Full-on plagiarized post

Yeah, I'm stealing this post from my brother. Because it's true. And because you youngn's need to read it! I'm editing for grammar so Angela can stand to read it, and for punctuation so I can stand to read it.

When I was a kid, my dad used to bore me to tears with his diatribes about how hard things were when he was growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning…uphill...both ways! (But seriously, my dad really did walk to school every day. To a one-room schoolhouse in the middle of a cornfield. Until the ripe old age of nine when farmers let their kids drive in Nebraska. But I digress...)

I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a trip like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it.

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty-something, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. They’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, they live in a Utopia.

They don’t know how good they’ve got it.

When I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves… in the card catalog. Which was actual cards with numbers and stuff on them, and you had to learn the Dewey Decimal System to use the library.

There was no email. We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen! And put it in an envelope, and actually lick a stamp. Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, stick up the red flag, and it would take like a week to get there.

There were no MP3’s or Napsters or Playlists. If you wanted to steal music, you had to walk to the record store and shoplift it yourself. Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up. And then you had to convince your parents you really needed a boombox with dual tape recorders so you could record all this crap for your friends on a mix tape. Like Flock of Seagulls.

We didn’t have fancy phone stuff like call waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal. That's it. And we didn’t have fancy caller ID either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, a collections agent. You had to pick it up and take your chances, missy.

We didn’t have any fancy Wii video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics. We had the Atari 2600 and a Commodore 64 computer. With games like Space Invaders and Asteroids. Your guy was a square box. You actually had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen f-o-r-e-v-e-r! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died. Just like LIFE. And we all had to learn how to write DOS.

You had to use a little book called the TV Guide to find out what was on TV. You were screwed when it came to channel surfing. You had to get off your chair and walk over to the TV to physically change the channel...by turning a dial. And there was no Cartoon Network either. You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons. And then we only got Tom and Jerry and the Road Runner.

We didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove. Try making a single hotdog on the stove. If you wanted to make popcorn, you had to heat up oil in a spinning popcorn pan and turn the dial for ten minutes and then pray to God you didn't burn it or yourself. And then pour real melted butter on it. With real salt.

Kids today have got it too easy. They're spoiled. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in 1980.