gen x origins

One of the primary reasons I embarked on the bend snap project is my deep, unyielding interest in popular culture. Some of this is just a product of the time and way I grew up. I don’t know that I put a lot of stock in generational distinctions, but there are some markers of Gen X that fit me to a [graphic] T. I was a latchkey kid, and my weekday afternoons were filled with marathon phone sessions with my best friend, The Mary Tyler Moore Show reruns, and any music or fashion magazine I could get my hands on. Like many humans of my age, I’ve grown to have a deep love of popular culture and well-tuned sense of irony. I am so good at sarcasm that it’s hard to tell when I’m being serious. As Darragh McManus put it in The Guardian over twenty years ago,

[W]e're sincere in our insincerity, thus confusing the matter to proportions so Byzantine it couldn't be teased out by an intellectual tag-team of Steven Hawking and King Solomon. … Everything is a pseudo-apathetic pose, a wry jibe, for Generation X; everything we say and do is lacquered with the bitter patina of sarcasm. We're ironic and infantile and don't take anything seriously, and yet we take everything seriously.

It’s this oscillation between irony and earnestness that’s at the essence of so many Gen Xers. I am one of them.

McManus identifies the ironic t-shirt as Gen X’s uniform. Given the choice, I would wear a graphic tee—with a pun or heady joke, the promo photo for a 90s movie, some band—in every imaginable situation. (This one is a current favorite. I wore this one until it fell apart.) As I say on bend snap’s home page, fans wear our hearts on our sleeves and t-shirts.

So here I am now, a dabbler, putting words I like onto things I’d wear (or carry things in or drink out of) and sharing them with others who also might like them.

In the next “behind the screens” post, I’ll share the roots of my new inspirational tayings collection, which is available now in the bend snap shop.