Skinny Jeans

The first thing I have to do in order to tell where I fit in terms of cultural, social and technological currency is to determine to what degree my children are giant nerds. They're the obvious point of diachronic reference for me as I compare my own technological and mass-cultural consumption decisions to theirs. After all, I'm a mixed-signal half-analog GenX artifact, as much dead as alive, and these are post-Milennial digital natives who breathe in pixels and exhale spent bandwidth. So if there is a way of existing that's current and vibrant and living at such a speed that it's evolved right out from under me, these are the people to check with.

Unless of course they are themselves unhooked from the zeitgeist, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. Part of the issue is that I have all boys and teenaged boys, if my own experience as both a father and as a recovered one myself, are not among nature's most observant species. I've seen one spend a few minutes looking for shoes he was already wearing. And this is the time of life we've also decided would be ideal to allow them to pilot automobiles. Whatever extortionate rate ole Geico wants to charge me to insure one or all of them, it's never going to be high enough to be unjustified.

So if they are in fact giant nerds (and by that I simply mean un-self-consciously disinterested in the pressures of socialization and the ways in which that affects the choices that structure leisure time),* their value to me as barometers or lodestones or orthopedic footwear (please just choose the metaphor you'd like, I can't decide) is compromised.

I asked them pointedly tonight if they were on any social media in any depth. They rolled their eyes at the idea of facebook, which I expected. Pithy ecards about the dangers of Monday and coffee addiction interspersed with pictures of your cousin's children really have nothing to offer anyone under 60. What surprised me is that Instagram, which I know not at all, and Twitter, which I use to follow but do not participate in, were both similarly shrugged at. These are the things I've heard in media reports are stealing the audience share from the facebook, but is this old news? Is the problem here that the media itself is staffed by never-weres in their lost and useless mid-twenties, and thus themselves blind to the actual youth culture happening below their eye-line?

Or is it that these boys are their father's children, as cutting edge as a spoon handle,** happy to get by on movie trailers and corporate-partner-sourced listicles until the tastemakers introduce to us the things we should have been interested in twenty minutes ago?

I don't know. Maybe they're no help anyway. The youngest is already 11. Somewhere there's a group of nine-year-olds huddled around an iPad running an app that transmits coded messages in the form of complicated smells. And a group of seven-year-olds laughing at them for wasting their time with that fuddy-duddy bullshit.

Eh, I don't know why I'd bother fighting. I'm old enough to remember when MySpace made me feel old. I'm still on Blogger, so there's likely no hope for me anyway.


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*John Hodgman told a story on his podcast about how, when he was a boy, he accepted an invitation to a pool party, only to spend the entire time at this other person's house indoors, in air-conditioned comfort, reading comic books he'd brought in his briefcase while the normals all swam. Just in case you were wondering what that looked like.

**Popularly fashioned into prison shivs as needed, remember