High School Underground: Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

Welcome back, dear reader.

It’s recently come to my attention that my generation embarrasses me. There’s just something about us that seems so, and I’m not sure how to phrase this, but we're downright dumb. I don’t mean that in the crosses-eyes-when-doing-math sense, but rather the over the top way some kids dress and talk. I suppose that comes with each generation, though. The '70s had the feathered hair and classic “groovy” lingo. The '80s had their big hair, leg warmers, and metal music. The '90s had their grunge era with ripped jeans and midriff tank tops and, oh, yeah, me.

Now you want to know what we have? We have guys in too-large T-shirts with jeans down way too low and hats—so many hats. We have girls who dress in ways that makes you wonder if they actually got dressed this morning or if a gust of wind just happened to blow those scraps of cloth onto them. Even I’m not immune to this ridiculous fashion, though I like to think that my pants sag, because they’re hand-me-downs, and I’m built like a string bean, whereas my older brother’s build is more like that of a tree trunk.

Our popular music, that ridiculous excuse that passes for audible sound, is possibly the most embarrassing thing. Most concerts nowadays are all either terrible, because the singer has no talent without auto-tune, or they’re performers as opposed to actual artists. There’s a lot of good music out there, but for some reason, kids prefer to have their ears bombarded with some generic beat and a man spitting words about clubs so fast he may as well be speaking gibberish.

Don’t even get me started on school dances. Movies like Back to the Future and Better Off Dead sent the message that high school dances were fun events with live bands. Maybe that was just in the '80s, because every dance I’ve been to was a DJ with bedazzled headphones and a Mac laptop playing S&M by Rhianna to a sweaty rolling mass of teenagers and their gyrating hips.

There are, however, a few beacons of light in my generation. There are those of us who are not afraid to offer our interpretation of Hamlet's actions in English class—even though the teacher may throw us a dirty look when we let certain inappropriate words slip. There are those who maintain a balance of intelligence without becoming total social outcasts. To you select few reading this, I thank you.

We have new words that crop up so fast, and our new slang can be so confusing, that even I, in the midst of teen activity, have trouble keeping up. Being in Santa Cruz doesn’t help either, because surfer slang is like an entirely different dialect. The best example would be a certain four-letter word that starts with “f," which can be used by my generation for virtually any occasion. Whether it be noun, adjective, verb or adverb, its versatility is endless. Just the other day, a kid announced he was “hungry as f***”.

Which begged the question, how hungry is a f***? I suppose if there’s one thing I can take pride in for my generation, it’s our creativity.