Spoiler Alert: This is one of those completely random posts that has nothing to do with anything and merely me just taking advantage of having a blog to express some arbitrary thoughts.
So I have had the same group of best friends since elementary school. I’m not a spaz who’s never made a new friend since, just someone who’s been fortunate enough to make it through my adolescence (including the immature, hormonal AND bitchy years of growing up as a girl) without killing my girlfriends and them not killing or hating me. We’re now spread out geographically with two of us living down here, one in NYC, one in NJ, and one in DC and yet we still manage to keep abreast of every detail of one’s life, important as well as insignificant. Well Miss New Jersey was down this weekend visiting her family and while home she did thing ever and rummaged through old photographs, texting them to all of us. Besides laughing so obnoxiously that Jared wanted to kill me, a couple of things came to mind…
Kids/Teens these days vs Us: While we’re not exactly fossils yet (still in our 20s, hey hey!), it becomes more and more apparent that we’re getting old. The basketball belly of mine is adding as a daily reminder to me. Well, the differences of the shit we dealt with versus what kids these days deal with are blinding!
Let’s just talk appearance wise first. Kids these days are much more attractive and as they should be! They’re getting braces earlier, there’s even invisalign if their rents find them worthy enough to make the investment, that already helps your awkward phase by 40%! Growing up in So Fla the humidity was our biggest enemy. And what did we have to deal with? Courtyard schools and outdoor portables..inhumane! Thus our biggest goal in life was to defend humidity which even lead some girls to PERMS during middle school. Luckily I dodged that bullet but some of us weren’t as lucky (cough cough Pam). We then became guinea pigs for the flat iron. These were not the best back then, ConAir thought they’d be geniuses and create one with a little built-in steamer. You legit loaded this thing with water as if it was an f-ing Super Soaker (Do kids these days even know what those are?…ok, point for us)! Because let’s bring more water, steam and humidity to the hair! Then there was the Solano (see above photo for reference). This should now only be purchased from Antiques Road Show these days. It was like 20 pounds (way too heavy for my marionette arms back then seeing as I was like 60 pounds soaking wet…and I wondered why I didn’t have a boyfriend) and fried your hair to death! But hey, you successfully had straight hair from the time you were home until half way through 1st period. Victory!! There were none of these amazing blow dry bars and apparently the only makeup that was relatively known to us was Wet and Wild and NYX and only later we were luckily introduced to MAC. Now I see these girls frolicking about in Sephora making stupid jokes about whether they like being “Naked” or “Naked 2” and laughing their asses off in reference to the same Urban Decay palette that I own. Wtf?? They deserve to suffer in their awkward years just like we had to. In middle school (aka the haven of awkward years) to accommodate for dress code, we were stuck in bell bottom jeans from Wet Seal and sneaks from Steve Madden that resembled that of moon shoes. Man we looked like idiots. (I would share one of these prized photos, but you may never take beauty or fashion advice from me again.) Once in high school we had the privilege of finally putting our Seventeen Prom issues to use and attend homecomings and proms. Now girls these days really don’t know how lucky they are when it comes to formal dances! I see younger siblings and relatives of friends of mine strutting around in their little dresses and there’s no tool, no glitter, no butterfly clips in hair. No, instead they’re in the same Parker and Alice + Olivia sequin dresses that we rock ourselves on New Years Eve. Cool. Poor Jessica McClintock…
Now on to the differences between socializing. What do they even do these days?? I just picture every teen to be acting out Miley Cyrus’s terrible new music video and I cringe. Growing up in our town it went from hanging out at the Roller Skating Rink to then the Ice Rink to then just basically driving around like idiots thinking we were the shit because we drove. Not to mention COUNTLESS meals at T.G.I.Friday’s. Like how are they still in business now that our generation doesn’t go? Now girls just dress up in crop tops and take selfies and probably sext and Snap Chat with the loser boys they want to flirt with. How did we communicate? It went from calling each other on our family’s landline, to scoring your own landline (sa-weet!), to writing notes, to sharing a notebook (with alias names of course), to beeper codes, to chat rooms and screen names, to cell phones, and finally to now keeping an on-going group text message between the five of us. (Our world is now that much better with emojis because that’s how lame we are.) There were no iPhones, iPods, iPads. Instead, we had mixed tapes and eventually mixed CDs. Although we had N’Sync which probably trumps anything kids are listening on their schmancy devices, another point for us.
In summary we sure missed out on a hell of a lot of cool stuff that kids growing up now totally take for granted, but we also know the joys of the Oreo Madness and those fools are simply missing out.
(And just kidding to any teen readers out there, I’m just bitter because you guys rock and don’t have to use disposable cameras that you have to turn the flash on and wind up.)
Xo,
Leah
