You know you're getting old when....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have actually experienced or heard (usually from teenagers) ALL of the following:

  • The local “classic rock” station stops playing Aerosmith’s hits from the 70’s, and starts playing their hits from the 80’s.

  • “Who’s Norman Schwarzkopf?”

  • They now make laptops FAR more powerful than the desktop PC’s I surfed the Web with in college (early to-mid 90’s).

  • "The Internet’s down! How am I going to chat with my friend/significant other/cousin a town/state away? (HINT: try a phonecall)

  • “My friend’s parents are so weird. They don’t even have cable, for chrissakes!”

  • “I voted for Bush because I figured, the Republicans haven’t been in control for a really long time. Let’s see what they can do.”

  • My freshman year of college, one of my friends had a cellphone. Everyone thought he was a drug dealer.

“I wonder what music video’s from the 60’s looked like?”
Any additions?

2

Not quite in the same vein as yours, Lizard, but I knew I was getting older the first time a teenage online friend whom I was talking through a personal problem said to me, after I related a similar situation from my teen years, that “things were different back then!”!

I almost cried.

jayjay

3

I posted this elsewhere, but it didn’t get much of a response:

Remember all those Beatles retrospectives that were around when you were in high school, especially for the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper? Well look around you. High school kids now look at Devo and the Go Gos now from the same temporal perspective that you looked back on the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits.

Pick up an edition of Playboy on your way home from work today. See that buxom centerfold? She was born in 1983, about the same time you were looking at your first Playboy, ever. You dirty old man, put that down right now.

Remember that lame show that was on in the mid-80s called Thirtysomething? That’s you pal. (Well, OK, you’re not a whiney narcissistic Boomer, and you have that going for you at least.)

That kid giving you your Whopper in Burger King looks back on the Reagan administration about the same way you looked back on the Nixon administration. For him, watching the Challenger explosion at the time–as a two or three year old crawling around on the rug in front of the TV–was akin to your watching the Apollo moon rockets taking off at the time, when you were just at the same stage of development.

You’ve found yourself muttering about “kids today”.

All of the presidents you could remember in high school had served honorably in World War II. All of the presidents high school kids remember today had gotten out of serving in Vietnam one way or another.

Aerosmith’s “comeback” was over ten years ago.

That really fine girl you liked in high school is over 30 now and has two kids.

What Woody Allen did wasn’t so bad, was it, now that you come to think of it again? I mean, cut the guy a little slack, who wouldn’t . . . ahem, never mind.

4

What is it with all this shit that kids wear on their faces these days? I remember when Rosanna Arquette’s character in Pulp Fiction looked like some kind of looney alien freak. Now she looks like an ordinary college freshman.

I’ve found myself muttering that if I have a kid, and if he ever comes home looking like that, I’ll kick his ass . . .

. . . yup, that’s when I knew I was older. Moreover, that’s when I felt glad I was older.

5
  1. people look at you with extreme suspicion and make snide comments when they see you trick-or-treating. this sadly occured to me when I was quite tall as I am quite tall
  2. people are not only shocked, but are disgusted when you say you’re dating a 16 year old, even if no sex is involved.
  3. when you’ve had sex before many of your classmates were even born.
  4. when even though you’ve never left college, you’re identified as non-traditional, hmm, that ones boring too
  5. when you begin to skip comics in the newspaper. at first just a few, then several, and now I only read a couple, and even those I miss occasionally
  6. you begin to notice yourself saying things like “that used to be a Police Station, and before that a Sears.” what really brings it home is when you say that to person and their eyes just glaze over in boredom
  7. your constantly comparing things to how they were way back when. I will still occasionally say to people “you know when I first started using computers, I had to have an 8” floppy disk" was it 8"?
  8. here’s a good one, when you’re changing the diapers of a baby who’s parent whose diapers you’ve also changed.
  9. this one hit me hard, when I realized that I am the Johnson heir for my family, my father and grandfather both gone, If my grandfather was King, now I would be. Wierd.
6

I clipped that from another post and forgot to include the introduction.

These are things that occured to me, well most of them, which made me think “Jeez! A whole part of my life is gone.”

7

Criminy, that was the year I was born. It just sank in.

8

Fellow Doper Xploder has two daughters, and they babysit my kids. One day during the last Presidential “election,” we were discussing what was occurring. I was telling her about the electoral college, and how a landslide isn’t necessarily what it appears to be, and I mentioned Ronald Reagan, and his landslide electoral vote, but pretty darn close popular vote.

She looked at me quite blankly.

Says Persephone, “Oh my, you don’t remember that, do you?”

Says the girl, “Nope.”

Says Persephone, “oh wait…you weren’t born yet, were you?”

Says the girl, “Nope.”

Says Persephone, “Hey, you don’t even remember the Gulf War, do you, and your dad fought in that?”

Says the girl, “Nope. I was really little.”

When stuff that I actually remember is now part of junior high school civics, I am old. Sigh.

9

Your dreams are dry and your farts are wet.

10

…your comb-over is mostly ear hairs.

11

you realize you were a teenager when the very first issue of Playboy hit the stands.

you remember when automatic transmissions were a rarity.

you remember when your parents bought their first TV.

you remember what an occasion it was when your parents bought their first airconditioned house.

and, you remember the end of World War II.

12

You visit DisneyWorld and (1) You think how manipulative the attractions are from a corporate viewpoint. (2) All the indoor rides like Pirates of the Carribean are too dark for you to see very well. (3) You realize that they are now marketing nostalgia (Disney’s old classics) about things that were nostalgia to begin with (the pioneer days, the Swiss Family Robinson, etc.) (4)The whole place seems more like a big money trap than an adventure.

You get all these disgusting old person symptoms like nose hair, planar warts, digestive problems, etc.

You realize that little children have a distinctive smell.

The speed limits on the highways that seemed ridiculously slow before now seem reasonable or even a little fast.

You find yourself wishing that things would stay the same for a while.

You realize you’re turning into an old grouch because you cannot see, hear, move or think as well as you want to.

You have to show a co-worker how to use a DOS command line. Also they say “what’s that?” when they see a 5 1/4" floppy.

You rewatch all your old favorite TV shows on cable and are appalled at how bad they were.

You start wondering if character and morals really are more important in life than money, looks, or coolness.

Five years doesn’t sound like a very long time anymore.

13

The majority of your college classmates were born the year you graduated from high school.

You see a picture of one of your first celebrity crushes and they look OLD and have grown kids, or worse yet, [igrandkids!

14

Well, when I first started driving the nationwide speed limit was 55 mph. What is it now? 95 mph?

George Carlin said that you know you’re getting old when you find yourself leaving the same weird smell in the bathroom as your parents.

15

Your first Major, Big-Time Adult Crush is now turning 40 (no offense intended to the 40+ folk out there, I’ll be there soon enough m’self).

Your high-school teachers are all retiring.

With your college years, your first inkling comes when you stop recognizing names of current students in the alumni magazine articles. Then you stop recognizing the names of professors.

You say to your stepsister, “Well, this really isn’t as bad as the last energy crisis,” and she stares at you blankly. During the last energy crisis, she was 6 months old.

Your grandparents’ generation is all dead.

You have to tell someone what it was like to live without cable and VCRs.

Oooo - here’s a good one: A young-mom friend of my parents borrowed their pickup. Young-mom’s daughter stared at the window handle - she’d never seen one before.

You remember when having a tape player in the car was a Very Big Deal.

You remember when they were called Datsuns.

You remember your first calculator. It was (at least!) the size of your fist.

Candy, the unfortunately-named big-boobed bubblehead from high school? Now, as Candace, she’s head of the local Jaycees and owns a real estate agency.

Your friends are having their first divorces.

You go from resenting doing yardwork when you visit your parents to making sure you do yardwork so Dad doesn’t have to.

16

You know your’e getting old when:

Hardly anything on MTV appeals to you anymore, (NOT MTV2, which you can only get if you want to pay $60 a month for cable).
Most of the stuff on MTV (Real World, Road Rules, etc.) is made for 10-15 year olds, as are the girl and boy bands.

When I was a teen way back in the late 80’s,

snicker

MTV played really interesting videos (I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that I am no longer a teen) :wink:

17

All I can say is Oh My God. And I am now feeling like a relic because I am one of the only people I know who still has a tape player in my car.

Someone mentioned Playboy earlier. I remember when I first started looking at it in high school…it contained pictures of strange, fascinating, arousing creatures dubbed WOMEN, all of whom were too old for me to ever date. Now I look at it and think “hey, there’s a naked woman about my own age.” I suppose I’ll look at it in 20 years (assuming I’ll have any interest in sex by then) and think, “hey, they’re just a bunch of naked girls. Big deal.”

18

Anyone remember computer punch cards?

Also, my computer on my desk is more powerful than all of the computers that ran the Apollo Program at NASA. (I watched Apollo 17 lift off in person.)

I used to own a sliderule. And knew how to use it.

My first car’s radio only had AM on it.

My first car didn’t have AC.

My first car I could fix most mechanical and engine problems myself.

All STD’s were cureable by a shot when I was first sexualy active.

I remember when pantyhose didn’t exist. A garter belt wasn’t just a sexual costume.

I remember wearing a “crew” cut because everyone else was.

I also remember having hair down to my shoulder blades because everyone else was.

Leisure Suits, Ecch! Be glad if you missed these.

If you can remember these or lived through this, you are getting up there in age.

19

I remember getting electricity and phone lines. It was really cool to watch them dig the holes and bury the poles.

although we lived in the boonies so…

20

I remember not having a microwave a color television, or cable TV. I remember getting an Atari 2600 for Christmas the year it came out-and that was a big deal!

I realized I was getting older when I walked through the mall and saw a bunch of kids-mid to late teens perhaps. And instead of thinking that they looked like they were having fun, I thought that they looked like they were up to no good and detoured around them.
Now, I know not all kids are bad, and I apologize because most teenagers that I know are good kids, struggling through the same stuff that I did. But that was my first reaction.