Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Keep Your Facebook, I'll Keep My Mixed CDs

I’m continually amazed by and possibly jealous of the cool gadgets kids have these days. I’ve noticed myself uttering the phrase when I was a kid… all too often these days; I’m making myself feel old. For example, I was telling my students the other day about gasoline prices and how, even as recently as 1998, they used to be less than a dollar. The look in their eyes was asking me if my 1912 Stutz Bearcat got more than 3 tobacco tins of petro per 100 paces back then.  This feeling of being an anachronistic character from The Great Gatsby occurs on a daily basis. One of the lame background characters, too – not Gatsby.


The students I teach right now were born around 1992-1993 – I was 13 when they were born. There have been some many crazy technological advances since then that I DO probably seem like a toothless, turn-of-the-century prospector to them. I could go on and on about all of the changes that have happened since I was their age, but there is one change that makes me happy to have not gone through. I am SO happy that Facebook and MySpace didn’t exist when I was in high school – and college for that matter. Well, MySpace did but I wasn’t computer savvy enough to use it.

I imagine that I would have posted the dumbest, most embarrassing comments. I think about all of the just idiotic things I said to girls over the phone because I wasn’t face to face with them. I can’t imagine what I would have done or said if I didn’t even have to SAY these things. I bet young, impulsive high school boys are getting in trouble on a daily basis for leaving long love notes on girls’ walls, and then are being ridiculed when all of their friends see these asinine comments. I’m not even talking about cyber-bullying – I’m talking about cyber-dumb-ass-ery for everyone for all eternity to see.

I imagine there is quite a bit more of this happening in college. Boys aren’t any smarter then. Tell me that this scenario isn’t plausible: College boy goes out with his buddies to a local college bar. He drinks a few drinks and meets a girl. He is charming and she is interested. Girls leaves. Boy stays out with his buddies. Inebriated boy gets home and posts that he found his future wife on her wall (“Jsst wantedd tooo said heyy to me future wife. Holllla at cha boy!”). Girl makes a point to never cross paths with this pathetic, over-eager misspeller ever again. Next weekend: same thing, different girl (“Babby, you’re a firrwrrks! Yoo compete me1 Holllla at cha boy!”).  

This has to be happening every night, all over the world, right?

I’m happy that I was able to avoid this hornet’s nest. My wife just gets mixed CDs filled with Bone Thugs and Harmony and Lou Bega (his b-sides, not even Mambo No. 5) when I want to let her know I truly love her.  

8 comments:

  1. I'm not sure anyone is old enough to post anything on Facebook that's not asinine. But still, it pulls you in and steals half your life anyway.
    Love the line about the Stutz Bearcat.
    It Just Got Interesting

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dude....I had to explain 'Nirvana' and Kurt Cobain to a bunch of teens the other day. *sigh* They enjoyed the music though AND I got to tell my Kurt Cobain joke:

    What was the last thing to go through Kurt Cobain's mind before he died?


    His Teeth.

    ............oh,no she didn't!

    ReplyDelete
  3. i hear ya about the looking back on your old self and 'facepalming'. when i see the things that i wrote as a youngster i cringe. though perhaps in 10 years i will look at this very message and cringe :O

    by the way, i just posted a guide on keto. if you are still interested in losing weight, i think you should really check it out and see if it's for you. hopefully i'm not too robotic this time :p

    ReplyDelete
  4. I feel like I've been denied a very special part of my high school days. I had a Myspace in high school (it was only available to college students when I was in high school) and I never had any boy leave me love notes on there...

    Although my high school boyfriend did take a picture of Tom Felton off of my wall and circled his pecks and labeled them "boobies" and insisted, in a long and very well worded argument, that he was female and it was stupid of me to find him attractive. It didn't work, which is perhaps the only part of the entire thing he regretted. And maybe he regretted posting it ten times, but I think that was probably intentional.

    @Duchess: I just told that joke to Padawan. He didn't get it. So sad...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Meet me at the crossroads, crossroads.
    Haha, this is great. My first tank of gas I filed up had prices under a dollar too. So stop making me feel old too.
    You are so right. I cannot even imagine having facebook in high school. It would have been bad news allllll over. It got popular my senior year of college, but even then it wasn't like it is today.
    PS - your 'holla atcha boy' made me think of this HILARIOUS site you might enjoy. Its called http://www.holladaddy.com/. You are welcome. (and fyi, no porn or anything, but also maybe not sfw, haha)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I watch my poor nephews post the dumbest things almost daily. Makes me sad. Sometimes I comment and try to turn their mistyped comments into something positive, but it is not always possible.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I find myself doing that all the time. Still being in college at my age means I'm surrounded by young-ins. There's a 15-year-old on the team that doesn't have a conscious memory of 9/11 and that freaks me OUT.

    -E

    ReplyDelete
  8. I get embarrassed by things I post two hours ago. I couldn't even imagine having to live with high school FB posts floating around on the internet. I think there should be an option for people to erase their internet leavings every couple years. It would be like flushing the toilet, really.

    ReplyDelete