[debeguiled]

(11-03-2018 06:29 PM)RoastBeefCurtains4Me Wrote:  

I had a dream the other night where I was at some get together with a bunch of young people in their 20's. They were around a long table, some sitting and some standing. They were all watching something on TV, and also talking. I noticed some started doing sign language to translate what others were saying. It didn't seem as if any deaf people were there. They were just into sign language.

Once I started noticing this in the dream, it seemed like all the sudden almost everybody started doing sign language, and then started dancing as they signed, with their arms out or above their heads.

All the sudden, some kind of cartoon came on, and they all started singing along with the theme song. Ninja man! Ninja man! N I N J A M A N Ninja man! ( I've never heard this in real life, but that's what they sang in the dream).

I was standing back a little from the group as all of this was happening, and I thought, man, these young people are into weird stuff I really can't get into the way they do. I went into the bathroom in part to get a little separation from this weird scene, and took a leak.

At this point, I woke up, and realized I needed to take a leak.

At my age, I am surprised I don't have dreams like this. A lot of what the youngest generations do can seem as foreign as sign language.

I don't get most video game references, and I am not going to start playing them now just to fit in. I know very few Pokemon characters.

Some days when I read the forum, I find myself oscillating between the forum and Urban Dictionary just to know what people are talking about.

Bill Burr spoke about this once and I took his words to heart. On the one hand, you don't want to be the the older guy trying, and sometimes failing, to use all the latest slang, but if you don't at least try to keep current with cultural trends, you will end up being the guy whose references are thirty years out of date, calling people Palookas, or saying things are Groovy.

A couple of points about culture.

When I was in college in the 80's, I had an old school, three piece suit, Harvard educated English teacher who looked like a parody of the out of touch literature nerd.

I was surprised to find that he could speak intelligently about things we students were listening to and watching and he knew our slang.

I asked him about it and he said it wasn't that hard to keep up. He could read reviews of movie and watch a couple hours of MTV a month, listen to our conversations, and that was all it took.

Compare that to today where instead of there being a couple movies that everyone watched, a couple of songs that everyone listened to, and a couple of slang words that showed up and stayed for a long time, we have every computer literate person and every subculture all having internet access.

It is probably pretty hard for young people, let alone old people, to be able to keep up with all the trends and all the slang that crowd one another out with lightning speed every day.

When I was a kid, you might learn some new term, like, when you block someone's shot in basketball or beat him with a move, kids starting saying: "Face," which was an abbreviation for "In your face."

Well, that slang lasted for all of high school, with some variations that you could easily figure out. Slang arrived slowly, and stuck around when it came, because it was mostly word of mouth, with a little bit of input from TV or the movies.

A lot of it was regional, and a lot of it we just made up ourselves, so it was original too, our lines and catch phrases.

I can't imagine the pressure a young person feels today to keep up with all the slang in the whole world scrolling across your screen nonstop day and night.

It is also funny that because the internet is such an archive of everything that was ever recorded, that a lot of the stuff that I know from high school or college, music mainly, but also movie and shows, the young people of today know also.

This is fairly amazing to me because when I was young it was a point of pride not to know any of the grown up stuff, but now, because it is all on the internet, it is like people feel pressure to be au courant with everything that ever happened!

I was in a Starbucks the other day and this song came on the speakers:

Now this was a song that was actually before my time. It was a song that my parents listened to, not because it was from their generation, but because they wanted to feel like they were keeping up with what the young people liked.

And I said to the barista, but more to myself, "Fuck, I hate James Taylor."

And she said something amazing, she said: "I love James Taylor. How can you hate James Taylor?"

It was amazing because she looked to be 22 at the oldest, so why in the hell does she even know who James Taylor is?

I'm not really complaining about this. It makes it easier for me to talk with younger people if they already know a lot of the music and the movies and tv shows I watched as a child. One of the things I like about this forum is that I can make references to this stuff and a lot of members know what I am talking about.

It's just odd. Odd when someone on the forum who I know is 20 years younger than me will post a song he likes because it is red pill and it will turn out to be something I listened to in high school.

Anyway, it makes communication easier, and despite the age-mogging that happens between generations, we still have a much stronger social connection and more shared reference points than I did with people my parents age.

I had to explain to that barista in Starbucks that I didn't hate James Taylor and his music per se, but that she would feel the same way if she had been listening to the same three or four songs over and over for forty years.