Yea I'm getting older.
Not something you think about or realize and even with my recent birthday, thank you thank you you're too kind, it's not something I really notice that I'm not a teenager anymore.
That is until something like #GrowingUpWithStrictParents starts trending on Twitter.
Now I get it, I really do. In my youth I thought my parents were the most unreasonable of all adults on the planet. I think most kids feel this way.
But what I really got out of this social media "event" was kids today crying about how their parents take away their phones. Their phones. The iPhone's and Androids that 14 year olds have that can surf the web and watch movies and make voice commands.
Now I'm not old and grumpy enough to act like I didn't have a phone as a teenager. Cell phones were a relatively new science that were just beginning to become the normal thing for adults to own. I got my first cell phone my last year of high school. Not the faster than light also a spaceship kind pf today but a small Verizon flip phone with a nub antenna sticking off of it that severely poked you in the thigh if it was in your pocket and you bent the wrong way. Or anytime you wore pants as tight as I did.
So as people who grew up prior to color television or cars can understand my chagrin at younger youths complaining how they get such technological marvelousness taken from them by their strict parents. For the life of me: what are they complaining about? Instagram and snapchat will still be there when they get their phones back.
It's not like when I was 14 and you took a picture on a film camera and your friend said "Hey you wanna upload that to a social network?"
And you were like, "Yea that'd be cool so all my friends can see it!"
But then he said, "Well that's too bad cause nothing like that exists."
On my first cellphone if you hit the "internet" button you had a mini heart attack just before you hit the back button 57 times, turned off the power, and slammed it on the ground in a million pieces in hopes you wouldn't incur whatever $100 billion dollar data fee it was for connecting to the Internet.
At that point there wasn't even really anything on the Internet for me to check.
MySpace was sort of around, sure maybe I could get on Yahoo but by the time the page loaded my phone battery would have died so would it have really been worth it?
There were no multiple social networks and apps to be had. No Buzzfeeds or Reddits to give me endless hilarity and kitten pictures.
I guess I didn't realize what I was missing by not having these entitlements. Now it seems non access to such jubilation is a death sentence.
When/if my phone was taken away life simply reverted back to how it was for...oh, every other year of my life.
Playing sports outside. Building something. Testing out the "Dig a Hole to China" thing until you get bored and your hands hurt from blisters and you realize just how much being in a real life version of the movie Holes would suck.
And yes it's not just connection to the interwebs that makes today's revoked phone privileges such a pain for the youths. It's also the disconnect amungst friends. No talking to your friends, or texting to be more specific because talking on a phone is dumb. It's true that we have reached Alexander Graham Bell's true vision for the telephone as a completely silent and phalangicle communication device. But my quip is that you don't get how good you have it kids of today. Complain that you can't text your friends because your parents took your phone, but realize at lest when you can text them again you don't have to hit the 7 key four times times to get an "S".
The barbaric romanticism of T9 texting and it's laborious ways is lost on the young ones. There was a time when you got words wrong, not because your phone thought you wanted to say something else, because you either hit the 6 key two times instead of three or you forgot to hit the "next" key on the word "good" and said "That'll be home".
At any rate, you don't know how good you have it. In my day you had to ride your bike 5 miles to the video game store uphill both ways. This post is supposed to be ironic, but seriously, stop complaining that your strict parents took your smart phone away. Because we all know you just rolled your eyes and got on your IPad to watch 7 hours of Netflix while you stream Pandora.