my 26th year

i have just turned 26-- a seemingly uneventful age to be, yet so much has happened in the world in my lifetime. i always expected that one day i would be a grandmother telling my young ones about how much i had seen, or all of the things that didn't exist when i was young. i am 26, and i can say so much has changed.

i have seen walkmen, and discmen become archaic.

i lived life before a cellphone and remember when only the richest, cool people from the movies had those bulky old carphones that looked like fax machines. i had a beeper and it was embarassing because people thought I was a drug dealer.

i remember religions having commercials.

i remember movies without commercials!! i remember saying to friends, wait until they hit up our theater time with consumerism!

i remember being able to smoke everywhere, and believe me at a point I did. Now, you're lucky i you can outside! When I started smoking a pack cost $2!

i remember fearing my parents and teachers more than anything else.

I remember television actually ending and getting those screens with the colored bars and the beeping sound or just snow. That used to scare me when I would wake up in the middle of the night.

I used a typewriter, because that is what there was and not because it was trendy.

I remember my dad telling me when I was 13 that my generation knew nothing about world issues, how we would never know what it was like to be in a state of war, or have anything significant happen to shake us up....and then there was 9/11.

I make it a point to mention all of this because as a teacher I am hyper aware that I am young, yet there is such a gap between my students and I as far as the versions of the world we have grown up in. I remember using microfiche in the library to do research...or even going to a library! There was a time that people relied on eachother and common sense--a time in which you just had to be savvy because you didn't have the world at your fingertips. I guess I enjoyed the naivete and the joy of discovery....but now it is different. Now, I feel that everything has sped up in life. At 26 I shouldn't have seen the world change so much.