I'm turning 40 this year. I went the other way than you; I turned toward the younger generation, which wasn't properly seen as a cohort until Doug Coupland spoke up with 13th Generation and Shampoo Planet. Finally! Books about youth that weren't about those damned boomers. Books about my friends, instead of about my babysitters.
It's funny how powerful that chasm feels when you're on the down side of it. I remember going to a friend's birthday party; ended up we had two boomers and two gen-x-ers partying together. And o! the frustration of trying to talk to one another across that divide.
At least, I know two of us were frustrated, 'cause we vented together later in the evening. I've always wondered what the interaction felt like from the other side; they mostly just looked confused.
The only point I can clearly recall at this distance was the "$3 cab ride" distance measurement, which started it all off. Lessee, I was talking about my life programme of monotonically increasing depravity. Noting that we had half an hour or so left in my 20's, we joked about running out to do something rilly *bad* before the clock ran out and I was already 30.
So one of them goes, "Hey, Tiffany's is close by; it's only a $3 cab ride." At which point the two x-ers collectively stare in disbelief and guffaw in astonishment at the expectation that such a measurement might translate into a comprehensible distance in our heads.
We spent the rest of the night trying to bridge that gulf (once, that is, we'd managed to point to it).
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I'm turning 40 this year. I went the other way than you; I turned toward the younger generation, which wasn't properly seen as a cohort until Doug Coupland spoke up with 13th Generation and Shampoo Planet. Finally! Books about youth that weren't about those damned boomers. Books about my friends, instead of about my babysitters.
It's funny how powerful that chasm feels when you're on the down side of it. I remember going to a friend's birthday party; ended up we had two boomers and two gen-x-ers partying together. And o! the frustration of trying to talk to one another across that divide.
At least, I know two of us were frustrated, 'cause we vented together later in the evening. I've always wondered what the interaction felt like from the other side; they mostly just looked confused.
The only point I can clearly recall at this distance was the "$3 cab ride" distance measurement, which started it all off. Lessee, I was talking about my life programme of monotonically increasing depravity. Noting that we had half an hour or so left in my 20's, we joked about running out to do something rilly *bad* before the clock ran out and I was already 30.
So one of them goes, "Hey, Tiffany's is close by; it's only a $3 cab ride." At which point the two x-ers collectively stare in disbelief and guffaw in astonishment at the expectation that such a measurement might translate into a comprehensible distance in our heads.
We spent the rest of the night trying to bridge that gulf (once, that is, we'd managed to point to it).