GENERATION vorteX

I always think back on my college days with great nostalgia.  When else can you sleep until noon, drink your weight in Yeigermeister, discuss Brady Bunch episodes until 3AM, eat pizza at every meal and meet girls who might actually let you touch their boobs?  But the thing that made it truly great was that you were surrounded by hundreds of people exactly your age, at exactly the same station in life, who cared about exactly the same things you did: which basically consisted of drinking Yeigermeister and touching girls’ boobs.  I had the added privilege of going to school in Boston, widely recognized as the number one college town in America.  For four years it seemed as though the entire world was in college.  No matter where I walked, every store, every restaurant and every bulletin board catered to wall-to-wall 18-to-21-year-olds and the boobs they yearned to touch.

Life has certainly moved on and I’ve settled down with a wife and family in the Philadelphia suburbs.   I love it all and don’t mourn my early twenties for a minute, but lately I’ve started noticing something gone curiously awry.  It’s been almost seven years since I graduated college.  As near as I can tell it’s been the same amount of time for everybody else I graduated with.  A little elementary math indicates that if the whole world was twenty-one seven years ago, then there should be an abundance of twenty-eight-year-olds today.  Eighteen months of living in suburban Pennsylvania has proven that theory to be patently untrue.  By my estimates, everybody on earth is either under seventeen or over thirty-five.

No matter where we go, it’s the same two looks on everybody’s faces.  Either, “I’m jaded because I have another prostate exam tomorrow,” or “I’m jaded because my parents won’t let me listen to Eminem in the house anymore.” Lauren and I try, but it’s tough to identify with people talk incessantly about their cholesterol levels or about last night’s episode of Everwood.  Where are all the mature yet energetic mid-to-late-twenty-something’s of our generation?

I’m starting to think this part of Pennsylvania might actually be a vortex in the space-time continuum.  Or at the very least, it’s some kind of temporal black hole that prevents people in their twenties from entering.  Perhaps it wasn’t just perception back in Boston.  Maybe the whole world really was in college.  Perhaps my age group radically expanded in the late nineties as some kind of generational supernova that ultimately collapsed in on itself.  Perhaps Lauren and I are the proton nucleus of an age-gap nebula with negatively charged thirteen and forty-year-olds swirling all around us.

I know that sounds crazy, but the only other plausible explanation is that Lauren and I are actually the only two survivors of our entire generation.  Whatever the case, it can be a lonely way to live when there are no friends around to commiserate with over age-specific topics.  The irony is that most everybody on our upper terminus is at the same station in life as we are; married, with kids running around and others on the way.  Maybe that’s the reason we ended up here in the first place.  Maybe the act of bringing a child into the world opened a wormhole that sucked us into the vortex we’re in now.

That would explain how my single friends, who I hear from occasionally, continue to tell fun and interesting stories involving throngs of others our own age.  I’m not sure how Einstein’s Theory of Relativity works in practice, but perhaps the fast-paced singles lifestyle causes time to move slower in relation to the people around you, allowing all involved to remain the same relative age.  Having exchanged rings and genetic information, Lauren and I have somehow sliced open a hole in the fabric of time, shooting us into this strange eddy where time expands parabolically on either side of us.

We are making the best of it though.  Without other contemporaries around, we’ve turned to each other more and more.  We bond over games, late night talks and the child we’ve created – the one who opened this alternate reality to begin with.  And while we don’t know exactly what has happened to every other member of our generation, Lauren and I are genuinely enjoying our time together in this vortex of Pennsylvania.  If nothing else, I get to touch her boobs every day.