Yes, I've used that line on my kid. It is 100% true. I also lived around the corner from my school, but that part doesn't help my case, so I leave it out. The purpose behind it is to remind these brats today that they are spoiled goddamn rotten. The fact is, whether I lived around the corner or ten blocks away, I'd have still walked to school. When high school rolled around, I took two buses to get there. Nobody offered me a car at 16 and told me to take it easy. Kids today get chauffeured everywhere. To school, to friends' houses, to the mall, to the park. Now, I've had a look at quite a few kids in my day, and they all have feet. Why is it they aren't walking to these places? We are raising the laziest bunch of shits I have ever seen. "Mom, can you take me to Taylor's house?" Taylor lives two blocks away!!! Buses and trains are foreign to these guys. I think they aren't certain who takes them, maybe the homeless live there. They aren't too sure, but they are definitely not willing to find out.
Remember checking the bus schedule on the corner so you'd know when you had to leave in order to make that movie showing? Or be at school on time? Squeezing on the bus with countless sweaty people, backpack over your shoulder, holding on to the rail or strap till you reached your stop and had to squeeze back through the crowd to get off and walk to school...now that was fun. Taking the bus to the subway to catch a train into the city, smelly and crowded, bouncing around, avoiding the perverts. Don't have to do that from the passenger seat of your mom's car, do you? Or for you older teens, while driving your mom's car or the car they got you for being alive on this planet for 16 whole entire years? Tough existence, isn't it?
How's that giant screen TV working out in your house? Yeah, we have three. Why? Because everyone else does. When I was a kid, I had a black and white TV when I finally got one in my room. Even though there was a color one in the living room and my parent's room, mine was a relic. But it gets even better. We had to stand up and twist that funny little knob on the front of the TV to change the channel. Imagine that?!?! I had to stop sitting on my fat ass and walk across the room if I was done watching a program. One day, in high school I decided I wanted the little tiny portable TV from the kitchen and my mom was nice enough to allow me to take it. It had a 5 or 6 inch screen! I kept it on a little cart next to my bed so I could actually see the faces of the actors. Cable? That was something my friends had since according to my mom, clever wench, my block didn't HAVE cable. She claimed to call regularly to ask, but to no avail. Cute, huh? Music channels, movie channels, sports, cooking, history, cartoon, you name it...all at the push of a button. I had seven channels to choose from, maybe eight or nine if you count the random UHF channels I could get by moving the antennae on top of the TV just right. But, go right ahead and whine that there's nothing on TV, you've certainly earned it. Can't seem to stop shaking my head right now.
Oh, and speaking of friends, did you know we actually spoke to them? Wait, wait, we even called them on the telephone. No, not on our tiny little mobile phones, but from a landline. The kind of phone that was either sitting on top of a shelf or table or hanging on the kitchen wall with a long, spiraled cord attached to the receiver. Receiver, the part of the phone you put to your ear when you wanted to have a conversation and sound came out. Weird, right? If you wanted privacy, you had to stretch that cord as far as it would take you. Some of us stretched it into the bathroom, which is always a fun place to chat. I was lucky enough to have a window that opened up to an opening in the roof. I could drop the cord that went into the jack down from the roof, plug it in, and then carry my white princess phone up to the roof and talk privately. In the summer, when I was home alone anyway. Yeah, didn't do much for me, did it? I also had to dial the phone. Not push buttons or a touchscreen, turning a dial starting at each and every number, twisting it around the phone and waiting for it to circle back to the beginning for the next six numbers. Calling someone quickly just didn't happen and it wasn't quiet. Couldn't be stealthy back then. The whole house could hear the fucking dial spinning.
There was a point to that last rant. Yes, the fact that we actually spoke to our friends. We didn't text them in bizarre shorthand. We picked up the phone and called. Then we talked for hours. Sometimes the friend didn't answer, their mom did and we had to ask to speak to them. Imagine doing that? Direct contact wasn't always possible, sometimes there was a middle man or woman. When we talked for hours, we'd hear the call of the wild at some point. That call would be our moms screaming for us to get off the phone. Why? Because when we were talking, nobody else could call. Call-waiting didn't exist. What the other caller heard, was the ear-numbing drone of the busy signal. We would have caused our parents to be unreachable.
Unreachable is what we were the moment we stepped out of the house. Why? Refer back to the part about no cell phones! They weren't invented yet. When we went out, took a bus or walked somewhere, you couldn't contact us. Our parents had to trust that we were going where we said we were and that we'd be ok. Carrying on private conversations with other people while we were out with friends just didn't happen. We actually engaged the person or people we were with at the time. Strange concept to most of you who have at least one eye on the screen of your cell phone at all times, texting away with at least one person no matter who you are with or where you happen to be. We connected with people, had deep conversations, laughed out loud (not LOL'ed), we held hands with our friends and socked them in the arm...because we were with them, in person, face-to-face. Hiding behind a screen to say things we'd never say in person wasn't an option. We had to be real, all the time.
Computers weren't in every household, either. They took up entire rooms and were not available to the general public. If we were assigned a paper in school, we had to type it on a TYPEWRITER. Yes, a clunky thing with keys set up like stadium seats that you had to bang on not glide across with great speed. And God help you if you made a mistake, there was no back space. You used a piece of correction paper wedged between the error and the typewriter key and slammed down on the key until the wrong letter was covered in white. Or...you could use White Out and blow on it for a minute or two instead of hitting delete and continuing on your merry way. No procrastination for us. Mistakes could double the amount of time it took to actually type up the damn thing. When I finally got an electric typewriter, I made even more mistakes at first. Pounding on the keys was no longer necessary but had become a habit for me. Wasn't the best transition I've ever made.
Since computers weren't an option, neither was the internet. That's right, you could not surf the web to find out information on everything and everybody. Let's go back to that research paper you were just assigned. It has to be 5 pages and needs to have at least 3-4 resources cited. No problem! Let's Google that shit. Um, no. Not in 1983 you didn't. You grabbed your school bag and notebook and hauled your ass to the library. And you walked there, usually by yourself. When you arrived, there were no computers to look up books and magazines to see what was available at your library and 15 other local libraries. Nope. You stepped over to the card catalog and flipped through it, drawer after drawer, card by card until you found a book that seemed like it would help you write that paper. Writing down the location of the book and its name, you went back to the catalog and continued this process a few more times. Taking that little slip of paper with all the info you carefully wrote down, you went to the shelves and began the hunt. After finding all the books, you had to check them out and carry them back home, where you'd skim through all the pages looking for information to put in your paper. No copy and pasting back then. Ahh, the simple joys!
Car seats, bike helmets, actual seat belts with a shoulder strap. Those were luxuries we just didn't have. As infants, we sat cradled in our mom's arms or on her lap in the car. When we got older, we bounced around, untethered in the back seat driving our parents crazy. We rode our bikes at unsafe speeds down hills with NO helmet on! Sometimes we rode on the handlebars of a friend's bike. We fell off and got back up and did the same thing all over again. Parks didn't have padded shit underneath the play structures, which were not plastic, but wood and metal. They gave nasty splinters and burned the shit out of you in the summer. When we fell off, we hit the concrete...hard. Then we knew how not to climb the next time. We drank water from hoses and lived to tell you about it. Safety wasn't the insane paranoid issue it is today. We exercised common sense and learned from our mistakes. These days you'd think kids were made of glass the way we wrap them up in padding and straps to protect them from themselves.
Still think you have it rough? I'm sure you do. Life for kids these days can be so difficult. What clothes to wear, choosing from the extensive selection bought FOR you not BY you; what smartphone to demand your parents buy for you; who else to text while you are out with your friends, if you've actually gone out; which car to ask your parents to buy for you because you just can't possibly be the only senior being driven to school by your mom...and because the bus is just so not an option; which videos to look up on YouTube for entertainment because you have no idea what to do with yourself; grabbing the remote while you recline on the couch to flip through the bazillion channels to which you have access to find something to watch. Poor tortured fucking soul. I feel so sorry for you. I'm sure you'll wind up in intensive therapy as a result. Did we survive without all that shit? Are you friggin kidding me right now???
No comments:
Post a Comment