I was reading a tweet Monday as part of my regular day off morning ritual, and it struck me as amazing.

It said that MTV is 30 years old.

Let that sink in.

Now, read it again. MTV has been on the air for 30 years.

How about we put that in perspective, shall we? I know most people who read this blog (not including our friendly Islamists, whom I have no raw data on) are typically in their upper 30s. New Carlson is like 53, and pulls the average up a bit, but overall, I’d say the median age is about 38.3 (thanks for pulling it down some Jess and Pulv).

Me, I’m going to be 40 soon, and like most of the six-7 offsuiters, this means I’ve lived almost my whole memorable life with MTV as a constant. We’re the first generation that got every bit of music that we wanted while we were growing up — all the David Lee Roth, Jon Bon Jovi, Axle and Slash, U2, Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, REM, Nirvana, and the bestest, greatest band of all time, Pearl Jam — brought right to us, to our bedrooms, our living rooms, our basements.

I don’t know if I remember the first time I watched MTV, but I do remember when it started. It was a big deal, even for us 10-year-olds. We were on top of the world in fifth grade, but everyone knew that’d soon change when we went to middle school the following year. It was tough before the digital age, when all you had were some random magazines, a couple sports weeklies, a skate boarding mag and then the SI Swimsuit issue to get us all the useful info we could act smart about in class, the hallways, parking lot to show our coolness (I’d mention the random Playboy and Hustler magazines that always turned up in a junior high school locker–no, never mine, never–but that’s probably for another blog).

MTV changed not just how we got our information, but how we were motivated. You started seeing bands and wanted to have their most recent record–albeit in cassette format–and then there were the fashion trends you had to try to follow to stay in the cool groups. It was difficult, but for those of us who didn’t get a weekly allowance or whose parents couldn’t afford to buy us the hottest shoes or parachute pants or whatever, so some of us had to scrounge money.

It was two years before I’d have my first “real” job making about $3.25 an hour, but that didn’t stop me from trying to get some extra pocket change to keep up with all the cool things on MTV. I figured out quickly that I could take a little lawn-mowing money and invest it.

At age 11, investing meant buying something cheap and then turning a quick profit on the playground. Pretty much like it does as a 40-year-old, except that I didn’t know about interest rates and yields and the pitfalls of the small bond market. I could have easily gone the pot or heroin sales route, as it was around this time that I first was offered reds and other neighborhood “goodies” in the hallways, but I followed a path a little closer to my, um, heart.

Hauling my bumblebee-like fat ass to the gas station and buying up all the Bubblicious, Now & Laters and any hard chocolate I could grab (soft chocolates were bad, as they melted too quickly) was the starting point. Then I would sell everything in the bag, which cost me about $6, by the end of third period at school and collect a nice little profit margin of about $13.

I couldn’t do it every day, but it carried itself over enough that after a month, I bought a sweet shirt. With that little ingenuity, I was able to sort of keep up with some new trends, although for the most part, I figured out pretty quickly that being a tub of goo really didn’t lend itself to running with the cool crowd, no matter what you wore. So after month two, I bought a digital alarm clock (another thing we’ve had our whole lives that just a couple decades before was completely uncommon).

But that was what was good about MTV. It took in everyone, even the weirdos, geeks, dweebs and Goonies.

[Side note: any chance you can mention the Goonies, you should. At work, home, the gym, Starbucks, everywhere. And at least once a month, you should YouTube “Truffle Shuffle.”]

It didn’t matter what you wanted to see, you could find a little something for your taste on channel 29–that was the channel in our house anyway; it was probably an illegal black box, the one with the rotating knob and the numbers on it, that we had since we had no money but had basically every cable channel you could imagine, including HBO, which I mainly just liked for Fraggle Rock.

With this new channel, if you were into new wave, you had it. If you wanted to bang your head, you had it. If you only wanted to watch videos with half-naked 18-year-olds at a concert with the band that wore even more makeup and hairspray than the chicks, it was there. Everyone was welcome.

Sure, it’s changed through the years. Most of us who are old enough to remember it (when was the last time you caught yourself saying that and thinking how much you hated hearing your parents say that?) can tell you how great it was to actually hear music all the time, and watch actual videos at times not only between 2-4 a.m. It was splendid actually, being able to follow ‘the’ band of the day and actually see them, not just hear them.

But no matter how it’s morphed, the fact is that it’s still here. Thirty years later, it’s still hanging on, has spawned a rival, one that was terminally lousy at first as far as guys were concerned, but has come on to close the gap in recent years, and continues to produce stars, albeit not as many as YouTube and America’s Got Talent. And I’m not sure what that says.

What other things can you think of that we’ve grown up with that are ours, that we’re the first generation to really live and evolve with?

Personal computers? Check. That’s still us, but that’s about it for the biggies. Cell phones. Kinda check, but not really. We were mostly out of college before they were widespread. The Internet? Good god, that’s amazing, but there are already 18-year-olds who have not known a life where they couldn’t surf the ‘Net after school.

In fact, kids nowadays will only know phones that can let you video chat. I called my six-year-old goddaughter last weekend and it was the third time we’ve called this summer iPhone-to-iPhone using the FaceTime feature. For her whole life, she will always know you can talk and see the person on the other end of a cell phone.

Incredible.

Maybe in another 30 years I’ll be able to blog about something else that we’ve had for so long we can’t remember life without it. Let that sink in too. So many more inventions are out there that will become part of the mainstream and in some small way, a part of our everyday lives. And think about the fact that I believe I may live another 30 years.

Yikes.