No One Else Here Remembers Watching the Challenger Blow Up
I am sitting in a Starbucks in Foggy Bottom on our dinner break from the show.
The one embedded in the campus of George Washington University.
It is finals week, so the place is filled with students.
I feel really, really, really old.
These are the things they dont know about:
None of the men worry about hair loss
None of the women worry about the wrinkles in their forehead
None of them have watched their friends become spouses and parents
None of them have been forced to re-examine their dreams and goals in the name of being realistic
Can any of them really have had their hearts broken?
Maybe. I don't remember. Nineteen was a long time ago.
posted by SAS @ 6:18 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I feel your pain. I am usually around people who don't remeber Watergate or the fall of Saigon.
Reaching for my walker now.
Water-what? Or yeah, that's the place next to Cuppa-Cuppa, right?
Few of them know of life before the internet either. There was no e-commerce before 1996. Not a dime. God that abrupt generational milestone makes me feel old like nothing else.
When I started college at the University of Michigan in 1993 we used the gopher system to search for things. Very few people had their own computers, so we would all be in the computer lab (the main one was this giant bubble in the middle of campus) writing papers until the wee hours of the morning.
I actually think that an important social aspect of college was lost with the deluge of personal computers.
I feel the same generational gap with these students, but why does your age seem to bother you so much?? Life expectancy for our generation is so high, you'll probably live to be 90 if not 100. So you're nowhere near being old. Do you feel underaccomplished for your age? Cause Tom Lehrer had the right prescription for that 40 years ago: "It's humbling, for example, to think that when Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for 2 years".
You're not old until you're like 70 anymore. Maybe 65 for some people. I remember the Challenger explosion, the Reagan-Mondale election, and Reagan getting shot. (We had to write condolence letters to him in pre-school.) Those of us born in the 70s are getting pushed back as the most cool by people born in the 80s. This is the natural rhythm of life. I don't see what's so disconcerting about it. We're all getting older, and we're all going to die. So what?
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