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We’ve been called a lot of things, some of them not very nice. Baby busters. Slackers. The mainstream corporate media in the early 1990s missed the satire of Douglas Coupland’s definitive Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and cast us as "flannel-wearing, alienated, overeducated, underachieving slackers with body piercing, who drank franchise-store coffee and had to work at McJobs" (or so Wikipedia points out). Of course, the people in charge of the mainstream corporate media at the time were our elders, Silents and Boomers who seemed not to care about trying to understand us -- disparaging us was more fun.

So who are Generation Xers, anyway? I prefer the definition authors William Strauss and Neil Howe developed for their fascinating work delineating the cyclical nature of history, in which they call the generation deemed mysteriously X (as in "inexplicable" or "unknown") the somewhat less cryptic -- but still numerically ominous -- 13th Generation... that is, the thirteenth generation of Americans:

The 13th Generation (Nomad, born 1961-1981) survived a "hurried" childhood of divorce, latchkeys, open classrooms, devil-child movies, and a shift from G to R ratings. They came of age curtailing the earlier rise in youth crime and fall in test scores -- yet heard themselves denounced as so wild and stupid as to put The Nation At Risk. As young adults, maneuvering through a sexual battlescape of AIDS and blighted courtship rituals -- they date and marry cautiously. In jobs, they embrace risk and prefer free agency over loyal corporatism. From grunge to hip-hop, their splintery culture reveals a hardened edge. Politically, they lean toward pragmatism and nonaffiliation, and would rather volunteer than vote. Widely criticized as "Xers" or "slackers," they inhabit a Reality Bites economy of declining young-adult living standards.

(That’s from Strauss and Howe’s Web site, The Fourth Turning, an offshot of their book of the same name. I also highly recommend their previous book, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069.)

It’s not a particularly flattering profile, but it feels like me. It feels like us. Not that all those Bad Things had to happen to all of us -- we aren’t all children of divorce; we weren’t all individually denounced as wild and stupid -- but the tenor of the times when we were little kids, for instance, gave us all that hardened edge that now influences, as an example, how we react to the increasingly crappy economy.

I like us, though, us Xers. I think we’re cool and interesting people. I like our cynicism and our pragmatism, our irony and our sarcasm. I like how we’re independent and self-reliant. I wouldn’t have us any other way.

But of course, that’s because I’m a pragmatic Xer.

I was waiting on line at the Ziegfeld Theater on West 54th Street for a Sunday afternoon show of Revenge of the Sith, having arrived three hours before showtime in order to save a good spot for my later-arriving pals, and now they had finally turned up. My pal Gail (her site is A Million Things That Bug Me on the "geeks with blogs" roll) was wearing her "geek." t-shirt, I was castigating myself as a dork for having gotten to the theater so early that there were only half a dozen people ahead of me, and we were all wondering what kinds of nerds in costumes were lined up way back where we couldn’t see them.

Which inevitably prompted a discussion about the shades of difference in meaning between "geek" and "dork" and "nerd" -- because there’s nothing geekier than splitting those kinds of hairs. And since everyone uses these words to mean lots of various and often contradictory things, it’s worth my setting down how I’ll use them here, and how I try to use them in everyday conversation.

Geek is entirely positive, as far as I’m concerned. To be a geek is to enjoy a self-awareness of one’s obsessions, but it’s more that, too: it’s to enjoy everything that goes with being a geek. I’m never ashamed of being a geek...

...Except when I am, and then I label myself a dork. There’s self-awareness that goes along with being a dork, but also a bit of embarrassment. At those moments when I haven’t quite fully absorbed the paradigm shift that goes along with celebrating geekiness, and I feel momentarily like a bit of a weirdo, dork does the trick, even if the trick is being mean to myself.

I can never be a nerd, in my glossary, however, because a nerd has absolutely no awareness of his or her nerdiness. If you think you’re a nerd, you are, by my definition, emphatically not one. To be a nerd is to embody all the stereotypically negative attributes of the geek -- poor social skills, pathological obsession with trivia, and so on -- and none of the positive ones, which involve living an examined life and having a lot of intellectual fun while doing it.

So, to use the waiting-on-line for-Star Wars metaphor, I may well have felt like a dork for waiting for three hours for a damn movie I’d already seen twice before, but because I did it for my friends, some of whom were Sith virgins, I can safely consider it nicely geeky. But that guy on line ahead of me, who had the "Imperial March" as the ringtone on his cellphone? He may well have been a nerd. But only if he was using the ringtone unironically.

What is geek philosophy, and why do we need it?

Look, we won. Guys, we won. Some of the richest men in the world are geeks -- c'mon, people don't come any geekier than Bill Gates. The most popular movies and TV shows revel in geekery -- if the kids who actually liked high-school biology (I was one of them) created a TV show, it'd be CSI; everyone and their mom is seeing this new Star Wars flick -- even if most of the people who enjoy them would never define themselves as geeks. A scan of the help-wanteds demonstrates that every other job going wanting demands skills that we geeks were honing during our sad, pathetic teenhoods when everyone else was out at football games and sock hops or whatever the cool kids were doing in the 1980s.

So why doesn't it feel like we won? Because, despite the triumph of everything geeky, we are still rejected. Made fun of. Teased. Looked upon with a combination of revulsion and pity. It is time to take back the word "geek," to overcome our shame and our embarrassment, to stand up and proudly announce, "We're geeks, we're here, deal with it." It cannot hurt us to take a cue from our queer brothers and sisters (some of whom are geeks, too) and come out of the closet as happy, productive, weird human beings. For our weirdness is redefining "normal."

But this isn't just one of those ludicrous exercises in building self-esteem that ignores, you know, reality: Geek philosophy isn't about making people feel better about one's closest relationship being with a computer, or a complete collection of still-in-the-box Buck Rogers in the 25th Century action figures, or whatever stereotype of geekiness is in vogue at the moment (because of course there is a tiny minority of folks for whom it would probably be healthy to be a little less stereotypically geeky). It's about recognizing that there is value in the geek outlook and the geek aesthetic and the geek approach to life, and about putting the fact that the geek outlook is spreading into some sort of cultural context.

Okay, so why the focus on Generation X? ("Celebrating the culture of Generation X" is the blog's subtitle.) Of course there are geeks older than GenXers... but I'm not so sure the term "geek" has any meaning when applied to people younger than Xers. For though geekiness has always been with us, adult Xers have taken it mainstream -- a 15-year-old geek today, in 2005, is not a freak like a 15-year-old geek was in 1984, when I was 15, was. Geeky is cool, today... and Xers, in many ways, made it that way. In a similar way that hippies defined the Baby Boom generation even though they constituted but a tiny percentage of that generation, I believe that geeks have defined and are continuing to define Generation X -- if you're an Xer and not a geek, that's how you define yourself: as not-a-geek. Geekiness and GenXness goes together without saying.

Who we are -- as geeks and as Xers -- is going to have a dramatic impact on our culture as a whole, and it's starting in earnest right now, as Xers -- the oldest of whom are now 40ish -- begin to move into positions of authority and start to blossom creatively. I believe we're in for a new golden age of entertainment, of pop culture, produced by Xers... and it's going to be geeky. I'm gonna show you why that's something to celebrate.