When I was your age, it was cool to wear bandanas. And to play hacky sack!
My mother is a very young-seeming woman. She looks easily a decade younger than she is, she loves to dance and she takes a weekly aerobics class called “Super Macho Girls.” I’ll call her from bed at 10 p.m. and it turns out she is at an uber-hip gin distillery that just opened, in a neighborhood I am not cool enough to go to. But then, occasionally, she will mention the fact that she was born before televisions made their way into American homes and I will look at her like she is Methuselah.
I was thinking about this the other day, when it occurred to me that I will someday have to tell my child that I am older than the internet. Okay, not older than its invention, but older than its widespread use. Same with the cell phone. The iPad. Reality TV. (Which I am confident will continue until time immemorial, when Chris Harrison looks like Dick Clark and full-blown intercourse doesn’t even warrant a TV-MA rating.)
A few other things I’m not looking forward to screeching at my kids from my porch rocker:
- That not only am I older than the internet, which means I may as well have played stickball with Jesus, but I had an AOL account with dial-up, and that this was considered cutting-edge.
- That the first computer I used had a black screen and boxy yellow letters and that I used it solely to play Tetris, which also black and yellow and wasn’t even in 3-D.
- That when I learned the letters “HD,” they were just average consonants, and that the quality of television when I was growing up could be divided into two categories: static-y and not quite as static-y.
- That I was there when Us Monthly became Us Weekly.
- That for a short while in 1992, Kris Kross made it cool to wear clothes backwards. And that I jumped on board this trend with a silk paisley vest. And that there is photo evidence.
- That I have a hoard of Sassy magazines and Melrose Place DVDs, and that I occasionally take sojourns back to 1991 in the comfort of my pajamas and my box of wine, and that this is TOTALLY NORMAL, SHUT UP.
- That in my youth the coolest thing you could possibly drink was served in a bag. (Capri Sun 4eva!)
Yes, someday I will shock my son by admitting that I was born before the internet (to which he will probably be tethered via brain IV). But so was Lindsay Lohan. And then he will look up at me and ask sweetly, “Who’s Lindsay Lohan?”
And that is when the boxed wine will really come in handy.
About Una LaMarche
Just a few short months ago we were causing enormous giggles from our kids (being just a…um…1/2 of a generation older than you, I’d say) regaling our kids with tales of the tv cable box still attached to the tv by a wire that only went SO FAR. And the telephone that stayed on the wall in the kitchen and only went as far as the curly yellow cord allowed you to roam (basically where everyone else could hear you). You were likewise wired up to your atari/nintendo64/colecovision and your staticky walkman. Everytime my mom got a new used car I prayed it had FM radio, PLEASE. And the first computer I learned on in school ran in MS-DOS only. I could not understand why everyone thought they were so cool. They didn’t do anything. You put in 4+2+ and it gave you 6. Big deal! Calculators had that. And the computer room was freezing. Computer rooms had to be kept as cold as O/R’s back in the day. And what days they were! Yeah, that’s right, we paved the way, didn’t we?
Twitter Name: HeatherSchiavo
hysterical! My mom and I had a conversation on this topic just the other day with regards to how she just got her first iPhone and we were using FaceTime. She was amazed. It’s still pretty cool to me too and I’m 33. But my 2 1/2 year old son just took to it like no big deal. As if to say: “Grams is on your phone…yeah and this is cool why?”
We actually had a nice moment, the other way around, when … after we moved house … the boys discovered our tiny TV with built in Video player (used for training Scouts and Lifeguards) and thought it the most amazing machine ever!
Our 6 year old keeps telling people about this ‘new machine’ … It takes these big DVDs that are like tapes inside a plastic case … and you can see the tape move from one end to the other, or you can tell when the tape is in the middle of the story because you can see it through a window. It’s really cool!
OOH, I’ve got you beat on the aol, I had a prodigy account with dial up before anyone knew what it was!!
thanks for the laugh :)
Sassy!
Twitter Name: msmegan