Oh Snap!…it’s A New Buzzword: Chapathetic

Portland | Tyler Benson

“The Generational Gap” is such a horrible and clichéd tangent to rant about, but hearing the words prate off my own lips brought me back to when it was such a growing pain of an experience.  If born into the peak of Generation X one would most likely embody the excess of 80’s apathy and vanity while recollecting memories of snorting in the boy’s room, complaining how hard it was to be a pretty person with problems and vowing to remain 18 till you died.  A young-buck born into the Generation Y juggernaut may have upper-management written all over them.  They buy into the hype, try to sell society on the hype, take the money they sold the hype for and make it rain at a strip club later that evening.  Every generation tries to be less like the preceding while thinking very little of the generation following it…human nature is shallow, but never as black and white as its X & Y labels.

What happens in the middle of all this…the generational gap?  Thousands of children born at a stitch in time where mixed messages are the only ones being passed.  We were born on a bridge connecting X-apathy to Y-smarmy; two pieces of land on an ever tectonic plate shift.  We had 1 of 3 options:  1) We could run to apathy, become jaded towards society, eventually open a myspace account with a profile pic displaying our distaste for the social network, move to the Northwest and take a job offering poor customer service in order to sublimate emotions for a poetry career only to later in life, much as our Gen-X peers did, give up on the dream and settle down into that account exec role in order to have weekends free with the kid.  Stepping backward a generation happens far less frequently than …2) We could run to smarmy, flip a couple of houses, sell a couple computer programs, open a myspace account with a profile pic displaying ourselves holding a beer and/or bosomy blonde and eventually move to the Pearl District where, with shit eating grin, we shit on all the people we think we’re better than and continue to wax uninteresting about investments made or chicks our sexual prowess has boinked.  3) We could stay on the bridge, absorb and observe every pro/con allowed to us from both sides, become inspired by Gen X’s cynical wiles and Gen Y’s promotional appeal, become equally as nauseated by Gen X’s morose outlook and Gen Y’s morose conceit, understand each opinion silently and open a myspace page trying to combine the aforementioned profile pic scenarios.  We know how to remain unimpressed for all of the right reasons and sell that detachment without a marketing plan.  We know how to critique a situation at face value then reflect it in a manner that makes us sound like more than spoiled children.  It’s a perfect mixture.  It’s not apathetic.  It’s not charismatic.  It’s…”Oh Snap!…It’s A New Buzzword: Chapathetic”

In 1st grade, I was due for my very first “Show & Tell”.  I was placed in a triad presentation schedule with Popular-kid, sporting his full bodied shelf haircut, cargo pocketed jeans and model straight teeth, and Weird-kid, who somehow got a blue geode stuck up his nose.   Popular-kid went first and presented an action figure of a turtle that had apparently mastered the art of karate.  This turtle was decked out in swashbuckler’s mask and adorned a belt upon which rested ninja nunchucks.  I assure you that this showcase was roughly 1 calendar year before retail stores stocked their shelves with Ninja Turtles, and later came to understand that his mom was some sort of Japanese exchange student program worker who was given the toy as a gift.  Popular-kid didn’t say much in regard to his Turtle…he just sort of smiled, looked popular and unintentionally filled out the first request on every little boy’s “X-mas Wish List” that day.  The girls simply remained enamored of his popular-kid assets (see above).

For my “Tell”, I mumbled my way through a tale of how the sticker I adorned over my heart came to be relevant. The sticker read, “Don’t get too chompy” and featured a shark flashing his pearly whites.  So the story goes, the day previous I was having dental work done in which they yanked both of my baby carnivore teeth.  Doc Toothy plopped a couple stickers into my hand for being such a good patient, one of them being the shark sticker.

This was my very first experience with Novocain, and it was an experience that nobody really set properly the ground rules for me.  Novocain is going to numb your mouth and make everything that you chew feel like a bouncing tennis ball.  Fun, right?  When the thing you chew happens to be part of your body the experience gets a little more intense, like you are the tennis ball being bounced.  Funner, right?  When the part of your body you decide to chew happens to also be a part that was anesthetized (ie; a bottom lip), the feeling’s stakes are raised to the hallucinogenic drug euphoria of being a tennis ball that is bounced off another tennis ball at some ridiculous speed.  Funnest, right?  So here I was, one episode of Major Dad deep into chewing my lip like beef jerky and my mom walks into the room screaming and toweling my face with a soaking rag.  Apparently, from the looks of the rag, I had about gnawed off my entire lip with the amount of blood being wiped away.  Remedied with Neosporin, more damp rags and a mother’s TLC, I awoke in the morning with a lip the size of a catfish covered in red and white, blood and puss respectively.  So my story went…went upon the deaf ears of a classroom dense with Turtle envy and/or detoured by my Bushman’s lip.

The third participant in our trifecta, Weird-kid, was missing on account of a sick day.  Upon later befriendment of Weird-kid and during a nonchalant rehash of the above “Show & Tell”, he explained how he couldn’t find anything worthy to show that day.  To paraphrase with words he hadn’t used, he threw a hissy and refused to be the laughing stock of a 1st grade right of passage.

In front of 1st grade eyes, without us realizing it, the generation’s gap was revealed.  A gap that raised us all on television nuggets of creativity bred from 70’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” acid flashbacks, reared in the 80’s methodology of curt cynicism towards bullshitters while passive aggressively-fighting for your right to party, and later told that being a grown up is collaborating with a formerly discouraged counter-culture that was transformed into not just a niche market, but rather the entire market by the silver tongued, Hot Topic as a mall’s staple, “come on, Unique-Snowflakes, watch the Ally McBeal’ baby dance around” 90’s.

Which side would we waver towards when life’s first challenge came?  Would we dazzle the in-crowd with a revolution du jour, would we gripe and become no shows with the out-crowd or would we offer up much ado about nothing anecdotes to no-crowd in particular?  Being 7 years old I was not intentionally delightful or gruff during this portion of life; simply doing what my mother told me. While the above story is beyond a doubt interesting, its message is not as important as the current analysis of it.  Reflection, understanding, abstaining from knee-jerk reactions and band-wagon jumps; these should be traits on par with happy and healthy.  With head’s full of jumbled messages the less traveled middle-road will be hard for the generationally gapped.  It may seem your best interest to hop in with a status quo and repress an entire childhood of experience or an entire future of knowledge.  Best interest advice?: reflect, understand, abstain.  It may not carry the heat of sexy advice like, “Hump until you get AIDS” or “Don’t fill up on bread”, but sometimes the best counsel comes from obscure revelations.  Of course, there are pitfalls.  Hanging around the gap and taking a majority of Gen-X & Y’s quirks on the chin doesn’t get you at all laid, but it allows you time to create.  Let’s use an example like…um, er… writing…a…um…let’s say a column.  And at the end of this column you’ve afforded yourself to say things like, “Well…now I got that out of my system” and then move onto topics unlike so-and-so again.  (Oh, Tyler…what a “chapathetic” ending.)