OK, you asked. To begin with I will let you know that these days I don't even consider myself that "young" anymore, being in my early 30s and having bought a house last year. However, I am obviously younger than you, and since you asked what you members of the '60s generation look like to us younger folk, I will give you the perceptions of this one Gen-Xer, which I know from conversations with my peers is not an unusual opinion.

We HATE you guys.

We have spent our whole lives growing up being told how "important" everything that happened in the 60s was. We have had the remnants of your hippie culture shoved down our throats since birth. We have heard how "No generation ever celebrated being young the way mine did" repeated like a mantra to deny the fact that almost all of you didn't actually do anything in the '60s besides take some drugs (if you have ever seen the movie "Rivers Edge," the scene where Ione Skye and Keanu Reeves are in school listening to their teacher talk about "the '60s" pretty much sums it up).

Meanwhile you wander around looking like fools, doing anything to avoid feeling old. So yes, the answer to the questions "Do we look like doddering fools? Do we look like people who have not accepted our age?" is yes and yes. I really do have respect for the people who made significant cultural and political innovations in the '60s; I just know that most of them actually did it in the early '60s, then everyone jumped on the bandwagon after the hard stuff was done.

OK, I don't want to pile on here or seem excessively hostile. I think that even if things did "quiet down" a little in the '80s as far as drugs and sex are concerned, kids have been drugging and screwing just as much if not more since the '60s as they did then. The perception that things were "wilder" back in the '60s has more to do with the fact that it was a new kind of thing then combined with the unwillingness of the boomers to admit that they are old.

Anyway, that's just the opinion of one soon-to-be 33-year-old.

-- Jotham Stavely

Political activism

I'm 19 and in college. Speaking at a demonstration these days will not get you laid. It might get you looked at funny.

Up until last year, I thought my generation was a repeat of the '80s -- career-driven, self-interested. When Seattle happened in late 1999 I was 16, and that was something I found inspiring. It showed me that there were other people out there who cared about the direction of the world. I was involved in local activism stuff in New York City in high school, around issues like police brutality and the drug laws, but for my generation the '60s is like some distant memory or dream where people had lives that were interconnected with history. Kids who care about issues have a tough time surviving with MTV around telling everyone to drink up and party hard.

The sexual revolution pretty much just left us with no idea what to do. No one "dates" anymore -- you "hang out" and "hook up." You know someone's your boyfriend or girlfriend after you've hung out and hooked up with them for a while. Courtship is abolished, I guess.

Most girls nowadays don't want to consider themselves feminists. They think it makes them seem pushy or shrill, I think. I'm a feminist even though I'm a guy, but that's because I know enough to know there's no contradiction.

After 9/11 I think there was some sense that our generation might be entering history, that we might have something to do all together. Unfortunately, that was thought of in pretty militaristic and apocalyptic terms. And since there hasn't been a horrifying terrorist attack since then, the end-of-the-world sense of last year has pretty much gone. Things are sort of back to normal.

To me it seems like your generation stopped its war in Vietnam but then stopped short before changing society. That was the promise you didn't follow through on and now we've got to pick up the pieces, but I'm not sure we can with all this mental pollution everywhere. It's gonna be tough.

-- Sam Hayim Brody

Wimpy

I wish I could say that being young and swingin' in today's world was a fabulous good time, and it damn well should be considering all the possibilities out there, but all I could think about when reading your questions was how wimpy my generation is. Not just when it comes to the pursuit of true love, but it seems in the pursuit of any and every dream.

There are just too many choices. As a child raised by multiple baby boomers who've held on strong to their own youth culture, I'm jealous of the freedom they experienced in breaking through the ceilings and rewriting all the rules. While I'm grateful that they've given me so many options in how and why and where to live my life, I can't help but be resentful that now I have to consider whether I would rather sleep with women or men, with or without the black leather accoutrements. And if I choose not to pick a personal fetish, am I boring? I could be and do just about anything, and that thought leaves me paralyzed with indecision.

And I am not alone in this dilemma. It seems like all my peers are having the same difficulty. Off trying to do their own thing, they don't know whether to stick with what they started with or try something new. We're a generation of those annoying people at parties who are always looking around to see if maybe there's more fun happening over there.

Since now we don't have to get married for money or to bolster familial connections, we're free to hop relationships for the rest of our lives. We don't have to stay with one career. You're as likely to hear about a virgin-till-marriage 25-year-old as you are to read about a 23-year-old who put himself through college as a male prostitute. There is no more national youth consensus on what we want to be. Those with even a mild interest in self-analysis, therefore, find ourselves always thinking, always wondering, always trying to define ourselves and be different.

I know I'm making huge generalizations. I know that confusion about one's future or one's love interest is not limited to my generation or to people under the age of 35. But to be honest, getting laid has never been my problem. Sex and relationships are definitely out there to be had. The problem lies in how we approach love and the making of it once we're in the middle of it. We spend too much time worrying about where this hand goes or whether that girl is the one. The legacy of our beloved partying parents is that they gave us the opportunity to try everything. The challenge is to figure out what to do with the smorgasbord of deliciousness we've been presented with, without the structure the previous generations took such joy in smashing.

-- Alayne Freidel

Grateful

He asked if they looked like doddering old fools. Doddering old fools, she repeated incredulously in her head. Like the generation that preceded his?

No, they only looked like doddering old fools when they worried about what they looked like. She remembered her '60s radical boss, an intellectual who chose to take on his father's tool-sharpening business. He only seemed old to her when he was concerned about the effect of the advancing years on his hipness.

Otherwise, she was grateful to his generation. Grateful for the progress they pushed for, the culture they cultivated, and especially for those who did not succumb to greedy, self-righteous Republicanism as their idealism faded away. And in a more frivolous vein, she was grateful to them for having enjoyed their youth. They enjoyed it so much that they extended it.

She was grateful that because of this generation that refused to get old, she would not be as restricted by her age as women once were. She could have her cake and eat it, too. She could wear blue jeans and a sexy short haircut at age 55, and this would not even be considered eccentric. She could look forward to the oncoming years, rather than blow out a single birthday candle with dread and resignation.

And she felt that maybe, as they aged, this generation that previously warned against trusting anyone over 30 would change the unhealthy American obsession with youth. Or maybe they would keep chasing after it and searching for it in pretty little bottles. She hoped they would celebrate their young hearts.

-- Amanda Vassigh