dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2019-07-16 09:38 pm
dragonlady7) wrote2019-07-16 09:38 pm
Entry tags:
A Serious Question
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laughingacademy:
plaidadder:
So, I took PJ to Baskin Robbins today and evidently they are having a whole Scoops Ahoy tie-in thing. This led to PJ asking me about Stranger Things, which she has heard about but not seen. I was explaining the show and I mentioned that a big part of its appeal is that it was set in the 1980s. For people in my generation, we remember the 1980s, so it’s nostalgic. For people 10-15 years younger than me, the 1980s is either their early childhood or a fantasy landscape they know of only through 80s movies, but it still evokes memories. For kids your age, I said, you get to see what life was like before the Internet.
She asked, perfectly seriously, “What did you DO?”
I said, well…
* We watched a lot of TV. We also talked about TV a lot because we were all watching the same six shows. (The LOOK on her face when I told her there were only four networks for most of the 1980s.)
* We wrote letters. I did, anyway. Letters to who, she asked. Friends you met at camp; friends you had in elementary school or high school who moved away; relatives, etc.
* We made fake commercials with our cassette recorders, like you and your friends do on your iPad.
* We talked to each other. Long conversations, in person, on the phone, about stuff.
* We hung out.
* We spent a lot of time listening to music.
And, you know, for me, I was writing a lot, and some of my friends were also Creative Types. But basically that was what I came up with. Feel free to add your own answers if you are old enough.
Trying to breakdance. Many cardboard boxes were sacrificed to the cause
Roller skating (not rollerblading, because in-line skates weren’t a thing yet)
Riding my bike (never did manage to pop a wheelie)
Reading. I dominated the Book-A-Thons. My parents’ friends and co-workers quickly learned not to pledge more than 10¢ a book
I was born in 1979 so I lived through the whole 80s, and honestly I’m not super into the nostalgia, but what did we DO back then?? Well it was different for everyone because not everyone does the same things now! And a lot of the things I did then, my niblings do now, because kids are kids and stuff remains pretty universal.
I spent an awful lot of time just making up elaborate games with my sisters. Some involved us pretending to be some sort of animal, outdoors. Some involved the giant bin of Barbies, and we’d collaboratively come up with an epic story to tell, and then act it out over the course of several days, with five thousand full-cast outfit changes.
I read a lot of books. Sometimes we played board games as a family. I’m really good at Scrabble and I really don’t like it. Sometimes we did puzzles, though that was less common– Grandma was really into them though, so whenever we were at her house she’d have one going on the card table and we learned the basics of how to sort the pieces by color and start with your edges and such. Kids still learn that, though; Farmkid just finished her first 200-piecer and she’s five.
Mom threw us all into the car one or two days a week in summer, and sometimes on weekends during the school year, and drove us to every single free or low-cost event or location she could find. Every historic site, every museum, every hiking trail. I could recite the recording from the push-button exhibit at the Saratoga Battlefield. We watched boats go through the lock on the nearby Erie Canal. (Actually I think we’re on the Champlain spike of it, but I don’t recall.) (Oh yes, Lock 4. We could hear the ship’s horns from our house, even though it was miles away, and sometimes she’d throw us in the car and we’d drive up there fast to see the lock keeper open the lock. Because it takes like 45 minutes to open the lock, so we’d usually make it.)
We memorized the times of our favorite shows on TV and had elaborate negotiations to decide which ones we’d get to watch, since we were only allowed 1 hour of TV a day (not counting when our parents were watching too, though, so often we’d watch whatever sitcoms Mom and Dad put on in the evenings even if they were dumb because that was free bonus TV). Mom and Dad had their own TV in the bedroom, but it was black and white, and they only used it occasionally; later on, my younger sisters would watch their CW shows up there because they were embarrassing. (The B&W set had died by then, and it was an old color set Dad had wired up to use a lightswitch to turn on and off, and the channel selector only sometimes worked. That’s the 90s though, not the 80s, I’m digressing.)
We called our friends on the phone and would talk about nothing for extended periods, on the kitchen phone with the long cord you could take around the corner, or sometimes when we got older, on the phone in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. (To this day, that phone’s a rotary dial, so you can no longer dial out with it because the line only reads touch-tone pulses now.) I haven’t called anyone on the phone in eons, but I used to be just as bad as any teenage girl.
We went to the library at least every other week without fail, and got the maximum number of books Mom’s library card could handle. Often, we passed books around the whole family before they went back; I’d read a lot of pulp mysteries by the time I was in junior high. Every Dick Francis ever. Because there was always a stack of them. That’s how I learned to devour a 300-page pulp novel in two hours, because I learned the formula, and that way I could get through the whole stack and have time to reread before someone else wanted a turn with the book.
My mom and dad babysit my nieces and nephews and in many ways, they do all the same stuff, with little variation, but– having TV on demand, that just plays whatever show you want, that’s a huge difference, and they have games on iPads and things. Those are mostly just the frills, though– the fundamental stuff is still the same. Those kids are still learning to bike and rollerskate and swim and are going to museums and making up elaborate games and all.
Being able to text their aunts and get photos of their cousins’ every landmark is new, though; I only knew what my cousins were up to if my dad had called his siblings, or if they sent a card. Aunt Judy mailed letters to Grandma from Norway with photos of her kids, and then Grandma would photocopy them and send copies to everyone so they’d all know what Judy was up to, and that was our only contact with them because long-distance was too expensive. But now we have a family group text and my sister sends photos every time her kids do anything, like learn to bake or make a huge slip-n-slide or graduate first grade. The cousins in Norway are on Instagram and I can DM them directly if I want, but I don’t, and honestly we were more up on their lives when Judy was sending letters.
laughingacademy:
plaidadder:
So, I took PJ to Baskin Robbins today and evidently they are having a whole Scoops Ahoy tie-in thing. This led to PJ asking me about Stranger Things, which she has heard about but not seen. I was explaining the show and I mentioned that a big part of its appeal is that it was set in the 1980s. For people in my generation, we remember the 1980s, so it’s nostalgic. For people 10-15 years younger than me, the 1980s is either their early childhood or a fantasy landscape they know of only through 80s movies, but it still evokes memories. For kids your age, I said, you get to see what life was like before the Internet.
She asked, perfectly seriously, “What did you DO?”
I said, well…
* We watched a lot of TV. We also talked about TV a lot because we were all watching the same six shows. (The LOOK on her face when I told her there were only four networks for most of the 1980s.)
* We wrote letters. I did, anyway. Letters to who, she asked. Friends you met at camp; friends you had in elementary school or high school who moved away; relatives, etc.
* We made fake commercials with our cassette recorders, like you and your friends do on your iPad.
* We talked to each other. Long conversations, in person, on the phone, about stuff.
* We hung out.
* We spent a lot of time listening to music.
And, you know, for me, I was writing a lot, and some of my friends were also Creative Types. But basically that was what I came up with. Feel free to add your own answers if you are old enough.
Trying to breakdance. Many cardboard boxes were sacrificed to the cause
Roller skating (not rollerblading, because in-line skates weren’t a thing yet)
Riding my bike (never did manage to pop a wheelie)
Reading. I dominated the Book-A-Thons. My parents’ friends and co-workers quickly learned not to pledge more than 10¢ a book
I was born in 1979 so I lived through the whole 80s, and honestly I’m not super into the nostalgia, but what did we DO back then?? Well it was different for everyone because not everyone does the same things now! And a lot of the things I did then, my niblings do now, because kids are kids and stuff remains pretty universal.
I spent an awful lot of time just making up elaborate games with my sisters. Some involved us pretending to be some sort of animal, outdoors. Some involved the giant bin of Barbies, and we’d collaboratively come up with an epic story to tell, and then act it out over the course of several days, with five thousand full-cast outfit changes.
I read a lot of books. Sometimes we played board games as a family. I’m really good at Scrabble and I really don’t like it. Sometimes we did puzzles, though that was less common– Grandma was really into them though, so whenever we were at her house she’d have one going on the card table and we learned the basics of how to sort the pieces by color and start with your edges and such. Kids still learn that, though; Farmkid just finished her first 200-piecer and she’s five.
Mom threw us all into the car one or two days a week in summer, and sometimes on weekends during the school year, and drove us to every single free or low-cost event or location she could find. Every historic site, every museum, every hiking trail. I could recite the recording from the push-button exhibit at the Saratoga Battlefield. We watched boats go through the lock on the nearby Erie Canal. (Actually I think we’re on the Champlain spike of it, but I don’t recall.) (Oh yes, Lock 4. We could hear the ship’s horns from our house, even though it was miles away, and sometimes she’d throw us in the car and we’d drive up there fast to see the lock keeper open the lock. Because it takes like 45 minutes to open the lock, so we’d usually make it.)
We memorized the times of our favorite shows on TV and had elaborate negotiations to decide which ones we’d get to watch, since we were only allowed 1 hour of TV a day (not counting when our parents were watching too, though, so often we’d watch whatever sitcoms Mom and Dad put on in the evenings even if they were dumb because that was free bonus TV). Mom and Dad had their own TV in the bedroom, but it was black and white, and they only used it occasionally; later on, my younger sisters would watch their CW shows up there because they were embarrassing. (The B&W set had died by then, and it was an old color set Dad had wired up to use a lightswitch to turn on and off, and the channel selector only sometimes worked. That’s the 90s though, not the 80s, I’m digressing.)
We called our friends on the phone and would talk about nothing for extended periods, on the kitchen phone with the long cord you could take around the corner, or sometimes when we got older, on the phone in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. (To this day, that phone’s a rotary dial, so you can no longer dial out with it because the line only reads touch-tone pulses now.) I haven’t called anyone on the phone in eons, but I used to be just as bad as any teenage girl.
We went to the library at least every other week without fail, and got the maximum number of books Mom’s library card could handle. Often, we passed books around the whole family before they went back; I’d read a lot of pulp mysteries by the time I was in junior high. Every Dick Francis ever. Because there was always a stack of them. That’s how I learned to devour a 300-page pulp novel in two hours, because I learned the formula, and that way I could get through the whole stack and have time to reread before someone else wanted a turn with the book.
My mom and dad babysit my nieces and nephews and in many ways, they do all the same stuff, with little variation, but– having TV on demand, that just plays whatever show you want, that’s a huge difference, and they have games on iPads and things. Those are mostly just the frills, though– the fundamental stuff is still the same. Those kids are still learning to bike and rollerskate and swim and are going to museums and making up elaborate games and all.
Being able to text their aunts and get photos of their cousins’ every landmark is new, though; I only knew what my cousins were up to if my dad had called his siblings, or if they sent a card. Aunt Judy mailed letters to Grandma from Norway with photos of her kids, and then Grandma would photocopy them and send copies to everyone so they’d all know what Judy was up to, and that was our only contact with them because long-distance was too expensive. But now we have a family group text and my sister sends photos every time her kids do anything, like learn to bake or make a huge slip-n-slide or graduate first grade. The cousins in Norway are on Instagram and I can DM them directly if I want, but I don’t, and honestly we were more up on their lives when Judy was sending letters.