The High School Prom

If you're a guy, hopefully the man upstairs helped you the month before the high school prom, or whatever else it may have been called (in my school, the underclassmen prom was called the "winter formal" -- different name, same pressure, except you're a freshman and still counting pubes).

So where is this pressure coming from? First, from your other duder friends. They're freshmen at that point, too--and, in retrospect, they don't know shit. But in reality, they're still at an age where the information they're absorbing comes from their Baby Boomer dads and moms and the one guy at school who has an older brother who tells stories.

It's a no-brainer that the stereotypical high school prom didn't happen until the 1950s--we all saw "Grease" and "Back to the Future," and we know those prom-induced boy-ask-girl restrictions continue into adulthood. Gender equality and the high school prom are inherent contradictions. Why spend 12 years teaching children that they're all exactly the same, only to throw in "prom king" and "prom queen" at the end of it all?

This is the paradox of the Baby Boomers: they tried to reject society's conventions and then they instituted many of those same conventions when they grew up. Stop imposing antiquated roles justifying your own childhood while at the same time demanding gender equality. I don't want to ask this girl out. The only thing I know about this chick is that she has chemistry third period. If I liked her I would have asked her to the movies months ago.

In the end, what does the guy get out of putting his tiny balls on the line and playing some gendered part that hopefully involves underage drinking? An awkward slow dance and pathetically late discovery that the girl you just spent an emotionally-charged month around likes some random dude that you didn't even know that she knew. It just gets worse as you get older, but at age 15 it's just plain ridiculous.

Coming May 2020: The 5th grade Spring Fling! Everybody gets laid!

Walkathons

If someone from 1950 could fast-forward themselves in time, one of the aspects of modern-life that would confound them is the bizarre convergence of charity and physical exercise.

Thanks to the Baby Boomers, the most charitable act in America today (beyond writing a check) is the -athon.

Charity alone is meaningless when you've grown up believing that you are God's gift to the earth, that you are the most "adventurous, daring, risk-taking, compassionate, focused and purposeful" generation since Adam and Eve, as this Baby Boomer Blogger believes. And because Baby Boomers can't participate in a charitable activity without some kind of me-me-me-me-me self-improvement function (i.e., trimming the waistline), we are left with the Walkathon, Bikeathon, Charity 5K, Challenge Run, Skip Around the Block for Diabetes, etc.

What a lazy, selfish, pathetic, geeky way of helping other people. How many emails do you get from a Baby Boomer each week asking you to personally join them in volunteering at a local soup kitchen? Is it between zero and zero? And yet how many Baby Boomers at the office, through email and at family dinners, hit you up for $5-a-mile so you "sponsor" them on some stupid early morning walk that ties up traffic.

Instead of using those four hours walking the highway in your track suit, how about doing some pro bono work at your law firm to help an impoverished family? How about reading a book that gives you some insight into the ways global poverty and genocide can begin to be extinguished? How about writing a letter to a congressman about increased funding for disease research?

Asking me to put my credit card number into a walkathon web site is flat-out lazy. I hope you sprain an ankle.

Misuse Of Email

Email is not difficult. Learn how to use it. You figured out the calculator and A/C on a car, so please figure this one out. Email is our generation's medium, so stop using our creation on your own terms and infecting the greatest invention of our lifetime with your retarded tactics. Baby Boomers love to make inroads into our culture, and then try to distort it.

Invent your own communication system where you can treat your own like shit, for crying out loud. Maybe a delivery fleet of Chevy Suburbans that run people over and shoot out Post-Its all over the road that say things like "You should roll that over into your 401K."

A few rules:

1) Email is free. Stop paying for that AOL account AND the service provider. Idiots.

2) Can you imagine grandma not responding to a phone message you've left? No, of course not. Grandmas always fucking respond. In fact, they respond even if you didn't leave a message. Baby Boomers don't respond within the customary 24-hour limit because they think email is a cool new hobby rather than an ideal efficient form of communication, so they'll just talk to you later on the phone.

3) If you send me another FWD: I'm going to take my own life.

4) STOP SENDING ME EMAILS WHERE I HAVE TO SCROLL THROUGH NAMES AFTER NAMES OF PEOPLE! START USING BCC!

5) Those videos as attachments on emails? It's called YouTube. AOL Search that shit.

Gated Communities

Has there ever been a falser sense of security than the gated community? Who are you keeping out? Who are you keeping in? And why must Baby Boomers, the children of the civil rights movement, insist on an economic segregation that is often just code for racial and ethnic segregation?

When I think of gated communities, I think of telling the 80-year-old security guard the last name of somebody I know who knows somebody I know and yelling "sucker!" out the window as the rear bumper blows past the millimeter-thick piece of balsa wood (which in fact poses more of a threat to the residents' S-Class hoods than actual home robbers).

Do you actually think that if I was into raping rich, white teenage girls that I wouldn't just jump the five-foot faux-brick wall and walk through the never-locked side door at three in the morning?

Interestingly enough, gated communities are usually located in the safest possible suburban areas. So if it isn't the thieving scumbags you're worried about, what is it then? The just-as-false sense of self-satisfaction that you're living in a neighborhood filled with 55-year-olds that have the same steady income that you have? People that share the same virtues of hard work and family values?

Well, I hate to break it to you--but that guy across the street who gets home around 8 p.m. every night sells stolen cars and cheats on his wife.

And that other guy around the corner who's always home and has a boy the same age as your son got his money from his father's furniture store (est. 1930) and he stays up late every night doing coke and watching "American Chopper" while his wife's passed out on Xanax.

Not that he really rides a hog, but how cool would that be? Man, "Easy Rider" was a great movie.

Tom Brokaw

As the wheels went off the last presidential debate, and as neither candidate even gave the pretense of answering questions, we had an opportunity to see Tom Brokaw for the empty suit, faux average-Joe-American that he actually is.

Brokaw was the debate moderator (even though he is technically no longer even a working journalist). He is stuck in that brief period of American history when TV commentators were actually a part of Americans' lives, and he is desperate to be remembered as one of the legends: Murrow, Cronkite...ehem...Brokaw.

Brokaw loves to sum up the garsh-darn nature of American society, and his book about Baby Boomers, nauseatingly called "Boom!", did just that: "The heady, sweet aroma of marijuana frequently permeated the air. As thick as the smoke were the four-letter words that suddenly were everywhere."

Yes! The Baby Boomers invented getting fucked up, and curse words?!? Are you sure?

And is it at all relevant that marijuana today is more prevalent, more legal and more potent than it was when The Beatles discovered it at Woodstock in 1969? In case you didn't know, every rock n roll moment worth mentioning occurred at Woodstock. What? You weren't there?! Oh, it was crazy. But that's just how it was back then.

In any case, Brokaw was clearly not listening to a single answer Barry or Mac were giving. He's too busy concocting his scheme for the takeover of "Meet The Press". Ever heard of a follow-up, Brokaw? Or how about maybe holding the candidates' feet to the fire and making them answer a question directly instead of letting them recite their stump speeches? Is this a debate or an episode of "Hee Haw"?

At the end, when the candidates accidentally walked in front of the camera, Brokaw's swashbuckling baritone cut out mid-syllable, rendering him speechless.

"Uh, you're in the way of my teleprompter," he said.

The words he missed? "Thank you for joining us, Americannsh." God-forbid this phony had to actually think on his own for a half-a-second. Goodnight America's lamest generation.