One of my favorite phrases is Hip to be square…
When I turned 40 (more than a few years back…) I was worried that I would become entirely invisible to all those young people around me…
click on photo at left for the latest Corner Drip cartoon
And considering that I work at a very popular Canadian University populated largely by 20-somethings, that would have been a whole lot of invisibility.
I mean, everyone wants to be, even slightly, relevant.
But I was wrong. And I am still sorta cool. In a grand illusion kind of way… But for the most part, for reasons just outside of my grasp.
And I really do not think it has anything to do what what I am doing…
It has more to do with what everyone else (in the young’n age bracket) are not doing.
I figure I am just out there living the dream… burning the candle with a flame-thrower… drinking 5 cups of coffee at a time so I can keep up with my own timetable.
And it is not like I am that busy. I work for 7 hours, taking about an hours worth of breaks a day – come home and make a gourmet dinner with my wife – put in about 2 or 3 hours on writing projects and web site obligations… shower, rinse and repeat.
Seems like that would have been considered a normal day… in 1974…
A movie making student friend of mine describes me as the coolest guys he knows…
I look behind myself every time I hear stuff like that. Surely I am not the calendar boy for Good as it gets. Dang, I was expecting to be a geezer by now… wearing tattered polyester pants and a weedy Nike golf shirt from Value Village… smelling vaguely like a combination of Canadian blended whiskey, Aqua Velva and sketchy personal hygiene.
But no…
Instead, life on campus has forced me into Gap-ville. I wear Levi’s, Fluevog shoes, cotton monochrome banana republic t-shirts… and I (gasp) shower every morning and shampoo with an all-in-one volume enriching organic formulation…
What have I become? Is this the future for the middle aged? Retro-chic into our golden years? Who is going be rad if the young folks won’t come up to the plate? Sigh… guess it’s gonna be me and my similarly aged hunky stud dudes.
Comments
2 responses to “Spring into inactvity – our new generation of lazy kewl”
I’ve been having a similar experience in the last couple of months. My husband and I talk about how movies aren’t good anymore, we’re downloading tv shows from the 70’s because they’re better…and recently I saw a concert at the Commodore and felt ‘old’.
It’s hard to tell – are movies in general worse now than they were say in the ’90’s? Are people in their 20’s more obnoxious now than I used to be, or am I becoming more sensitive?
In order for the 20-somethings to be particularly obnoxious, they would actually have to be doing something to get under our nerves… and that is the whole point of slacker-dom… like that telecom ad that is on Canadian TV right now – where the gal espouses her deep philosophic view on life and the slack-dude repeats his techie mantra… “It goes in… and it goes out… slides in… and slides out…” an example of young people, listless and idle sitting around thinking about nothing. I used to be driven mad by Dairy Queen ads – now I am maddened by the lack of irritating new things around me.