There's an email that comes around occasionally stating things like "the kids graduating from high school have never lived in a world without cell phones/microwave ovens/cable TV..." etc. etc. [For a horrifyingly cynical but funny take on this look here.] I am astounded by that, but it really hit home in the last couple of days.
Michael is one of the brightest kids I know, and I tell him that all the time. I always tell him he has a Ferrari brain and he's driving it like a beat up old VW.
We were watching Cast Away, the terrific movie about a Fed-X executive who gets stranded on a desert island. There is a scene with him answering a pager. I asked Michael if he knew what a pager was, and he said nope. I explained it. I was sitting there feeling sort of disjointed, remembering that when I moved to Atlanta in 1993 pagers were still very common. I would have to subpoena police officers for trial sometimes and I'd always have a pager number. Only rich people had cell phones.
My first cell phone, that I kept for years, was never used except in the car, and it plugged into the cigarette lighter. It was simply for emergencies.I never got one to carry around with me until after 9/11, and only because my mother insisted. I kept the same cell phone for 5 years after I adopted Alesia. My kids were embarrassed every time I took it out.
Of course, that's my new hobby: embarrassing my kids. It makes getting old a little more bearable.
When Michael tried on his new skinny jeans yesterday they were riding on his hips. I started to tell him to pull his pants up, but that phrase is useless. I was looking at them later, while he was getting ready for bed. They were intentionally MADE to ride low on the hips, according to the label. Good Lord. I was watching a program on HGTV while I ate lunch the other day and the man hunting for a vacation house wore his pants at his waist with his shirt tucked in. It looked BIZARRE to me. Just freaky weird. Pants at your WAIST?! What a dork. Then I caught myself and wanted to slap myself. Yikes.
We were watching the Today show this morning during breakfast and they were interviewing the cast of Back to the Future, and something was said about Ronald Reagan liking the movie. Michael said "Who's Ronald Reagan?" I nearly choked on my oatmeal. Mom handled it. I flashed back to the 1980's and all the fights I had with my dad because he LOVED Reagan and I couldn't stand him. Reagan refused to push for funding research during the first years of the AIDS crisis, as this article explains. Since I was a Drama major and always involved in music I had many gay friends. It's funny how just mentioning Reagan's name brought back that turbulent period of time.
Sometimes I feel like an ARTIFACT since I was born in 1962. It was the last century. OMG! My baby pictures are in black and white. I remember having a TV that weighed as much as an elephant. I sat in Mom's lap in the car. I couldn't wear pants to school until 5th grade. Many of the folks I graduated from high school with are now GRANDPARENTS!
In the words of the immortal Ferris Bueller [incidentally, played by Matthew Broderick, born in 1962]:
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
