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.