Or I’m celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of my 21st birthday. 
I’m about (in a couple months) to celebrate the 27th anniversary of my 21st (which is odd in itself since I’ve had more anniversaries than birthdays…). I’ve only recently realized that I’m actually a “veteran” employee - I’ve been there 15 years and know all the people who are retiring these days. And, because I have 20 years of service credit, I’ll actually be eligible to retire in just over 10 years at the most. And I’m actually starting to think about it in detail.
And then there’s my Mom, who admired pictures of my friend’s younger cousin and her parents. Cousin had just graduated and Mom’s remark was: “Her parents look so young.” My reply: they’re my age. I think I made her feel old, since her only grandkids are much younger. (My brother was 40-ish when they were born.)
But really, I’m just a kid!!!
GT
I know the feeling. The other day, I was eating lunch, with a couple of my younger co-workers, in a restaurant in Savannah called Gator Burgers. My friends were ogling the very comely young waitress and I found myself thinking, “I wonder if her mom is hot?”
I used to tell my daughter that back in the black and white days of my youth, before color came to the world, we used to watch television by candlelight.
and lastly, when I was seven or eight, my mom bought me a subscription to a monthly science magazine. The first issue came with a chart of all of the satellite launches to date. I believe that, at the time, the Echo satellite was the newest one in orbit.
Actually, you don’t! I said that they started becoming visible at 21. My first one was at 16! The bad thing about them - they will not color no matter what kind of color I use. The good thing - They are a nice snowy white, so they’ll actually be pretty when I’m ready to accept them and stop pulling them out.
No, No, you don’t understand. I always knew I would have birthdays, adding a number to my age each year, but it never occurred to me that I’d get old!
I had the vision of maybe looking old, that doesn’t bother me. Its the joint pain the heartburn, the insomnia you know, OLD.
Well, I’m old. I want a rewind. Just back to 40 would be plenty…
Say, any old nerds, here? Do you remember what you were doing in 1962?
Playing…Spacewar, maybe?
Okay, okay, I’m only 19.
But I was watching the TV yesterday, and a commercial comes up–for Toy Story’s 10th Anniversary Edition.
Kythereia: “Aww, that’s sweet, I remember when that film first came out… wait, wtOg??? Ten years ago! I’m old! I’m old!” :eek:
Not to worry. You undoubtedly were Totally Invisible to them.
I know I am, anyway.
DD
I remember when Michael Jackson was black.
I hear ya. I’m 28, and I recently bought a third-party video game system that plays old NES games. To me, Zelda and Super Mario Bros. are just as much fun to play as these newfangled games. But try telling that to these kids today, with their PSP’s and X-Box 360’s. Whipper snappers!
My father, however, says that he only had a rock and a stick to play with. And he was happy to have it!
As for the 80’s coming back…that was my childhood! It can’t be retro! It just can’t! And those layer-cake dresses were just as ugly in 1985 as in 2005. Blech.
I am NOT turning 50 in less than three months. NOT NOT NOT. In fact, I will be turning 19 … and some months.
372, to be exact
I arrested a kid for burglary a couple of years ago. He was about 12 at the time, and he and two friends broke into a vacation home, broke a few things and stole some stuff. Among the stolen property was a stereo with a turntable.
As the kid is giving me his confession, he describes the stereo that they took. “It was one of those old ones, that play those really big CDs”.
I considered asking the Judge to give him an extra-long sentence for hurting me like that!
“What, you don’t think this is amazing? The first time I saw The Oregon Trail I nearly crapped by pants!”
I still remember how to use a rotary phone. I never had to use a belted pad, but we read about them in sex ed in school, which led to my confusion/relief when I got my first period and was told I’d only need an adhesive pad.
Sometimes I imagine about when I’m elderly, telling stories to the young’uns like, “When I was your age, we had phones with cords in 'em!” and watch them gasp in horror.
I frequently ruminate on these things.
Here are two that scare me:
For my first two years as an undergrad, I used a slide rule for all my courses. Calculators were available, but full-function ones were too exoensive.
My wife, Pepper Mill, went to lunch with my mother and got a senior discount. Mind, she’s not old enough to qualify, and the fact that she was with my mother predisposed the waiter that way. But still…
Probably a good thing. If I had made a move on them, the chorus of squealed "Eeeeewwwwww"s would have totally flattened what little libido I have left…
I remember…
We really were the first on our block to have a TV. 8" screen. Black & white. No remote. TV antennas. Rabbit ears.
My brother and I had a 45rpm player. So cool!
Elvis! (well, the early years were cool…) Frankie Avalon. Fabian. Connie Francis. The Everly Brothers. American Bandstand.
Rock-n-roll shows. Not single entertainer concerts, shows. I went to one that included Frankie Avalon, Chuck Berry, and 6 other acts.
We had delivery men! Bread, eggs, milk, dry-cleaning, potato chips.
Street peddlers (this wasn’t in a big city, it was just a neighborhood of single houses.) The popcorn man. The knife-sharpener man. The rag man. The picture-on-a-pony man.
Door-to-door sales. Not kids. The Fuller Brush man. The Watkins man. Much later the Avon Lady.
All the stores made deliveries, free. You could have anything delivered. I once sent home a single pair of gloves.
Small grocery stores. Butcher shops. Department stores downtown. And it was cool to take a bus after school and go downtown to hang out. (prehistoric Mall Rats?)
Alterations on clothes was included, free.
Stockings with seams. Then, stockings without seams. What excitement when panty-hose came out!
Forget angora sweaters and poodle skirts. What we really had to have: Saddle shoes. Stuffed ankle socks. T-strap shoes. Full skirts with crinolines. Fur-blend cardigan sweater, buttoned up and worn backwards. Circle pins. A boy’s class ring worn on a chain. Spaghetti strap dresses. Bermuda Shorts. “Blue jeans”. Not “levi’s”, or “jeans” or “denims”. Certainly not worn tight, and we rolled up the bottoms. And wore them with Dad’s white dress shirt. And with plain white tennis shoes.
OK, that’s enough. Gotta go take my arthritis medicine.
Just last weekend, my mom mentioned how she and her friends were certain that pantyhose where a fad and would never be marketable in the long term. “Why, what a waste!” she said, 'you get a run in just one leg and you have to throw them both out!"
Took me awhile to parse that. 
I know the rest, but what, praytell, are stuffed ankle socks?
For the record, WhKid and his friends love the old video games. There’s some newer games which have old games hidden on them as “bonus levels” or rewards for beating the actual marketed game, and they love 'em. (He’s 12.)
But when I described my favorite text-only computer games (Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) he was quite perplexed. He doesn’t get it.
Re-thinking the socks in question, I should have called them stuffed bobby sox. On these, the cuff part had elastic and was long enough to be rolled over twice. You put on the socks, but before rolling them down, you slipped on this thing that looked like a foam donut. Then you rolled the cuff down over it. Voila! Very cool fat ankles.
Today they would look like you were trying to hide electronic ankle retraints.
Don’t worry, I’m not turning 30 in December, either.
For Christmas last year, I bought a friend one of those joysticks you plug directly into the TV, that came with Pac-Man and Pole Position. His kids watched us play for about twenty minutes, with many cries of “Oh, that looks stupid!!” and “That game is so easy!”
Then we made them play it. When I left the day before New Years’, they were still trying to get past the first board on Pac-Man. And they did not appreciate the way we made fun of them and then got to level 5 in about ten minutes. 