Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[HudsonHawk]

Two weeks ago I was at my high school class's 50th reunion. For us, that would have been the class of 1915 coming to town to celebrate.

Kids today think of 1985, the year I graduated high school, the same way we thought of 1955 when we saw Back to the Future.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I was born during Eisenhower's second term and one of my grandfathers when young knew someone born in the 18th Century.

Since I've been born, there have been nine U.S. Presidents, the current one being born in 1961. Nine Presidents before I was born was Woodrow Wilson who was born in 1856.

 

[scotrace]

Remember The lesson of Lestat de Lioncourt: Vampires who do not keep up with changes in human society will slowly die.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Question:
How do you realize, you are getting older?

Answer:
You were in cinema, on the premiere of "Alien" and "Apocalypse Now".

 

[LizzieMaine]

And it's really getting bad when you think of those as recent movies you haven't gotten around to seeing yet.

 

[Trenchfriend]

And today, the teenagers don't know about the Commodore 64.

I'm old now...

 

[Fading Fast]

The young women and men at work are amazed that I saw "Jaws" in the theatre when it came out - that was a "these guys think I'm 100 years old" moment.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Question:
How do you realize, you are getting older?

Answer:
You were in cinema, on the premiere of "Alien" and "Apocalypse Now".

Not only did I see "Alien" in Santa Barbara on the day of its premier, but the next day I saw Sigourney Weaver by the pool at the Coral Casino in Montecito, surrounded by kids who hadn't known her name two days earlier. Then, that evening, I learned that her parents, Pat and Liz Weaver, had been friends of my California family for decades.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Not only did I see "Alien" in Santa Barbara on the day of its premier, but the next day I saw Sigourney Weaver by the pool at the Coral Casino in Montecito, surrounded by kids who hadn't known her name two days earlier. Then, that evening, I learned that her parents, Pat and Liz Weaver, had been friends of my California family for decades.

Amazing!

 

[AmateisGal]

The realization that my daughter has no idea how to operate a rotary phone (I don't even know if she's seen one!), cannot conceive of a world without the Internet, and has no idea what a set of encyclopedias is.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Middle-aged or older: "We had mechanical office-typewriters, without electrical-connection!"

Teen: "WHAAAT??"

 

[LizzieMaine]

[QUOTE="AmateisGal, post: 2006389, member: 34.]...and has no idea what a set of encyclopedias is.[/QUOTE]

That's one that hits really hard for me. I *loved* the encyclopedia as a kid -- I'd sit leafing thru it for hours, even when I was supposed to be doing something else. There was nothing better for learning about the world and everything in it -- every page was something new that you'd never heard of before.

I suppose you can find that on the internet today, but there's way too many things I've come across online that I wish I'd never heard of. And the tactile pleasure of the encyclopedia volumes themselves is something you'll never get from a computer. Our school had a set of the World Book which featured transparent celluoid pages that showed the various organs and arrangements of the human body, and each page you'd turn would peel back a layer of the body so you could get a sense of how it all fit together. I thought that was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen.

I still have my set of the Britannica, 1937 "Coronation Edition," and I still use it, read it, and enjoy it.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I also spent endless hours paging through our World Book Encyclopedia as a kid. It was a major source of my interest in - and knowledge of - so many things! Browsing Wiki nowadays is also great... but it's very different from just going through articles in alphabetical sequence.

I recently had one of these realizations: I was showing my 16mm print of a 1943 cartoon at a party I was throwing. (Which is pretty darn retro in itself! But there's still some potent magic in film projection that's very different from digital media.) When I first got that print, the film was 30 years old, which seemed impossibly far in the past since I was only 19 or 20.

I recalled that... and then realized that I have now owned this film for 42 years! The seventies (my college years) are now much further in the past than WWII was then! It totally freaked me out.

 

[LizzieMaine]

When I was thirteen years old, they were tearing down an old neighborhood grocery store next to my grandparents' house, and I enjoyed poking around in the rubble. Among the things I found were several magazines dating between 1930 and 1938 -- and I marveled at the fact that some of them were *over forty years old." Next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of my finding them. Oooweee.

 

[MisterCairo]

Steve Jones, Sex Pistols guitarist, recently turned 60.

I'm about to see my seventh Star Wars film in the theatre on its release.

It's been eighteen years since they RE-released Star Wars (A New Hope).

I'm serving with commissioned officers who've never used a VCR.

 

[Trenchfriend]

VHS-Recorder are still popular in Germany, I think, and VHS-Cassettes are still available on normal supermarket. My Panasonic VHS-recorder is from 2006. Germany isn't that enthusiastic on high-tec-products, because of the unreliability of digital-devices.

My beloved tube-tv ist now 15 1/2 years old and I am 31. It's my second TV and will be the last, because I'm loving hearing (culture)-radio much more.

 

[Braz]

Since I've been born, there have been nine U.S. Presidents, the current one being born in 1961. Nine Presidents before I was born was Woodrow Wilson who was born in 1856.

I realized today that I have been alive during the administrations of fully one-quarter of all U.S. presidents, starting with FDR.

 

[LizzieMaine]

At the time of the 1930 census, there were still several thousand Americans alive who had been alive during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a man who was born in the year 1767.

 

[T Jones]

If I subtract my age from my birth year, it's 1911, which seems like an unimaginably long time ago.

1893 for me. One year before my great-grandmother was born!
Dwight Eisenhower was only at the half way mark of his first term as President when I was born.
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I can still remember the announcement over the school loud speaker that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
I can still remember when we prayed in school and when it was taken away.
I still remember "Duck and Cover".
When I was a kid I thought that only rich people owned color TVs.
I've been alive for 11 presidents!
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush Sr.
Clinton
Bush the younger
Obama
I'm old, but gladly not the oldest!

 

[Juanito]

I started college in 1985. I listed to a lot of the "oldies,"surf music, and classic rock. I drove a 1969 Camaro and a 1955 Chevy. While it seemed very old at the time, the music was only 15-30 years old; the cars were only 16 and 30 years old at the time at the time. That would be like listening to Van Halen or Nirvana today and driving a 1985 or 1999 vehicle.

What really disturbs me though, is that when my first daughter starts college in 2027 and the second one in 2029, that will be 42 and 44 years after I did. They will have as much in common with my experience as I did with someone who started in the middle or actually before WWII; in fact, I may have had more in common with the WWII group as neither of us had cell phones, computers, or any of the other technology that showed up shortly after I started school and is so pervasive it is a given today...and to think that I thought the alumni that came back to visit after 5 years were over the hill.

"Your parents heard Kurt Cobain play live, wow they must be old"

I actually did see Kurt Cobain play at the Crocodile Cafe when I lived in Seattle in 1992.