Generational

I don't like to admit it, but technically, I'm a millennial. Generation Y, if you will. The early end of it, but still, by most accounts, in the range.

I think the biggest reason I have trouble associating myself with the generation I was born during is because I didn't have helicopter parents. I was allowed to become my own person, and although I grew up close to my family, I talk to my mom maybe once a week. I'm sure if we lived closer, we'd spend more time together - I have fun parents and siblings - but given the distance and my problems with telephones (one of those random phobias), we don't talk daily. (Unless we're logged into World of Warcraft at the same time. Yeah, everyone but my dad plays.)

I got married when I was 20. I moved out of state - not away to college, but away - when I was 19. I'm not sure I ever actually told my parents that I was transferring colleges and moving in with my then-fiance (now husband); I just kind of... did. Once I met him and fell in love, all my future planning became "us" and not in the context of my up-to-then nuclear family. Looking back it was a huge shift in how I thought, but at the time I didn't even realize it had happened.

I'm not a group-work person. I work okay in a group, but I don't naturally gravitate to them. (This is to me somewhat ironic - I am a solo-player by nature, perfectly content to do my own thing and observe the world around me, and then my husband gets me into a guild in WoW and, four years later, I'm running it.) It does make mingling kind of difficult - I'm a listener and observer by nature. Small talk (and eye contact) don't come naturally to me. (And no, Mom, I don't think I have Asperger's, I'm just one of those introverts who spends more time analyzing than experimenting in the social realm.)

Multi-tasking - oh, yeah. I have nine windows and/or tabs open right now. Normally there would be more, but I'm not on my own computer. But I'm very easily distracted by loud noises or flashing colors, and I can't write a paper with music playing. I turn off all the screen-edge flash kind of visual warnings in WoW, because they distract me. Busy webpages bother me. I have six icons on my desktop at home (and the background picture is, as it has been for about ten years, the front cover of Dark Side of the Moon).

Web 2.0 stuff I'm kind of hit or miss on - I'm on Facebook, I have a couple Twitter accounts (it seems like the WoW-related one is the one I'm most likely to use), I sporadically blog. But being an introvert, the whole social part of social networking doesn't quite click for me. I sign up, and then... I mostly read what other people post. Web 1.0 I got into more - a couple web pages, way too many Gmail accounts. Oh, yeah... and then there's WoW.

But the younger people in this millennial generation - the ones who don't understand the original Star Wars, who don't get the references from Wrath of Khan, who just don't know about the pop culture I know best... (Yeah, so, I was born in 1980, and somehow missed out on most of Michael Jackson's post-"Jackson 5" music - still haven't figured out how I managed that.) Since my parents were in high school and college in the 70s, that's the era's music that I grew up with... sort of. When I was in 6th grade I got my first radio. I listened to two stations - the oldies staion (50s/60s/70s rock) and the classical station (classical & NPR). Yeah. I didn't really discover 80s rock until I was 19 or so. (Like... U2. How did I not know U2?)

The long and short of it is that despite being born in the bounds of the millennial generation, I don't feel like I fit into all these stereotypes I see pushed as a librarian on a college campus. "Millennials learn like this, socialize like this, etc." None of them ever seem to apply to me. The technology stuff, sure, but between the learning types (face it, lecture with note-taking works for me) and the pop culture differences, I just feel out of place.