In My Day...

Given that we're well into the first month of the year-long celebration of my 50th year on this planet, it's high time that I share some of my curmudgeonly thoughts with all of you. In today's post I angrily reflect on how the world has changed since I was a youngster in stretch polyester pants, happily playing hopscotch in the schoolyard with the other hep kids:

In my day...

• Stretch polyester pants were considered hep. And hep people used words like "hep" to describe activities like playing hopscotch and wearing polyester pants.
• Brownies were young Girl Guides, not squares - and they were hep, not square. No one would talk of hash brownies because hash was "a dish consisting of diced meat, potatoes and spices" and this made no sense when referring to young Girl Guides (and those few times when we referred to the brownies that were square treats with nuts, even the thought of hash brownies would be a complete gross-out, which used to be a hep term for such things by the way). Hash tags were labels that we would put on dishes consisting of diced meat, etc. Or they were pound signs, which just meant "number", as in #1 or #2.
• Birds twittered and tweeted. People who tweeted were locked away.
• Corduroy pillows made headlines, not 'celebrities' who were famous for nothing more than being famous. Crooked politicians resigned or were impeached. Mayors were the face of the city, even if they sometimes needed help from superheroes like Batman and Superman (whom they would call in to capture bag guys that did bad things like lying to the city, using drugs, or threatening others with violence). Political correctness wasn't an oxymoron, nor was it something we were all responsible for.
• Global warming was what Coke commercials did. And coke was something everybody did, but they drank it and it was good. And it had calories and caffeine. And people sang about it on a hill in hippie clothes. And they either didn't wear deodorant while doing so, or they sprayed it (which is why global warming is what it is today).
• Visible butt cracks were the domain of plumbers and carpenters. Thongs were things you wore on your feet - and today's thongs were called g-strings and they were only worn by exotic dancers (and occasionally plumbers and carpenters, which wasn't okay then but is now). Rubbers were used to erase mistakes, not prevent them.
• People were sometimes awful and mean and ignorant and racist and sexist and homophobic and that was bad. But most of them weren't able to spew their badness on the masses (just the people who had direct contact with them). And people weren't anonymous. And they didn't carry cameras. And they were free to make a mistake (like exposing their butt crack) and then put it behind them. (Get it? Get it?)
• Toronto sports teams weren't very good. Oh, wait.
• Ice cream was good for you (it had milk in it, which was also good for you). Yogurt was for hippies. Food wasn't organic, unless you grew it yourself - which was easier to do because of all the great pesticides and fertilizers you could buy at the store. Nobody (who was alive) had a life-threatening allergy to anything, especially peanut butter.
• Forget seat belts - we didn't even have seat belts in some cars and in all back seats. And even if there were seat belts in the back seat, we wouldn't need them because we were lying on the floor or sitting on our parents' laps up front. And air bags were the people who talked a lot. And they'd distract drivers by talking to them a lot from the passenger seat. Which would cause accidents. Which without air bags and seat belts were pretty serious always. But not being allergic to peanut butter compensated.
• There were only 10 or 11 TV channels. There was nothing on, but it only took a quick glance at the TV Guide to know that. If something good was on, we all watched it. All of us. And then we talked about it the very next day because if you missed it, you could never ever see it again.

Wow, this is surprisingly easy (I don't think that's a good sign). I guess I'll need a second installment to get it all said. So until the next "In My Day...", enjoy yours. Harrumph.