I’m not one to gripe about age but, sometimes, I feel it when I just DON’T GET young people.  In particular, I’ve been having this sort of post-modern existentialist conundrum thing about the youth of today and my youth. 

When I was younger, you kind of CHOSE to be a certain kind of person, you know?  You sorta looked what was around you, sort of ingested it, decided what parts of it you liked and what you didn’t and then, you know, sort of followed the path.  I was never much of a path follower cuz, really, I never quite fit in anywhere and I embraced the sort of rambling multi-path approach I took to my identity but, ultimately, I was well aware of what/where the paths were and how/why I was crossing them.  They were distinct in my mind even if I didn’t quite follow them. 

Lately, I’ve been interacting with younger folk and am sort of realizing that these ‘paths’ that I grew up with are very blurry. It’s, like, you can choose to dress as if you were going to one party but just, like, show up at another and it’s fine.  This is where my ‘old age’ gets to me sometimes.  I see this and, more often than not, am somehow offended (or something).

It makes me feel old because, well, it’s something different that, although I understand it in theory (I did study rhetoric for christ’s sake) it still somehow manages to get me all huffy and all “these kids and their new-fangled things”!  Aaaannnndddd then, simultanously, I get all eye-rolly at people who try TOOO HARD to define themselves in one particular way. 

I think I’m going senile.