The wife was away this weekend for a conference, so that meant my daughters’ hair looked more like Don King’s than that of a 2-year old girl. No matter how hard I try, it just gets worse.
On Friday night I did what any Dad would do - took her to an adult dinner party at some friends’ house. Of course she was the only one there under 32 (these friends seriously need to start breeding soon – you know who you are… my kid needs somebody to play with at these things!)
Around 9 o’clock she just pulled out her stinky blanket and lay right down on the floor; that was her way of telling me “I’m tired, let's get some chocolate ganache cake and leave please!”
The best part of the weekend was taking her to my dentist appointment on Saturday morning. She was on my lap while my crazy Dentist was being all-weird again ranting on about my Invisaligns and then about the government. Until my daughter started “tootin’" – then the dentist let me go! I’m definitely taking her with me next time.
Overall a really fun weekend of Gymboree, drawing, swimming, playground, and yelling at the ducks in the lake.
Spoiled Under 30 Crowd
A friend of mine sent this to me Friday – I couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t know who wrote it since there was no author attached, but whoever did it is pretty right-on
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 BOTH ways. yadda, yadda, yadda
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap 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 thirty; 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 damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today you 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 damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!
There was no email! ! We had to actually write somebody a letter ...with a pen! Then you 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! You wanted to steal music; you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ's usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!
And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the ph one rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
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" and "asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! 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 LIFE!
When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!
Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!
You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and 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 spoiled little rat-bastards!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up. We had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire ... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.
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
I personally can think about 20 things to add, what about all of you?
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap 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 thirty; 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 damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today you 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 damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!
There was no email! ! We had to actually write somebody a letter ...with a pen! Then you 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! You wanted to steal music; you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ's usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!
And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the ph one rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
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" and "asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! 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 LIFE!
When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!
Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!
You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and 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 spoiled little rat-bastards!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up. We had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire ... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.
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
33 comments:
I'm too tired to add to it right now, but it's dead on. I especially like the part about the Atari.
Aaaaah yes, Saturday morning cartoons. Those were the days.
And a note on the videogames: We had "Pong" first. Closely followed by the original Nintendo which came with a bonus "Duckhunt" game. Good times.
I'm even older, and from Britain - where we had two TV channels when I was a child. This went up to four when I was a teenager.
There weren't even Ataris, and the first time I went into a McDonalds was in Montreal when I was 18.
I sat down with my food and asked my American friends -
"Where are the knives and forks?"
thankfully, i've let my frustration over the technology-free 80s go, but the bitterness over graduating from college one year before personal computers and ecstasy became ubiquitous still lingers.
Imagine what your daughter will say to her next generation, could it be something like, "I had to eat the oily KFC with my fingers, and now you got chicken that flies and lands perfectly in your mouth!"
MP3s?! Napster?! Hell, we didn't even have CDs! We had vinyl records and cassette tapes!
And our parents were too cheap to buy us a real Sony Walkman; instead we got the cheap knockoffs called Walkguys or Runmans or Jogmates.
And when you put new batteries in them they tapes sounded like The Chipmunks on speed.
Then, when the batteries started to die, the music sounded like death dirges. You had 20 minutes of good listen time. Tops!
I remember the first time we finaly got a remote control for the TV. It was CORDED for goodness sake. How sad is that? And it was a big box about the size of my lap.
And then we got a Coleco Vision. After my eyeballs fell out from playing Pitfall on Atari for hours, I was loving my Coleco Vision with it's high tech graphics and all. But the flippin' Qbert kept jumping off the side of the pyramid. Damn you Qbert.
who could forget those 5x5 floppy disks. and filling out college applications on a typewriter.
And when cell phones were invented, you had to carry around a whole brief case just to make them work. And no downloading of ringtones.
And cameras! If you wanted an instant picture you had to shake that polaroid, and now all those pictures have faded, anyways. Otherwise, you had to buy film and take it to the store and wait a week, and you had to pay for all those pictures to be printed out even if they were all crappy and blurry!
When I was a kid I was the remote control. I had to stand in front of the TV changing channels until my Dad found something to watch. THANK GOD there weren't 500 channels back then.
We finally got one of those big boxes with the cord too. It felt like we were rich.
Ha! I remember the corded remote control for the cable.
And as for music -- hello? Vinyl! Or those sorry ass tapes where I you had to keep pushing rewind or forward to get to the good songs.
That was awesome! So true. My daughter was talking the other day about how she was going to email grandma, and asked something about what my grandma was like on email. I told her I didn't own a computer when I was her age, and barely knew my grandma because calling her was expensive. Kids these days are lucky for sure. And I am aware that I sound old when I say that.
i was not only the remote- but i was the antannae too! (did i spell that wrong???)
and i'm under thirty, but not by much...
cassettes? how about when your favorite one would get all eaten up and your parents wouldn't buy you a new one? I think i threw my Walkguy out at that point. (yeah, no walkman for me, cheap-o parents!)
I would be afraid to take my daughter to the dentist. I know that while the hygienist had her hands in my mouth my gal would be demanding "what's that?" "Where's that go?".
You know, hanging out with adults, at least maybe she'll develop a more advanced vocabulary.
That is the best. I saw a letter like that from Bill Gates once -- something like, "Your parents didn't used to be boring .... until they started picking up after you all the time."
Most of my friends are 35+ with no kids. Some arent even married yet. They still go out looking to score on weekends.
They can keep it.
Remote, antenna, dishwasher and the random function when mom and dad did not want to listen to the record straight thru...
good days
Kids are a great excuse to leave someplace you don't want to be.
Ours was also a time when kids could ride in the back window of your car. Car seats? We didn't even see seat belts unless we were digging in the seat for a corn chip.
Diana -- Yes, I too was the remote and the holder of the antenae.
Dad Stuff -- It's hard to believe as kids how we were able to jump all over the car with no worry. Just bizarre..
Back in my day, I had to actually stick my finger into a little hole and exert real effort to dial a phone!
Typewriters and white-out.
Did someone mention to No microwave thing. Or that there was NO Easy Mac around. You had to actually wait for the water to boil and then let the noodles boil for 10 whole minutes! And if you were out of butter and milk you were S-O-L.
And if I wanted to watch porn, I had to toggle the cable box buttons and there were all these damn squiggly lines messing up the picture! It was horrible!
Or, you actually had to try to find a friend who's dad had a Playboy subscription!
Now, all I have to do it open a damn spam email to see all the naked people I want. These kids got it easy...
I've gotten that e-mail before...too funny!
As for the Don King hair..... don't feel alone my husband is hair challenged also... when he has our daughter I just pray it gets brushed.
Oh, The Joys -- Ah yes, I remember those. My grandma had one of those until 1994. I could never dial right on those...
The Secretary -- I actually still used one during my first year of college. How scary is that...
L.A. Daddy -- There was this empty field near my house that had a stash in a cardboard box. The fella's in the hood would collect them from their dad's girlie magazines. We could have probably charged admission.
Jenifer -- I always used the excuse "oh well, i'm a dad, and dads don't do that" but then I met another Dad that did his daughter's hair like he was Vidal Sassoon.
that's hilarious. I was also the dishwasher in our house. My parents thought they were so damn funny. "Why can't we get a dishwasher, mom?" "We already have one! *snicker*" Ha-freaking-ha. 9Oh, and we had not TV, so not worries about remotes or channels or ATaris...)
The Jiffy Pop thing is hilarious! We had the Commodore 64, remember that?
kittenpie -- No way! My parents said the SAME thing too...and we HAD a dishwasher.
wayabetty -- Yup, I sure do. My neighbors had one and we were always playing games on it.
We had to type the damn footnotes on our termpapers with a MANUAL TYPEWRITER. I think that's about the number one think I can think of hating about my youth. All that lining up of paper and adjusting the roller... misery, just absolute misery. Now they have "word processors"... buncha sissies....
;o)
Did anyone mention watching DVDs in your SUV? I mean, Jr. watches "Cars" while Lisa watches "Barbie", because OF COURSE you will have one different movie for each child.
In my days, the options were: count how many COWS you can see on the side of the road. Or not.
I loved that text. Gotta frame it and hang it in my kid's room.
That bit is a transcript of Ernie Cline's hilarious "when I was a kid" act. Listen to it and more awesome stuff at http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/
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