Technically five, actually, since it’s almost 2am on Wednesday as I am writing this, but let’s just pretend it’s still Tuesday, okay?
I actually remembered to do this, then got busy with work, then looked up at the clock and realized that a whole two hours had gone by and…oops?
So here we are. Almost 2am on Wednesday-pretend-it’s-Tuesday.
Sooooo my birthday is March 27th (in case the math didn’t make that clear enough). Smack between winter and spring. the weather is usually crappy, but the one year it was nice, I was unable to walk due to the Great Surgery Adventure of 2019. Hoping for good weather this year!
I will be forty-seven years old. Three years away from a half a century on this lovely planet. Seventeen thousand one hundred fifty five days old, not quite exactly, because I don’t feel like figuring for leap years. I just looked it up, actually. It’s 17, 165 days, just ten more. Wow. And 564 months. There are a bunch of other figures, which I won’t bore you with, but I liked this one: 15.7 years sleeping (approximately). Seriously? Wow. That’s seriously mind-blowing.
So I was thinking back to my childhood. I’m sure you’re all aware that my generation is the last that never had cell phones, or internet, or any of the technology that we enjoy today. Cell phones came around — well, technically in the 80s because I remembered a friend of mine in middle school, her dad had one of those really big crazy bag “car phones” back in the day. I was pretty intrigued with the whole concept, even then. We didn’t get any until college, when we started commuting down to Detroit and my mom wanted to make sure we were safe, so we got one of those big bulky phones with like thirty-five free minutes on them. Yeeaah. Fun times. My first computer? In1998 for $1,500. It was a laptop. And it STILL WORKS to this day. I can’t connect it to the internet, but it will boot up and run. I did so much on that thing — web design, Photoshop…I didn’t even have virus software because back then, you didn’t really need it. You had to physically download it or get it off an infected disk (and we still used floppies AND Zip discs! Remember those?) so we were pretty safe. And then all of a sudden, omg, the hackers got smarter and put them on websites and whatnot and then we needed virus software. I’ve only had maybe three viruses though, to be honest. I am super careful, run my scans, keep everything up-to-date, everything. I’ve had so many people lose everything to viruses. And backups! I have a TON. Because one time, I lost an eight-page paper to a rogue Macintosh computer in my college days before the deadline and it wasn’t backed up. Never again! I said. To this day, I haven’t lost anything. I still have the original files from my Word Processor floppy discs. Yes. Pre-1998, pre-computers.
What else? We also had the good ole Atari and VCRs. Atari, man, we played that for hours! Never had a Commodore though. Or Nintendo. VCR…I had one up until I moved in with my hubby, in fact. I used to tape episodes of General Hospital! Then I went digital with a DVR. VCRs are hard to find now – but the ones that will record? Impossible. Trust me, I’ve tried.
It’s crazy how the world has changed so much! Or like, the internet. Googling stuff, even. When I am editing, I just Google words. I used to have to look them up in a dictionary. Or say you want to know when Freddie Mercury passed, or what season Adam Lambert was on American Idol, or something like that. You just Google it. In the 80s, you couldn’t do that. I can’t even imagine it, or not having a cell phone, or anything, but somehow we survived without these things just fine. For a long time, even. It blows my mind every time I think of it.
And the younger generations will never know that, will never know a world without these modern, awesome inventions. No Google. No cell phones. No internet. I mean, what the heck? What’s a VCR? What’s a pay phone? (I still see pay phone booths, but rarely. There’s a busted up one near my house. It’s kinda sad, actually). What’s Atari and a Commodore? A Word Processor? (I owned two, just before I bought my first computer). Remember Palm Pilots? I owned two of those too. They were cool! But they were quickly replaced by the iPads. I kinda miss them.
CDs in music stores? Our local music store had one rack of CDs. ONE RACK. Where it used to have aisles and aisles and aisles of CDs. Now it’s iTunes. I was in shock about that. But that’s where the future is, I guess?
So much stuff has just….disappeared. And we remember. But once we’re gone….who will remember?
I’m…not sure how I feel about that. I suppose there’s a story or poem in it somewhere. 😉
Meanwhile, think of me on the 27th. I’ll be eating my Mexican dinner and contemplating that I’ve made another trip around the sun. And lived to tell about it. 🙂