I remember when I lived in Arizona with my brother & his family (circa 2001), his half-brother was also living with us. He was probably 13 or 14 at the time. He came home one day and was excited to share a new singer he'd just discovered with me and my sister-in-law... good ol' Van Halen! We both just laughed. "Van Halen, huh? Wow, Dan. Never heard of him. He's new?"
My sister sent me this chain email earlier today that I thought was kind of interesting. Insane to think that most kids now have no idea what a cassette/VHS tape is... would freak out at the amount of time it takes to use a rotary dial phone... oh, and have no idea that Michael Jackson has not always been a white guy!
I could form a pretty good list of the differences between my childhood and that of my nieces and nephews. Cell phones being at the top of the list. Hello, my 12 year old nephew has a cell phone. When I was in High School pagers started to become all the rage, but hello, pain in the butt. Pulling over and dropping a quarter in the pay phone just to find out who the random number on your pager belonged too. Oh, and it wasn't a small pager snapped to your buckle or purse either. Nope, it was a little monster. Remember early cell phones too? Shweet mother of pearl. Oh, and then there's text messaging... hi, it's called pen & paper.
Anyway, here's the email (there were a couple cuss words I replaced to keep things G Rated, but I may not have caught them in the first post. Sorry about that. Eeks.)
"When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up... what with walking twenty -five miles to school every morning uphill barefoot... BOTH ways …yada, yada, yada. I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of nonsense like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But now that I'm "over the ripe old age of 30"… I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a stinken Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library & look it up ourselves in the card catalogue or in World Book Encyclopedias! There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen…on paper! Then we had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! There were no MP3' s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the music store & shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up! …or you'd just buy the 45 record. We didn't have fancy stuff like "Call Waiting"! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! (Unless you were on a party line…then you really had to wait your turn) And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your aunt, your bookie, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances! We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! with games Like 'Space Invaders' & 'asteroids' & PacMan. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your Imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like real LIFE! You had to use a Little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on the T.V. You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your behind and walk over to the TV to change the Channel & there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you Hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you little dirt-bags! And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove ... imagine that! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980! Regards, The over 30 Crowd"
That list above is still applicable to my childhood, even though I'm just shy of 30. I remember a lot of these things as a kid.
