N obody loves Les Millennials more than I, but I’m getting seriously weary of them. Also, I have to constantly spellcheck how many L’s and N’s there are in “millennial” proves I am failing with age, so annoying. Let’s just call them “Generation Entitled Bratz,” which would be more fitting, I think sometimes, and then I shut my pie hole because they are our future and I don’t want to be one of those old people who say “in my day” when “my day” wasn’t so long ago in the context of modern history. Seems like just yesterday that I blossomed into puberty at age 14 and eventually bloomed into the beautiful cactus flower I am now. I can even remember my first tampon, it was made out of balled up synthetic Santa beard material with one of those sharp whale bone applicators that you had to worry about your fertility each time you used them, and then to be warned in the early 1980s about toxic shock but not so worried you would ever go back to a bulky-ass belted pad that would give you a big, bulging camel tongue in those high-waisted denim flares, remember those, my old bitches? Oy, so wish we had Diva Cups back then, could have gone swimming in a white bikini AND gotten eaten out by the pool boy and no one would be the wiser.
When I’m fraternizing with Les Millz, I borrow their lingo. I don’t let them know that technically speaking, born in 1963, I’m the flying flea escaping the tail end of Baby Boomers, as I was way too young for all the cool LSD trips and groovy hippie festivals. But! I am loath to pretend to be a Generation X because I don’t get the appeal of honky “rap” that is the Beastie Boys AT ALL. I grew up losing my virginity and trying to grasp my sense of adult self whilst enjoying the musical stylings of The Talking Heads, The Cure, and The Smiths. I enjoyed the 90s and the early aughts of Quentin Tarrantino’s heyday until I went into a pop culture coma at some point after they cancelled the O.C. I missed many things and now I do not know who Ariana Grande is from Rita Ora and why is Taylor Swift even famous? Got reborn just recently because there are so many places to get ramen noodles these days, why slip away now. I can Instagram my noodles. I’m Generation Whatevs LOLCats, and if you’re reading this, you probably are too. Here in da clerb, we are all fam. Right? Don’t worry, my children, I would never say that phrase out loud EVER (maybe never).
I gave birth to two of these millians (that’s grammatically cool, right?) and they and all their friends are loads of fun to be around. The millians, also technically known as Generation Y according to Wikipedia are born in the 1980 to the early 2000s so most of them are Of Age now. Fair game, yo. As you know from reading this blog, I am unapologetic that I like to swipe right on “mature” millians (and sometimes their younger brothers) on Tinder so I have a range of millennial insight and understanding in the way their minds work. But! I’m still an interloper. There are so many things I admire because young people are awesome in their enthusiastic view of the world. However! Some things not so much.
For example, the old timey baby boomers who are bosses of big companies are enamoured to the point of worship with the millennials, “Let’s hire them! They can do things on the computers that we can’t!” And true, many of them are Aspergery as a product of old man’s overripe sperm (pssssst: millians’ parents are Baby Boomers! Mick Jagger is still spreading seed! Gross! Stop! Don’t get me started on this topic, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should). The hippie generation call their millian spawn “Indigo children” because of their otherworldly “blue aura” which is whatever, eye roll, I don’t judge but *whispers* autism spectrum, most likely. It’s cool though, we need hyper focussed people in society, nothing is more fun for them than cracking binary code. They are precious children who we love even though they can’t let the peas touch the carrots otherwise armageddon and a Big Pharma Ritalin situation ensues.
But the rest of them are just faking it. Geniuses they are not. Sure, they’re nimble with their fingers on their iPhones, all whip doodly, tap, tap, getting their Uber in seconds whilst my ancient gnarly hands try and fish in my purse to get my lipstick but all I can find is a broken tampon that I don’t even need under any type of moon configuration ever again. Tappity tap tap tap, they go, look at me with a puppy filter over my face lol. Jesus Snap-fucking-chat Christ. Why are you doing this?They’re as clueless as the rest of us. “Oh they’re so good at social media!” says Kevin O’Leary, that Canadian Trump wannabe from “Shark Tank.” Are they, Kevin, really? Can these youngsters even spell, let alone construct a sentence? Look up at that conversation I had with that young dude who was half-assedly trying to fulfill his bucket list. He couldn’t even say hi, he just sent me a question mark. I was so annoyed, I trolled him, I don’t feel bad about it at all, my haters. Then he disappeared without a fight. How un-hot. And he’s not a special unicorn or anything whose disappearance makes him seem magical, he’s a common insect. Here’s a typical conversation I have on a dating website on a daily basis:
He (at 9:04 am): Sup
Me, looking the dude’s profile pic over while I start my car and put it into reverse then put my phone down like a responsible driver and to go to (shhhhhhhhhhhh) McDonalds for the (shhhhhhhhhhhhh) breakfast Mc (shhhhhhhhhhh)Muffin where I eat it (shhhhhhhhhhhh) in two inhales in my car. This is the best moment of my day, by the way, and my guiltiest pleasure. I will proudly publicly talk about my ability to squirt now but this McSecret I am confessing is with the greatest of shame. I get the McMuffin with the sausage (shhhhhhh). Anyway, I click back on the dude’s profile to possibly respond and I have already gotten this:
He (at 9;20 am): I guess not lol.
I GUESS NOT LOL.
I have not even had the chance to say “Whatsup” with an eggplant for a question mark back and I have already been dismissed.
Older men of any other generation, be it this lot: X, Flea, Boomer, or even a World War 2 war vets, do not say “I guess not lol.” They sit and wait like gentleman. If you don’t respond to their first cockadoodledoo, they don’t take it personally, they keep you on a back burner while they fry a hot little egg on a front burner. They don’t care, they have all the patience in the world because they know meat is better when you brine it off to the side.
My mama just told me a cute story about how she started dating my dad. It was just after the war (WW2, the big one) She was working in a diner and he used to come in and order waffles. He always wore his uniform and was shy and quiet in contrast to my mother’s chatty nature. Ugh, this dude, she thought, why do I have to do all the work here? Hinting and making her interest known like a lady. Finally he asked her to the Saturday night dance and she hesitantly said yes but! She would meet him around the corner from the dance hall. Her fear was that because he was a farmer from the rural part of Manitoba, he would be dressed like a hick and she would stuck with him. So she approached him the other side of the street. If he looked like a hillbilly, she could bolt. But! When she saw him that night, he was wearing a suit and looked super handsome (“He had such a baby face!” I’m a sucker for those too, mama) and so she crossed the street. If these two young peeps in the late 1940s were living by modern times mating rituals, my dad would have sensed her apprehension, shrugged and said, probably under his breath because there was no Internet back then:”I guess not, 23 skidoo.”
And I wouldn’t have be born! And my mother would have tried to make it work out with her boy “friend” who hung out at the bathhouse at night and chased her because he liked the way she walked. “We didn’t know they were gay back then.” She might have had little beard babies. And I wouldn’t have been born! That’s so sad to think about.
As for the millennials in the work place, they seem to have the life span of those shadflies that crash and burn on your car in the spring when you’re driving near lakes and rivers. They move from job to job, they get bored easily, decide to travel and when they come back maybe apply to grad school but then decide it’s too expensive, so they get another job again where they splat again on the windshield. And then replaced by the same thing. Their value might be a little over-rated and maybe there should be a little more age diversity considered when hiring people is all I’m trying to say. I’ve been keeping track of this one particular “young and hip” digital marketing company that posts regularly on the job boards for various positions, that I have been ignored for of course, and what’s interesting is to read the ratings and comments. Nobody gives them more than one star out of 5 and the comments are “run by kindergartners (sic)” “working here is like being in The Lord of Flies. Unorganized anarchy” and on and on. Job boards are my porn and this particular company is my Sasha Grey, a great big anal prolapse waiting to happen.
Millians, I have noticed, are more sophisticated then any other generation before them. Their first apartments are in downtown highrises with recessed lighting and granite counters. They’ve done things like eaten raw oysters and visited Iceland that the rest of us took our sweet time doing or haven’t done at all. In the olden days we used to go to “bases” when we dated. Not sure what base was which but a home run was basic starfish missionary for sure. Millians are playing baseball, football, and ancient Greek wrestling all in one night.
They also drink high end liquor. This is what I can’t ever wrap my mind around. They do the pre-drinking at home, yes, that’s what my fellow fleas did back in the 80s, smart hockey, so then you can ride your drunk while nursing a beer at the mosh pit. My mama told me at that Saturday night dance, they used to smuggle in a mickey of gin and pour it into an Orange Crush, even smarter hockey. But these little bitches go to the clerb and order bottle service!!!! What? Another thing, they drink the Grey Goose or Belvedere vodka and they mix it with Diet Coke!!! Are you kidding me. High end vodka, aside from being over-rated and eventually very expensive piss, needs to be sipped with a twist lemon on ice, and shitty regular ass vodka can be mixed with anything clear, soda or tonic, or a citrus or cranberry juice. But Diet Coke??? They probably dump their Hennessy in that shit too. This makes me cry real tears.
Millennial girls have been getting their nails professionally done since they were toddlers. I was pushing forty when I had my first pedicure but these young women are put together by a team of professionals like those bitches on Downton Abbey. One thing about every older generation will balk about is how the younger ones do their eyebrows. Girls of my generation used to pluck their brows with tweezers to a millimetre of their lives so that some never grew back. Our mothers, with their penciled-in Joan Crawford eyebrows, would yell at us. Thankfully I was never that stupid as my natural brows were my thing although occasionally I hear voices and shave them off completely but that’s another story. But what is happening with the millian eyebrows? They need mulitiple tools and 5 different products to craft those disturbing airbrushed looking caterpillars that they post on youtube.
Millians have coined the cute term “adulting.” Like when they do something on their own that seems grown up, they will post it on social media and say something like “Look at me adulting!” It’s a selfie of them at a farmers’ market holding up a bunch of kale. That kale is their storming Normandy and needs to be documented with a hundred hashtags and monitored by how many likes by their hundreds of followers. How does one unremarkable shadfly of a human being get so many followers I will never know, but there you go.
This is a good thing though ultimately. I think millians are way better at making food choices and when they Instagram their meals, it raises the bar a little. I am going have a kale smoothie one day too. Hahahahahahaha, not! Unless it’s called McKale and it has sausage in it lol. #eatlikeshit