a true thing that happened to me.

[fox]

So I'm curling last night, as I do on Tuesdays. I follow my first shot up, one end, and go back to stand on the boards with my vice, who is in high school. One of us moves in such a way that my broom handle bumps into her leg. I make the immediately obvious crowbar-to-the-knee joke - and only a moment later realize that this child is too young to remember Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. She confirms that she is too young to remember this, but she's heard of it because people keep referring to it; and then, dudes, it turns out that she was born in 1994 and her birthday is in March, meaning my vice-skip is younger than the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan affair.

I haven't felt so old since my students didn't know Paula Abdul had ever been a singer.

Comments

[jae]

Every year I have students in upper-level courses--German majors--who intellectually know that the Nazi regime and the East German regime were two different things, but they keep mixing them up because to them those are just two different bad things that happened in Germany before they were born.

-J

[fox]

Indeed. It's Rob Roy vs. Braveheart - yes, yes, two films released in the same year about the heroic Scots resisting the damned English, but five hundred years apart. Oy.

[jae]

Yeah, but in this case it's more facepalmy because it's the difference between something that happened before their professor's parents were born and something she personally experienced! *g*

-J

[fox]

Yes. When your own life is "history". Aiee.