Generation Gap

To borrow from a blogger I lurk at, here's the great Sixty Minutes piece on the Millennials.

One of the moments at Thanksgiving that I will remember is trying to get Megan to identify the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When I tried __ __ of the Third Kind, she blanked. She told me she had never heard of the movie--it came out before she was born! Granted, I was only one when it came out, but still, I knew the movie and could identify it as a Spielberg flick. Granted, that was still five years before she was born.

Next Christmas, if all goes as planned, I will be married and an aunt. And granted, many women reach that point before the age of 32. But living in the land of delayed adulthood, this is a big thing for me. SE will have reached these things a good two years later than me, and others of my colleagues and friends later still. And granted, parenthood is still a step beyond that.

But I am growing up. 2008 is a big year. It's my ten year college reunion, and I can remember when the thought of getting to college, finishing college, finding a job, and wondering what in the hell I would be doing with my life was a big unknown. But next spring, it will also be 15 years since Star closed. Fifteen years since I started over again. 18 years since I left St. Veronica and Detroit. More than half of a lifetime ago.

Our intern here is a full decade younger than me. At Terry's ceremony Sunday, it struck me talking to the young uns that Peter was the same age LL was when I started here, and that the scary old guys we thought were scary 8 years ago are now creepy and scary to the 22 year olds. I am the sage old lady offering advice, not taking it. What happened. At 22, I could not contemplate being the one talking about getting married and offering the advice. Now I'm beyond NEMW's Paula or Jen S. from 1019.

But it's a good thing. I like being 31 and having so much to look forward to in 2008.