Ya know I think the youth of this generation have lost a lot of what made growing up in the 80s and 90s great.  I’m feeling a little nostalgic today and thought I would create a little list.

Saturday Morning Cartoons -The cartoons frickin suck on tv now and have been replaced with Japanimation shows that make no sense and annoying as hell pre teen sitcoms like Hannah Montana.  I’ve watched a few of these shows of they assume every kid is a frickin idiot and they’re painful to watch.  When I was a kid there were shows up on like Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats…etc, while they were cheesy they didn’t treat kids like they were morons and had some complex story lines that spanned multiple episodes, not bad for half hour toy commercials.

Going outside to play - Ya know I watch Vanessa’s kid and I don’t want to insult a 7 year old but the kid barely knows how to just go outside and let his imagination run wild.  He comes back to the door within 15 minutes complaining that he’s bored or cold or whatever excuse he can think of to come back in and Vanessa pretty much has to put to fear of God into him just to make him stay outside.  With so many indoor distractions mainly video games and the internet, kids have lost the ability to play or they have insane parents that don’t let them go outside by themselves because they’re afraid some kid napper will come grab them.  Man when we were kids we were crazy, we were outside all day, getting dirty, scrapping our knees, playing whatever games we could think of because no one had enough money for a Nintendo.  It’s pretty sad that kids have completely lost that now and will spend 10 hours playing video games without a second thought.   No wonder there are so many fat kids out there these days, because they don’t friggin do anything.

Making mix tapes – I remember having a massive stack of CDs or tapes and putting them into my awesome double sided tape deck and making my awesome mix tapes.  Each song had to flow into eachother and many times each tape a unique theme.  You also had to hit the play record buttons at the exact right millisecond to eliminate all the hisses and pops.  It was a labour of love, it would take hours and in the end was something that was uniquely yours.  You would show it off to your friends and listen to it over and over.  Now it takes 5 minutes to take a 1000 songs on an iPod.  If you don’t like your playlist it takes 2 minutes to fix it.  There’s no love or passion behind it, it’s way too simple.  People don’t buy CDs anymore, they just buy the one single off iTunes.  The entire experience of music has changed completely and when I was younger I appreciated the music much more.

When having 20 dollars made you feel like a millionaire - It wasn’t very often that I had 20 dollars but when I did I felt like I was on top of the world.  Then I would go to the store and buy something completely useless like 20 dollars worth of 5 cent candy.  Now 20 dollars is gone before you even realized you had it.

Sleepovers – Having a friend stay at your place definately doesn’t have the same allure as it did when we were kids.  I would have one almost every weekend, sometimes we wouldn’t even sleep and would stay up all night talking and joking around, eating junk food and watching movies.  It was something I really looked forward to and yeah puberty quickly marked the end of the sleepover then it just became something gay.

Cereal – Remember all those awesome cereals they had 20 years ago.  I never eat cereal anymore but walking down the cereal aisle these days you don’t see half of the cereals there that you used to.  You’d just pour some into a huge bowl turn on CBC, watched Mr. Dress-up and Sesame Street and you were good for the morning.

Having to go to the library – I just remember having to spend hours at libraries photo copying encylopedias and gluing them into my reports.  Also going there and taking out Garfield books and books about sciene and space.  I guess now things have improved and modern computing makes most of that so much easier and it makes me wonder why people really need to go to the library anymore.

When You Bought Lego by the Bucket – Now there’s Star Wars Lego and Harry Potter Lego and Indiana Jones Lego and Batman Lego and on and on.  It seems to be getting harder and harder just to buy plain Lego.  It’s also these ultra complicated things that takes an hour to put together and it’s so friggin expensive.

When you started planning your birthday 3 months in advance – I remember writing up the invitations, having a big party with all my friends there, eating so much junk food that I would be having sugar induced hallucinations.  Now it’s like whoopdey fuck I’m 31, my life still sucks and I’m one year closer to dying.

Life Being Simple – No bills, no mortgages, no girlfriends yelling at you, no real responsibililities.  Your main motivation behind getting up in the morning was playing and junk food and TV.  There was nothing expected out of you other then to go to school and do the odd chore.  Now everything is so stressful and complicated and a pain in the neck.  Nothing is simple when you get older and life can kick your ass if you’re not careful.

It’s a shame because I really think the youth of our generation are missing out on so much and may not be developing proper social and life skills that will help them later on life because they don’t seem to do anything.  Now if you don’t mind I’m going to make rice crispies with sugar and bananas in it and watch old Transformer cartoons.