How to deflate your ego in three simple steps

Anything that happened in the years prior to my birth, didn't actually exist for me. Scratch that. Before the year my consciousness acquired the capacity for long-term memory, there is a big, black nothing. To a certain extent, the concept of nineteen seventy-anything felt false. Oh, I knew it was out there. My siblings were born in the 70's. Some were born in the 60's. But for me, the early-to-mid-80's marked the beginning of time as I knew it.

And I guess that is how it goes when you're young. History is some vacuumous black hole of nonexistence. And then one day it isn't. Somewhere along the way, I pulled my ostrich-like youthful head out of the narcissism I'd buried it in, looked around, and realized there were people who remember exactly where they were the day Kennedy was shot. Just as I remember the moment my mother came rushing into my smart-enough-to-schedule-classes-on-Mon-Weds-Fri-only-college-era bedroom to wake me with her tears on the morning of September 11, 2001.

I sit at my desk grading student essays about emerging trends and I feel slapped in the face by how very little my students know about the world. I read of the dreadful (not their opinion, mine) re-emergence of acid wash jeans, facebooking, iPods. I read lines about how iPods made listening to music on-the-go a popular activity (anybody ever heard of a Walkman/Discman/Boom Box?) I read lines that parallel boot cut jeans with the 90's (wait, don't I still buy boot cut?). One student writes about how adults are finally catching on to the Facebook craze (because, apparently, the first members of FB weren't adults--apparently, teenagers set all trends?).

It is reiterated to me that 17 years ago, the age of most of my juniors, it was 1993. Their capacity for long-term memory kicked in somewhere around 1996. 1996! And their perception of 1996 was through the eyes of a three-year-old.

They're babies.

I suddenly feel very old. Very old and weathered. Yesterday, I swear, I was young and hip and semi-trendy. Yesterday, I was the youthful expert on cutting edge technology. I had great taste. I listened to the indie, the edgie, the youthful. But not today. Today I'm the tired old teacher-lady informing a student that it was an "8 track" not an "Atrax", and that 30 is, in fact, not quite middle aged. Today I am the boring, unhip woman who droned on about something-something-something "you'll be at the movies and there'll be a gaggle (yeah, old women use "gaggle") of young hoodlums (they use "hoodlums" too) seated behind you. And you'll think to yourself Phhht! Teenagers! I was never that annoying! I'm here to tell you--and remember this moment--you were."

* image found here

P.S. The best part about all of this, of course, is that they get to look back through photos of their adolescence in acid wash and wonder, What in the hill was I thinking? This comforts me at night.