Seppo Down Under

No Friends for You!

I sometimes play the "blog lottery", whereabouts I surf random blogs to see who is stealing all of my readership and occupying space on Al Gore's internet that could go towards storage and transport of free pornography and buttonhook websites (you guys remember making a lame piece of "art" with yarn and a mesh number-coded platen...long live buttonhook). In my blog travels, I have come across many pages of teenage angst. The last year of high school, the first year of high school, just hangin' out in high school. Is it just me, or are kids that much worse off today? I hate to call them "kids", as that classifies me as a "not kid", but the number of potential future collegiate eating disorders and substance abuses I read alarms me.

I am all for technology. I think computers and the web are great networking tools, and make life easier (unless you ever put a computer in for service with Best Buy). But for the kids today, the internet is just another avenue where you face potential disappointment. For that matter, the same goes for adults and the dating websites. Instead of the limited number of people you actually meet in person rejecting you, you get countless numbers of "foxylady99"s or "sillygirl"s who can stomp right on your attempt to find that small group of people with whom you completely meld.

As a teenager, you are ultimately worried about your appearance. I guess that's where the internet comes in handy. I was a fat kid, and a rotund early teenager, but I was a funny fat kid not the depressed recluse. I would have loved to get ahold of photoshop and paste my head onto a body shot of Patrick Swayze (the total babe magnet from my days of teenagerdome), misrepresenting my portly physique in the ultimate act of deviance and betrayal. There you go, "Lipstick Lisa76", I'm a hottie, not a fatty! But alas, I had to deal with the fact that I wore the same pants size as my father (although I was 9 inches shorter). I think it was where I developed my self deprecating humour. I was Chunk from "The Goonies", and the "truffle shuffle" was well within my range of entertaining diddys. Another fun game I had to suffer through was "What is this colour", performed by my older brother in front of his friends. You see, as per the wondrous reality of genetics, I am colour blind (from maternal G-Pa). Technically Red/Green colour blind, but I prefer the term "colour deficient". I think you can tell where this is going. Older brother, his friends, coloured object, and one colour blind little brother...you work it out. Little did we know until later, my twin brother is also colour blind but never made it apparent, so he never got to call blue, purple or green, brown much to the amusement of a bunch of 12 year olds.

So, technology when I was a growing up was the state of the art Commodore 64. We had the flash version with the cassette drive. Remember this way of slamming your brother?

1>Print, "Keith is a butthole"
2>Goto 1
3>Run

And the screen would scroll down with line after line of "Keith is a butthole"...good times, yeah, good radio. Then there was the "Meow Meow" program that ran from the tape drive. The more affluent programmers (my older brother) could hack the DOS text of the cat face to make him look like ET. What a master stroke! Then there was the Oregon Trail. Funnest computer game ever invented. Where else can you barter with and /or fight with hostile and friendly natives all while traveling across the Great Plains in a wagon? Cholera, cool!

So I think my generation came out better, having not had the "advantages" of technology. We had to take our lumps in person, and were forced to hop on our bicycles to go visit instead of texting or IM'ing our friends. As a member of (baby boomers + Gen X)/2 generation, we grew up to some of the best music, best clothing styles, and worst haircuts of the 20th century. Long live the 25-35 ers in all of their breakdancing, valley girl glory.