But some things do. And the hub and I have gone through a laundry list of what we had/saw/did/used growing up that Britton will never know. Follow me down memory lane.....
1. The green pages. My dad used to lose his mind if the green pages went missing. Because without the green pages, you didn't know what was on the television schedule for that week. The "green section" came in the Sunday paper, and it was preserved in a constantly-folded condition, next to the remote control. We didn't spring for TV Guide, so without the green pages, we would have never known what was on all of our 30 channels.
2. No cell phones. My mom actually owned the Zach Morris giant cell phone. I didn't have a cell phone until I was in my second year of law school. That was only seven years ago. And I didn't know what texting was until maybe two years ago. Because I'm not currently thirteen years old, with a cellphone-less past I can't remember, obsessive cell phone use bothers me. I scream at people using their phones (and texting!) while driving. I laugh at people who text while grocery shopping and run into a meat freezer. Britton will never remember a world without cell phones.
3. But she'll never use an answering machine. And there was just something about coming home to a blinking light that voicemail isn't going to replace.
4. More technology, I know, but it seems to be what changes the most. Computers. My sister Jessica bought her first computer when we were sixteen or thereabouts. It was so slow. They all were. My mom had one of those old computers where the cursor would blink over the green rectangles. In college, it took me over three hours to illegally download a song off Napster. And that's if the dial-up internet connection didn't fizzle out when 95% of the song was downloaded! My iPhone is a better computer than the Gateway (yes, Gateway) that lasted me six years. And I only had to get rid of it because it caught a virus and couldn't be updated enough to install anti-virus software. Heck, my iPhone is faster than my desktop computer I use for work every day, but of course that desktop is loaded down with over 8500 photos. Photos I never print anymore because....why? See the next one.
5. Remember film? Remember that excitement of one-hour film development? You'd order double prints so you could give copies to your friends. And my scrapbooks, oh my scrapbooks. I'm currently ordering the six iPhoto albums I have saved on the computer, one dating back to 2007. No longer are 100 pictures strewn across the floor, ready to be put in chronological order. I just open a new blank album and clip and drop in photos in pre-arranged places. It's not the same, and not even close.
6. Television shows. My dad sat me and Jessica down for the premiere of MTV. Seriously, on the day it premiered, we all sat on the old sectional, mouths agape, and watched MUSIC. ON TELEVISION. Britton won't see MTV that way, since they don't actually play any music videos anymore. But she will know all the crap we know as reality shows. And MTV was the birth place of reality shows - "Real World," anyone? There's a great theory that the only true "Real World" was the first. Ever since then, they have filled the position of "out-of-control anger issue" and "virginal innocent" and "smart but unattractive female" and you get the idea. Ever since then (or really, the premiere of any reality show), the people who show up on season two, three, and more are just imitating what they saw the season before.
Everything changes all the time, right? I just hope snow cones never do.
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