a few things, anyway...

sooooo...
another curious, and mildly tedious, debate rages on in the world of smaj. i can't say i'm terribly surprised.

none the less...

5 things i don't understand about my generation...

1. meeting people at the bar. people wear clothes reserved specifically for the bar, use language specificalyl tailored to the bar, and then stand around in a bewildering haze of light and noize that is impenetrable, trying vainly to shout pithy things to each other that lose most of their meaning after having to be repeated 3 times. "i'm going to the bathrooom!!" "what?!" "never mind!!" and so they get drunk and dance instead, and wonder, later, when they find themselves in the same bed, why they're having such a hard time talking to each other.

2. language. i find it hard to believe, essentially, that the same people who wailed in highschool about shakespeare being too difficult to understand and who speak a brand of english i will only describe as "marginal" out of kindness, have no problem with a sentence like "'sup, biatch, snoop dizzle is the shizzle, my nizzle, he's off the heezy. fo'sheezy.

3. our own melancholy. it's one thing to be aloof, distant, sullen, moody and depressed when you're a teenager. it's almost trendy, almost expected, and you have no problem finding shirts or music that share your disposition. however, when an entire generation of such youths wake up one day to find themselves sullen, moody and depressed adults, it's no longer fashionable, just kinda sad.

4. i-pods. don't get me wrong, it's a cool invention. but with it comes the advancement of the death of society. if i had a buck for every person i have seen on a bus, walking down the street, sitting on a park bench, eating lunch, with those infernal speakers in their ears, i would be quitting my job. people used to talk to each other every once in a while. now we're too busy inventing things that free us from the burden of interraction to notice how small our lives are getting.

and number five, special thanks to tank, smaj, and the originator of the tag...

5. a) our need to constantly evaluate our society, our generation, our peers, to discuss the foibles, follies, pitfalls and perils of our collective mentality, but rarely, if ever, to actually examine ourselves in a proactive and personal way that has nothing to do with anyone else. after all, if nobody else is going to change, we're trapped by the social structure, embedded in our subconscious for safekeeping. as good an excuse as any, and one i'm often guilty of hiding behind.
b) our ego-centered arguments that bear on nothing of real importance short of vaulting our verbal cleverness and our creative use of rhetoric over that of another, generally by getting into debates over trivialities and imbuing them with an almost rediculous emotional tenor that will be denied if asked about but is the driving force for the entire "discussion", which generally spirals out of control as all sides decide the last word is rightfully theirs.
thank goodness for the wisdom of batgirl.

and, in the spirit of what smaj was trying to accomplish, i offer whatever i can think of, in the few remaining minutes of my internet time, regarding what i might love about my generation.

i think all i can really come up with is that i'm glad we're stubborn. we come up against walls far higher than we can climb, we go through depressions that seem bottomless, we are burned and scorned, we are pressured to be better, stronger, faster, smarter, and then told that our efforts to be these things are generally not quite good enough (whether someone else tells us this or we tell ourselves, the results are the same). we are abused and then told that we are responsible for the way we are. and yet, despite any of this and more i might have missed or forgotten, we are still alive. still struggling. we know it's a struggle, and yet, at the very bottom of the barrel, we still, more often than not, look up and try to climb that stupid wall one more time. if we all had a little more to work with than just trying to save our own lives on a day to day basis, this generation could accomplish more than any that came before it, and possibly any that might come after. we live in the shadow of the oncoming personal apathy of consuming selfishness, but we are not dead yet, and we have, whether illusive or not, some modicum of hope, or we would not be here to discuss it to death.
: )

and please, if you're going to post a comment, don't, just this once, use it to exalt another empty argument. we can do that tomorrow, if you like.
: )