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July 15, 1997 9:35AM EST I nearly panicked today as I walked by the movie theatre on the corner of L & 23rd and saw a movie poster for Dirty Dancing. Following the trend begun by Star Wars, the film will be re-released sometime in the near future to celebrate its tenth anniversary. To which my brain responded in amazement "It's been that long already?". And suddenly I saw time catching up with me and my childhood being swallowed up in the vast retro-fashion machine that keeps churning around and around. To my mind the 80's are still a recent phenomenon. Yet the 90's are almost over and people of my generation are becoming the new crowd to please as the youngest of us become twenty-somethings and the oldest of us creep into the realm of thirty-something. Time recently defined my generation, otherwise known as Gen X (yuck), as kids born between 1965 and 1976 or 1977, depending on whether you read the article or only looked at the pie charts. This puts me, born in 1974 at the tail-end of things, yet still firmly in that group. Hmmm do I have more in common with a 32-year-old than I do with the 19-year-old who is just getting started in college? We are the generation of any number of cultural iconographic things from MTV to friendship bracelets. And we're getting older. A movie that was a big hit among my young teen friends in 1987 is now ten years old, yet I look back at being 13 as recent history, not that far back in relative terms. I rejoiced to find Star Wars back in theatres, relished seeing it back on the big screen and being scared out of my boots by Darth Vader as I was close to 20 years ago on my 4th birthday. But seeing Dirty Dancing back in theatres gives me palpitations. Am I getting old already? Everything that I was happy to keep nostalgically in the past is resurging, becoming the new forefront of retro. I mean, collections of 80's music seem to be popping up more and more alongside the disco ones and fashion seems to be picking up cues from the early 80's now as much as from the mid to late 70's. Am I going to start seeing a new generation of teens wearing ripped sweatshirts and jeans, new twists on leg-warmers and short haircuts? Am I ready to see the fashion trends of my childhood and teen years made into new retro-chic? It seems we only just recovered from processing all that 80's stuff. Granted I still like that music better than a lot of the stuff that's come out in recent years. Heck, I signed up with Time-Life and have been receiving 1 nifty, spiffy 80's music CD per month for the last 4-months now and have been pumping them through my stereo almost non-stop, to Sabs' dismay. I just don't know if I'm ready to see my past become the best new old thing. I'd kind of like to keep it in that nice fuzzy, warm spot of memory that looks back and sighs and says "Yes those were the days ...". But the wheel of time can't stop turning, and the 80's becoming retro was, no doubt, inevitable as the Great American marketing system now turns its attention to us, the twenty and thirtysomethings of the 90's and the new makers of, as Billy Clinton would say "the bridge to the 21st century", whether or not the 21st century starts in 2000 or 2001. I used to see the year 2000 as a far-off distant and hazy point, I could hardly imagine being 26 years old. I anticipated being married with at least one kid and another on the way by that point. Yet I am now uncertain of the likelihood of that particular outcome now. I most likely will be married by then, Thank you Sabs:) But who knows whether we'll be financially stable enough to start that dreamed-of family? It sometimes seems that a lot of the hopes and expectations of my generation have been crushed or bruised badly, leaving us scrambling to make the world into what we want it to be. We're idealistically pessimistic: we've inherited a mess, yet we still dream of great things. We aren't the starry-eyed dreamers of the late 60's and early 70's, we've got a much more practical approach I think, a do-it-yourself kind of attitude. Since no one else is doing us any favors, we'll just take care of ourselves, thank-you-very-much. But at the same time, I think some of us feel slightly cheated. My parents had a better than average chance of coming out of college debt-free with something to build on for the future back in 1970 when my mother graduated from nursing school and my father from college with an economics degree which he upgraded to an MBA just a few years later. They married, my father started building a successful business career, my mother continued to work until she had me, took some time off, went back to work and life went on, she didn't work when we lived in Europe, but that's another story. Our family grew, our fortunes rose. I was raised in that 80's stability and mid-level affluence that seems to have been all too common in suburban America. Yet I am now the same age as my father when he married my mother and my prospects are nowhere near as bright despite a college degree and the kind of background that is supposed to yield success. The system is no longer as accomodating of people of my abilities as it was when my parents struck out into the wide world in their early 20s. In fact, my family's story is somewhat indicative of the vagaries of time and economics. My father was downsized in the white-collar cutbacks of the early 90's. He has had to rebuild his career from scratch. There was a point where Sabs and I, were making more money in our entry-level jobs than my parents were with their years of experience/multiple degrees. The job-market today is not kind to those who don't move quickly enough with the latest change. In fact I find myself continously trying to catch my breath to keep up. My own inability to focus on any one direction is influenced by this hectic pace. How can I settle on any one area of knowledge when things keep changing so quickly that field may be obsolete within months? My father recently had first-hand experience with the job-market as he tried to break back into the business world after a close to 5-year absence in which he ran his own business. It wasn't going well, and he still has 2 sons to put through college so he put himself back on the market. He found something after months and months of looking. His old job no longer exists in the form that it was back in the 80's. Budgeting has been taken over increasingly by computerized systems with which he has no experience. His job has moved beyond him. He managed to find work despite this deficit. And I'm paralysed by similar fears about being left behind. I have just enough technical know-how to qualify for any number of computer-related tech jobs, but not quite enough to land some of the jobs whose descriptions look interesting. My French degree is just a pretty piece of paper for the time being. A mute testament to my ability to write a lot of semi-psychanlytical literary essays. Maybe someday that will become a PhD and I can tell more bright young women how to dissect a French novel and write about literate paradigms so they can go sit behind computers at XYZ firm and process files til kingdom come. There's so much I looked forward to when I was just a little bit younger. And I still hold to just enough of that bright-eyed idealism to want to DO something about some of the world's problems. I don't want to be concerned with just my little corner of existence, though it's requiring a lot of maintenance these days. I want to look farther afield than my own back yard. If I could only find a compass point to set sail toward. Are other 80's kids as lost as I am? |