Perhaps it's a sign that I really am getting on in years when I find myself taking umbrage at things my young colleagues have written. Forget the fact that I'm regularly picking up grammatical mistakes and mis-spellings of such things as suburb names and well-known people. That irks me as much as I'm sure it does you, learned reader.
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No, what's rattled my Gen X sensibilities this week is when the young things start declaring that something is the best, or the biggest, or is agenda-setting, without acknowledging the world actually existed before the year 2000.
Maybe I'm in a mood because of the Australian Lamb ad. Let's diss the whole of Gen X by just giving them two (incomplete) lines in the whole ad. Maybe no one does pay attention to us, but that will be their downfall.
If you're still reading ...
I didn't want to come across as a Boomer (born in 1966, I sometimes identify as being on the cusp of Boomerism - yes I'm often told my phone light is on) so I ran this story past my Millennial colleague Amy Martin who authored a piece about Mean Girls earlier in the week just to let her know to not take anything personally.
The original Mean Girls came out in 2004, 20 years ago. I didn't watch it then, too busy wrangling toddlers and babies and being a working mother. Who had time to watch a movie? Because that's what we had to do back then, plan a night out at the cinema.
I think I watched it at some point when my daughter was old enough to watch it. It was OK.
But when Amy said in her story that "it was the first film to set up the high school cliques and more so, the characters, the way that it did" I marched over to her desk and waggled a middle-aged finger at her.
There have been "mean girls" in high school movies since Rizzo mocked Sandy when she turned up at Rydell High in Grease in 1978. "She looks too pure to be pink," Rizzo says. Rachel McAdams has nothing on Stockard Channing. On Wednesday we wear pink? The Pink Ladies wore it everyday.
And not just Grease. The high-school movie which captured my entire generation (and by saying that I've probably debunked my whole theory) was The Breakfast Club.
This 1985 John Hughes classic had characters that represented the cliques - the popular girl, the athlete, the nerd, the weirdo, the rebel. Like Amy said, this film came at a time when many of us were living out our own version of high school drama. 1985 was my first year at university (where there were still cliques), just where did I fit in? (For the record, somewhere between popular girl and nerd, a dash of athlete maybe.)
Not only did The Breakfast Club bring together the five most iconic actors who were our age - Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez - it gave us the Simple Minds' track Don't You Forget About Me.
Think Sixteen Candles (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), the highly underrated She's Having a Baby (1988, not a high-school movie but one of Hughes' best).
Back then we thought Hughes was the father figure who understood us. It was interesting to read Molly Ringwald's recollections in a New Yorker essay in 2018 in which she spoke about the complicated elements of those films when they were viewed through a #metoo lens.
"John's movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teenagers experience," she wrote.
"Whether that's enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say - even criticising them makes me feel like I'm divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career. And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet ..."
But enough being mean about Mean Girls.
I also took exception to a story Melanie Dinjaski wrote for the sports section. A big six at Manuka, was it the biggest? I'm pretty sure I saw some bigger ones during my time as the Times' cricket reporter.
I think I've become one of those people who go to sports matches with a good dose of "back in the day" in my back pocket.
I was twittering around on X the other day and someone posed the question "Who is on your Mount Rushmore of rugby league players?" There were a lot of mentions of players such as Cooper Cronk, Billy Slater, Cameron Smith ... my four were Mick Cronin, Nathan Hindmarsh, Steve Rogers and St George legend Craig Young.
Sport's impossible to compare across generations but we all love to do it.
Perhaps this is the generation gap that's impossible to close.
I've covered a few things here at The Canberra Times over the years, from sport to education. But now I get to write about the fun stuff - where to eat, what to do, places to go, people to see. Let me know about your favourite things. Email: karen.hardy@canberratimes.com.au
I've covered a few things here at The Canberra Times over the years, from sport to education. But now I get to write about the fun stuff - where to eat, what to do, places to go, people to see. Let me know about your favourite things. Email: karen.hardy@canberratimes.com.au
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