My underrepresented generation

Perhaps it's just me and my terrible circumstances, but I feel underrepresented.

I'm nineteen years old. Normally, people my age should be in their third year in college, but instead I'm now working for, well, either an American website or an outsourcing company. I went straight to kindergarten during my pre-school years, and to make things hastier, I studied in a school where three-year courses is the norm. My contemporaries aren't surprised, thankfully, but you can say they've gotten used to it.

The same goes with the family. It's a given that I'm the only nineteen-year-old on my mother's side, since I'm my maternal grandparents' first grandchild. Their second is my sister, since my mother's the eldest. On my father's side, though, I'm the only nineteen-year-old, surrounded with cousins who seem to always relate to each other despite the age; my eighteen-year-old sister shares complicated stories with two other cousins who are of the same age. Family reunions always leave me bewildered.

Even worse, I couldn't really relate to anything. The people I grew up watching on television were either older or younger than me. I was watching Sineskwela when it launched and immediately figured that the young cast is older than me; even the fact that Huey was at Math Tinik didn't matter, since he is a year older than I am. As for those who made an impact when I was more aware of the world, well, Shaina Magdayao is younger than me. And does anybody remember Serena Dalrymple?

This shouldn't really bother me; it just struck me one time, when I was still going to DLSU before graduation finally happened. Thanks to the ubiquity of glutathione supplements, the number of celebrities who endorse them have ballooned too. There's this one unfamiliar brand with a billboard along Las Piñas, and yet it has a familiar endorser - Agatha Tapan, who you might know as the young girl in Bayani. Yep, she's older than me, when I thought shows like hers would cater to me. So, where did my generation go?

It isn't really frustrating, but when I was young, it somehow ended up occupying my thoughts. Perhaps the twelve-year-olds in 2001 decided to do something else, rather than take over the world, which meant I felt alone in a world I cared about the most. Don't forget, also, that I was accelerated - my classmates, who didn't get intervention of that kind, are usually older than me. High school was that way, especially if you consider the complicated miscellany, and the result - me talking up to older people. I don't really know if I ended up mature that way, because people said that I wasn't when I should've.

Now, I'm a 19-year-old who's yet to figure out how much his first paycheck's worth. I still watch television, still wondering where the people my age have gone, with older folks like Camille Pratts getting pregnant, and younger folks like Rhian Ramos getting so much attention. Eventually, though, age becomes irrelevant, considering that the things you have in common will eventually define you - what I studied, what I like to watch, what I like in girls, whatever, whatnot. Perhaps it's not with whether you've spent time around older people, but it's with whether you understand things or not. Imagine, say, my friends who are technically younger than me - Sars, Les, Kevin, you get the drill.

Then again, it still feels weird being stuck in some sort of age warp. I have daily conversations with a 13-year-old, conversations about love with a 26-year-old, a crush on someone who's older by half a year, and a promised script reading from... how old is Zet again?

Or, perhaps, I just drifted on the wrong side of the spectrum. I've always been the rebel...

And your responses...

you know they say age doesn't matter when it comes to love. i think that doesn't only apply to that. you're lucky to be surrounded with people of different age brackets. hehe.

Blogger Antonette7/20/2008     

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