. That’s when it hit me. She was not mis-hearing me. She had not ever heard of the movie. Or Harrison Ford, for that matter. Or Indiana Jones. And then I saw myself through her eyes: just another middle-aged woman, slightly disheveled, in need of coloring some of those gray hairs that were showing through at the roots, with kids in tow, asking about some irrelevant movie from her equally irrelevant youth.

Maybe it was the stunned, perplexed and confused look on my irrelevant face that made her decide to try entering one more search in the computer. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was just good old-fashioned customer service, indulging the middle-aged and the irrelevant, no matter how pathetic they may be. Either way, she tried again, this time typing in the words “Indiana Jones” instead.

Eureka!

“Oh, Raiders of the Lost Ark,” she said. “I thought you were saying Readers. Yeah, we have it.”

She pointed me to the “Must See” section, where my son quickly found the movie. It turned out the going rate for deep humiliation is pretty cheap: just $2 for five nights. I even bought a jumbo box of Bottle Caps at the counter to help numb the pain.

My husband and I watched the movie later that night with our boys, who loved it, but, let’s be clear: this was a Pyrrhic victory. I am, apparently, living in a world where it is possible for a young adult not to have heard of Indiana Jones. Who is the dodo bird here? I am. I am the dodo. Gobbling Bottle Caps instead of breadcrumbs. Make that request for Bottle Caps a double. I’m going to need them.

 

 

 

 

Here we are now, entertain us . . .

So goes the refrain of one of the most seminal songs of the 1990s, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A few weeks ago, I kicked off the Composition 2 courses I am teaching by playing the song for my students. We’re working on critical thinking skills, and we’re talking about the pleasure-oriented, dystopian world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Analyzing the lyrics to Nirvana’s song seemed like a good place to start.

Looking around the classroom while I played the video, I couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that not only had many of my students not heard of the song, the majority of them had not even been born when it was released.

I was born in 1971. So Nirvana, to my students, would be the same as the top 1946 artists are to me. Think Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, and Nat King Cole. I didn’t dislike these artists when I was young. They just seemed to be the relics of a different, dusty era. I.E., they were that dirtiest of dirty words in our Botoxed, bleached, filled, plumped, and lasered society: old.  Was it possible that for my students . . . Nirvana = Perry Como? Was it possible that Nirvana seemed old?

And if Nirvana was old, then what, exactly, did that make me?

According to the Pew Research Center, the answers are “neglected” and “stuck”.

I am a member of Generation X, the generation born in America from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. A few years ago, Paul Taylor and George Gao published for Pew an article titled, “Generation X: America’s neglected ‘middle child’.”

Like my fellow Gen X-ers, I am, according to Taylor and Gao, “smack in the middle innings of life, which tend to be short on drama and scant of theme.”

When they argue that my life is short on drama, I should note that neither Taylor nor Gao have been to my house on a morning when I’m rummaging through laundry baskets and hustling to get my three children out the door on time whilst also trying to find the required colored team t-shirts that said children are supposed to wear to school.

But okay. Here it is. The middle.

Taylor and Gao explain that not only are we Gen Xers at the midpoint in our lives, we are also, generationally, stuck between two much showier, flashier generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials: “Gen Xers are a low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths”.

With my oldest child in middle school and my youngest in kindergarten, I have been feeling my middle-ness more than ever, David Bowie’s “Changes” the current soundtrack to my life.

I don’t have the time for a mid-life crisis, nor the stamina. Nor the temperament, for that matter. This might be a Gen X trait—rolling our eyes at the cliché of it all: “What, a mid-life crisis? That’s so baby boomer. Please.”

A baby boomer feeling an existential middle-ness might have gone out, gotten a divorce, a new spouse, a second mortgage, and a shiny red sports car. A few years from now, I can only imagine, millennials feeling the same push and pull might chuck it all and decide to star on a reality TV show that they will share via Snapchat from the rooftop of their tiny house overlooking their tiny organic salmon farm. Or something.

But what’s a Gen Xer to do?

Probably something decidedly more Gen X low-key. Something like finally getting around to starting the blog they have been envisioning years.

Which brings me here. Welcome to From the Gen X Files.

What this blog won’t do: Offer advice, tackle serious world issues (which, of course, need to be tackled, just not by the likes of me), or attempt to tie anything up with a neat bow.

What it will do, I hope: Offer an entertaining respite from the drudgery and the drama, a little we’re-all-in-this-together half-smile. I know. A half-smile. I should probably aim the bar a little higher. But I’m a Gen Xer, and high bars bring out the sarcasm in me. So a half-smile it is.

Topics to be covered: Mostly parenting and pop culture, though I always admired radio DJ Chris on the show Northern Exposure, so there may be the occasional unexpected scat, the unplanned riff.

The middle isn’t all bad. On the day I played Nirvana for my students, I wore to class my longtime favorites, my great fashion item of the 1990s—my Doc Marten flower boots. Enough time had passed that the boots are no longer cringeworthy -outdated; they have graduated to a sort of retro cool.

Maybe that’s where we are as Gen Xers right now. Enough future still stretching in front of us to hold the promise of good times and adventure. A future that, like Lloyd Dobbler, has potential. The missteps of our youth far enough behind us to be seen with the proper perspective, what was once regrettable baggage now seen through the lens of wisdom and lessons learned, or at least nostalgic affection.

The boots still fit, by the way. And I’m not gonna lie. They felt damn good.