Several of us are Generation X. Some of us are even conscious of the fact that we're generation X. A few of us can even opine on what Generation X is, was and shall be - and when we squint just right and purse our lips we can even do it from a position of "we're not necessarily better than you, just older."

If you'd like to see where most of this bullshit comes from, it's Strauss-Howe Generational Theory which is basically history-as-Kabbalah. Strauss and Howe called us "thirteeners" about two weeks before Douglas Coupland called us "Generation X." Strauss and Howe, by the way, are the ones who saddled you with "millennial." The paradigms within are amusing and about as true as most horoscopes; S&H figure there have been six "saeculums" in the history of the US (which they trace back to like 1500 or some shit) and they've only been wrong twice. Those two points being the two most recent. So take it with a salt lick. But also keep in mind that people who should know better follow these idiots like a thirsty mule.

Here's the thing: There are lots of Boomers. There are lots of Millennials. There were comparatively few Silents; they gave birth to comparatively few GenX. And, as is appropriate, the Boomers heaped massive piles of scorn upon Generation X until we invented the Internet, took the Nasdaq to 5,000 and in the space of a few short years shifted the Boomers from "masters of the universe" to "aging demographic that will bankrupt Social Security." Boomers got rich buying GenX stocks; GenX transformed their workplace, their entertainment and their culture into something unrecognizable.

Let's say you were born in '58. Here it is, '93 and you're 35 years old. You rent VHS from Blockbuster, have a home and a work phone, watch HBO and Cinemax (maybe), and type on a computer that probably doesn't have a GUI. Sales are announced in the newspaper, which you read every morning, and all shopping centers around the Mall. You and all your friends listen to the same music because you hear it on the radio or see it on MTV and TV is a place of actors and variety shows.

Now it's 2003. You're 45 years old. You get red Netflix envelopes in the mail, have at least a RAZR (and possibly a Blackberry or Windows phone), rarely watch television and type on a computer that is literally connected to the Universe.

You buy everything from Amazon, music has balkanized into a million subgenres nobody knows because of Napster, you've been through American Idol, Big Brother, The Real World, The Amazing Race and even The Joe Schmo Show and fucking Steve Jobs is trying to convince you to put all your vinyl on this fucking thing.

And if you were born in '58, that shit mostly happened to you. And if you were born in '88, that shit was the lay of the fucking land that you grew up with and it's second fucking nature.

And it was mostly built by Generation X.

Obviously, this is a generalization. Steve Jobs? Boomer. Bill Gates? Boomer. Generation X didn't invent computers, Generation X made them ubiquitous and changed the economy to reflect that. So the Boomer journalists tend to be on one side of that divide, not eager to talk about how out of touch they are with the people who actually control the economy now. Millennial journalists live in a world created largely by GenX and didn't much interact with the folx that weren't their parents' age but also weren't theirs.

And Generation X has never really rallied around our identity at all. I mean, we got Reality Bites, we got Singles, we got the ouvre of John Hughes. But half of our childhood was claimed by Boomers and half of our adulthood has been claimed by Millennials so once the dotcom boom and bust shut boomers up forever, the press has been blissfully disinterested in us as a generation.

My perspective, anyway.