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There are days when I'm stunned at how all of this technology seemingly came down at once. I barely had put the cover on my Smith Corona when all of a sudden I was in an AOL chat room pretending I was a writer from Miami being flirted with by a guy who was pretending he was older, semi-retired and living on the Gulf side of the same state. Hmmm. Ok, maybe he wasn't pretending. When he didn't see me being interviewed on the Today Show a few weeks later, like I had proclaimed, maybe he figured out that I wasn't who I said I was? Now that I think about it, what chat room was I in? 'Over 60 and Sexy?' Rookie mistake.

Technically I never had an AOL account. I had the standard Gen X'er approach to the whole thing at the time: No way was I going to be a joiner (insert scoffing sound). First of all, everyone was a liar, weren't they? I remember feeling distinctly vulnerable in that overloaded AOL homepage interface. What the hell was all of this? No, I am not interested in playing online poker. Ok, maybe I am, but how do they know that?! Why is there a heart next to my fake chat room name? That's entirely too cheeky and suggestive. Why are people up at three in the morning talking about cat poop and engine oil and how they could 'totally relate to Alanis Morissette's new song? Yes, I remember these things. Who were these people? Crap, I'm one of them.

I signed up with Earthlink.

From there it seemed we were all curious enough about the new fangled technology to at least attempt to integrate it into our lives. We used our brick-sized flip phones (I think Mattel fashioned their toddler version after this circa 1995 gem) and payed our $300/month cell phone bills (and yet, AT&T wonders where the aggression started?) The World Wide Web was intriguing, but I don't remember anything useful at all on the internet at that time. For one, who could possibly remember an entire address? Didn't matter, I was too busy making sure my cell phone calls were just shy of an emergency and it took too long to 'surf' anyway. Of course at the time, that word only meant water, waves and wedgies.

People that are a lot smarter than I am are debating whether or not all of this technology is saving time, increasing productivity, bringing down walls that divide us socially and economically, but the irony is that with my generation (hello X'ers!), what I hear most often is, "I don't have time for it." Oh the pessimism, oh the ennui, oh the anti-joiners...I heart my little niche generation of Rage Against the Machine'ers.

We are the generation that is sandwiched between the "I went to a bunch of Dead shows, dropped out, but now I'm your doctor" Boomers (80 million and some change) and the "I thought I wanted a career, but really I just want a big paycheck" Gen Y'ers (78 million and some change). At barely over 45 million, we are like Jan Brady — the largely ignored middle sister stuck between our do-gooder, save-the-world older sister, and our fame-seeking, lisping, blondentourage younger sister. We had the bad hair, the bad economy, the bad attitude.

So cut to 2011 and get a load of us - I saw some statistics recently that suggest that we make up close to 30% of the Facebook demographic here in the US (they don't break it down by generation, but I did some "New Math" and I feel pretty good about that statement). At over 100 million members stateside, that means that nearly two thirds of our generation joined up! I'm not surprised, but I love to laugh at how we act annoyed and reserved and reluctant. For all the reasons that outwardly it seems counter-intuitive to have these kind of numbers come from the likes of Jan Brady, I think it makes perfect sense.

In the past year or so, having separated and divorced, I've been dating again. There are dozens of funny technology dos and don'ts that seem quite obvious, but some of them really make me laugh. I like 'The Office Guy' on Daily Candy's blog. His economic, quick-witted delivery slays me. I saw one recently where he was giving tips on how many post-date texts are appropriate for a woman to send. I'm a one text post-date sender and it goes something like this: "thank u." The Office Guy lays out the slippery slope after just two texts and all I can envision in my head is the Jon Favreau character in the movie Swingers calling a woman he just met at the bar, over and over again in a row, with the final message on her answering machine being, "This just isn't going to work out." (By the way, I just Googled Swingers to make sure I spelled his name correctly and this is what I got in return: "The word"swingers" has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active." WTH? a) I had no idea I even had SafeSearch turned on! b) Really? It's that offensive? and c) What else have I been missing?!) I think this is where our reluctant-to-join attitude serves us well. I don't consider text messaging a conversation, I don't think many in Generation X think so either, but we think it has its place. I will admit though, we might be dangerous with the answering machine (aka: 'voicemail' for you Gen Y'ers). Boomers leave short messages (they just want to get you on the phone), X'ers leave entire one-sided conversations, and Y'ers just hang up and text you, or they don't call you at all. I don't have a single babysitter who listens to her voice messages. The answering machine was our technology and ultimately, again, we are like Jan Brady: we want to be heard.

This is one reason why I am not surprised that we are big Facebookers. In our own way, we are still trying to be heard. When you are sandwiched between Reaganomics and a recession and are fed lines like, "you can be anything you want to be, as long as you fit in," our angst and lack of a solid rudder created a generation of kids who devoted ourselves to grounded questioning, authentic reflection about our feelings, and determined introspection. Not the doped-up introspection of "free to be you and me" or the coked-out introspection of "we can have it all," but the "what the hell are we going to do?" introspection. What were we going to get behind? What was our collective thought...irony?

I haven't researched this, but I'm pretty sure irony existed before the first X'er could talk, but we mastered it, we owned it and it became our way of being heard without being wholly transparent. Brilliant. We took feigned ignorance and interest to a new level, making Eddie Haskell look like a bit player. Think of everyone you know between the ages of 35 and 46 and I think we just about corralled all of the smart asses into one corner, yes? Not that irony is just about that. To be truly ironic, you have to be a thinker, and maybe even a brooder, and I genuinely love this about my generation. I think it's what makes us unique. We often think as we speak, question why we are leaping, and I think we feed off of perspective and experience.

We are not credited with much outside of irony, Nirvana, Winona Ryder and Eddie Bauer barn jackets, but our middle-child angst has contributed to some significant cultural building blocks. We are the generation that spiked the number of women in the workforce and we are the most ethnically diverse generation than any before us. Not having a defined path for ourselves, and due to being raised in the midst of ambiguous social change, we created our own path based on tolerance, adaptability and fairness. We were often the product of two-income households, or divorced households, with over-worked parents, during a time of economic uncertainty. As a result, us "Latch Key Kids" are more independent, skeptical and resilient, and we are the first generation to put a value on balancing a successful work life with a strong home life. We have supported advancements in personal technology (to get us out of the office), and now that many of us are parents, statistics show that Gen X fathers spend more time with their children than Boomers did.We decided we wanted more than what it seemed was ahead of us.

Some of this means that we've often been brashly dubbed, "Generation Me," but I think our cautious confidence, independence and adaptability laid critical groundwork for the lighting-speed integration of technology into our cultural norm. Yep, I put that inBOLD. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, are Gen X'ers. So is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and Michael Dell of Dell Computers. Many top executives in ground-breaking companies such as these, and others, are Gen X'ers. We are widely considered the most entrepreneurial generation in history. Unlike Boomers, who maybe on average are more linear thinkers (think: 'step one leads to step two'), and Y'ers who are more intuitive when it comes to technology (because they've always had it), we are more independent and analytical and I think this led to astonishing innovation with measured and thoughtful integration.

So we Facebook, we Twitter, we text our babysitters and return our voice messages. We use our bluetooths and listen to Pandora and rent movies online. We pay bills online, but we would never dream of using our debit cards, and we are the first to share internet privacy and safety messages. We will accept your .ics's, but many of us also carry around our handwritten date books, and we still handwrite birthday cards and love notes. Ultimately we have been good stewards for change. We've been nearly an ideal bridge between the days of typewriters and party lines, to smartphones and Facebook. You can count on us to continue to apply our skepticism with poetic optimism, and our craving for fairness, authenticity and grounded progress.

By 1990, The Brady Bunch was reinvented as a dramedy, The Brady's, and Jan's character had marital problems and then fertility problems, culminating in her and her husband adopting a Chinese baby girl. I was just starting college and immersed in my own dramedy, so I barely remember the series, but I think it's hilarious that this is what happens to the fictional Jan. It couldn't have been scripted as a more perfect middle-child Gen X ending. Meanwhile, I started college with my Smith Corona and ended college with my Smith Corona, but I drove off of that campus with the distinct feeling that everything was about to change. Our little niche generation was just getting to work, in the middle of a recession, with a guy from Arkansas in the White House, and 'RSTLSSPEN' was just about to sign on...