write what you know

So, I'm supposed to "write what I know" - which is great, if you're Ghandi or Paris Hilton or someone else and people actually want to know what you know - and I'm stuck. I just don’t know a lot. I haven't lived long enough or hard enough, I guess. I mean, I'm good at Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit so I know stuff but I don't know the right stuff. And now, I've got this assignment - this creative assignment (so, knowing all about nineties trivia? useless) - and I'm stuck. When I say that I'm stuck, she says "write what you know". Yeah. Helpful.

Here's what I know: I was (technically) born in the eighties (1980, to be exact). It's weird to be born in a year defined by its zero and still be attached to the nine other years that come after it. Am I supposed to have stuff in common with a twenty-year-old? You know, the ones still staring at their lives like its sooo far away? As if. Anyway, born in the eighties in a third world country. A country with about 120 million people, in a city with 8 million other inhabitants, in a hospital that wasn't really a hospital but a "women's centre" (birthed by a doctor who later checked into that same hospital as a patient and succumbed to breast cancer), to first-time parents (one of whom paced the hallways and promptly jumped on a motorcycle when he was told his little girl would need a blood transfusion - the clinic didn't have any - in order to bang on the gates of the American Embassy at 0400… that's also called taking your life in your own hands). Had the uneventful childhood of a rich daughter living in a poor country. Seven years later, we moved. Suddenly, I was enduring the uneventful adolescence of a poor daughter in a rich country. I went to school (and realised my third world education was pretty first class), did well, graduated high school, then undergrad, then grad school. Bought a car, bought a condo, got a job, travelled to some places. And now, on the cusp of my thirties, living the uneventful life of a middle-class single-girl (still in a rich country), sitting in a class of other bored middle-class single-girls, I'm told to write what I know. Sadly, it only took this previous paragraph to do just that.