YESTERDAY AND TODAY... THE BIG DIFFERENCE

Reminiscing by Shanah B

When I was a kid, every old person around me used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were... When they were growing up; what with walking distance just to get to school every morning.... Uphill...Downhill... Barefoot.... BOTH ways… yadda! blah! yadda! yaddah!!!

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 my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm just around the corner waiting to join the group of dear Golden ladies in a few months, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared with 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 Bic pen! Then we had to ride a good fifteen minutes all the way to the mean post office- buy appropriate stamps, which most mailers would rather wet it with their saliva to make it stick to the envelopes than using the now you see it now you don't water soaked dirty sponge. Eww!! lOh! Believe me, we actually needed to make all those stamps stick lest letters dropped with even a peso worth of stamp missing wouldn't reach its destinations and you'll be damned! After which, we still need to put it ourselves in the designated mailboxes- and it would take a week for those filthy envelopes to get to its recipients!! Sounds like an exaggerated lie eh? Well, it ain't!! Check it out- a single stamp costs a peso or so....

The presently so-called Bantay-bata services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, parents of some of our bonehead buddies also had permission to kick our asses! You bet! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you so much wanted music and you become restless, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Believe me, this kind of thing was once "in" among the well offs!

Or just like my brother Joey- you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio (one by one), and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! Damned big mouth radio announcers spoilers!! There were no CD players! We only had cassette tapes We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and most of the time, the tape would come entangled rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?!?

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! Can you live with that???

There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, the phone stays behind too, or are you crazy? and you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends." to get one. OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

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 seatmate, your lousy suitor, your back-numbered colleagues, the person you didn't want hearing from, your stalker, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances!! !@#$%^&*()!!!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the FAMICOM with games like Mario Brothers and the like. Then the Atari 2600! with games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Polaris'. Your screen guy was a just a mere 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 games just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

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!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

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 not many of us had microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to do the thing by simply heating the frying pan!! Imagine that?!

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten!