I turned 49 a couple of weeks ago and it hit me. Good lord, I’m old.
Not old, in the geriatric sense. I don’t have a weekly pill organizer or a calendar full of doctor appointments. And I still only have one cat.
But I’m oldER than most people I now encounter. It was a bit jarring, to be honest.
Someone mentions an event that happened in 2008, and that sounds reasonably recent to me. Then I stop to consider it, and realize 2008 was 17 freakin’ years ago. How did that happen? Kids who were born in 2008 are now driving.
My fellow GenXers and I are officially middle aged. We were the cool kids, the children of the ’80s. We pioneered the impatient eye roll, and directed it with targeted, teenaged derision at our out-of-touch Boomer parents. God, is it possible I now have more in common with those Boomers than with today’s youth?
I’ve actually caught myself saying, “Back in my day…”
There was no Google. No internet. No streaming services, satellite radio or social media.
But we did have stereos with TWO cassette decks. TWO. Our mix tapes were musical masterpieces, hard-earned over several nights of relentless request-line phone calls to the local radio station.
Then we got CDs and celebrated skipping directly from song to song, embracing the thrill of “shuffle,” and “repeat.”
We played Pitfall and Joust on Atari 2600 and marveled at how advanced gaming had become since Pong and ColecoVision.
We endured busy signals and used *69 to redial whoever had last called our landline.
We rented movies — on VHS tapes — from actual video stores, and got fined if we didn’t rewind them upon return.
We wrote down directions, read actual maps when driving and remembered dozens of phone numbers. Yes, most of them were only seven digits, because most of our friends all lived in the same area code, but it’s more than most kids today have saved in their own actual memory.
We made plans to meet friends at a concert’s will-call, and actually had to show up. On time. There was no GPS voice guiding us through every turn, and no apps to find our friends in crowds.
We went to the mall to get jeans at Gap and peruse the posters at Spencer Gifts.
As we got older, technology advanced, and we kept up. We were in our 20s for the Y2K panic.
But today? Not so much. We’re no longer the cool kids, or at least I’m not.
I don’t know how to make a “reel.”
I can barely use Instagram, and I still cling desperately to the use of punctuation, capitalization and actual words in text messages.
Jesus, I just found my old Rolodex in a cabinet the other day. Yes, a Rolodex — hundreds of index cards, with handwritten names and phone numbers flipping around a wheel.
I often still take handwritten notes during city commission meetings in an old-fashioned, lined, steno notebook with a spiral at the top.
I have no idea how many online friends and followers I have, and I couldn’t care less.
I’ve never participated in a TikTok challenge and I follow no one on TikTok.
I haven’t gotten around to getting my medical weed card. Not that it’s presented any sort of supply chain shortages on my end, as most of my friends show more initiative in renewing their weed card than they do in registering their vehicle every year.
But damn, I’m old. OK, once again, not old, per se, but perhaps obsolete.
Then again, I love having lived nearly half my life without the internet. I love having straddled two worlds and being able to remember both.
And for those kids who were born in 2008 — put your damn phone down and learn to drive — AND parallel park.
