I saw an ad the other day for a new ABC television show called "My Generation"; apparently, it's faux-documentary style, a back and forth of footage of one group of high school friends as they traverse the decade between 2000 and 2010. It's set in Austin. The premise is that the group is reunited at age 28. Of course, none of this is very original. What happens to people? Who followed their soapy, over-talked dreams, and who didn't? Who got knocked up, married, divorced, went nuts, etc.? But it intrigues me because this might be the first blatant attempt to fictionalize MY generation. I'm a couple years off on the 2000 graduation date (I matriculated in 2002), but sure as hell I was the generation who followed Britney Spears in her prime (what was anyone thinking?), watched 9/11 unfold on a classroom screen, cared whether Joey and Pacey ended up together (and if you don't get that, you're fired!), and went off to college with so much promise in my gut that anything seemed possible. The second Bush was in the White House, but other than that life seemed like it might be pretty manageable. Who knew, eh.
Whether or not the show lives up to its hype, or makes me feel nostalgic, thinking about it also made me think about how we all process change as the years roll by. No matter the specific "generation," we all have that decade (AKA, our twenties) that sort of defines us. How we enter the world, how it surprises us, how we find the people who we want to CHOOSE instead of them choosing us. After college, anything is on the table. But we have to put it there.
There's a scene in the show's promo in which the group jumps, fully clothed, into a pool. Cheesy, yep, but also a little moving. I think it's supposed to represent a moment of unabashed joy--a moment that, despite receding hairlines and dashed hopes and re-start buttons, these people can find again. Who would want to be 17 again? Not me. But to recapture the joy of 17 in your late twenties? Score.
This morning I randomly read a page of a Pablo Neruda poetry collection I have by my bed. The line was "I love the handful of earth you are." That's how I feel about the people who stay in my life. They're not perfect, because no one is. But I love them just because I love them (to paraphrase Neruda), without pride or show or having to defend my choices. I didn't have a very good high school experience; I was the nerd, the cast-out. Much of it was my own doing. But as I've come into my own, and approach my tenth reunion, I realize that the most important development of my decade has not been an event but a process of accepting change and learning to love.
Talk about change. My sister Joan and I used to regularly lounge around painting our nails red and dissecting my latest man-drama (because, um, there pretty much always is some); now she goes to work, I try to work, and her precious daughter crawls around on the floor. There's a quarter of a century between me and Eleanor. She'll have a whole different story to tell--culturally, politically, just in the every day of her life...wow.
Above, there we are--two totally different generations, just a' rollin' around in a heap on the carpet, giggling.
Fantastic post. I just went to my 10 year reunion for the c/o 2000. It was very... anti-climatic. I think you summed it up well, however, that it's the process of our 20's that really defines us, and my reunion served as a nice period on the end of that realization.
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