Last night, when I returned home from school, our nanny gave me the update on her weekend. She had been set up on a blind date. For some context, our babysitter is 14 years younger than me. I am 34 years old, and she is 20 (just in case you can’t do the math). After hearing the nostalgic narrative of dating (and predictably being “grateful that I had already lived that segment of my life”), I asked her what he looks like. She then proceeded to look at me with a tentative, unconfident, sure-I-would-have-no-point-of-reference look and said, “Do you know what MySpace is? I can show you his picture there.”

At this moment, I could have simply said “yes.” But, something very strange took hold of me. I let in with: “I’m not that out of it, of course I know what MySpace is. In fact, my sisters had me ‘pimp’ their MySpace pages for them.” And if that wasn’t enough, “I have a blog, you know.” Now, I don’t have to annotate the text to indicate how lame my reaction was, but that’s not the most disturbing part for me. The most disturbing part was my defensiveness. This pointed to two horrifying things: 1) a moment in which I acted EXACTLY like my mother who spends her life proving you otherwise despite the forces of reality; 2) the very act of being defensive made me realize how lame of a 34-year-old I actually am. I’m so disturbed by this because I feel like I have turned into that 30-something that cannot face the fact that she is a 30-something and has to prove to her 20-year-old nanny that “yes, I am cool; I promise; I know what MySpace is. And, did I mention that I have a blog.”