Ah, the good old days of the 80s and 90s when the biggest dilemma we faced was whether to use our 25 cents to buy a bag of Jolly Ranchers or to feed the neighborhood’s most malfunctioning arcade machine. Back when we had to resort to a landline phone that was actually tethered to the wall—like an emotional attachment to your best friend who always wore a scrunchie and had an impressive collection of slap bracelets. Talk about a wild time, right? We’d spend hours attempting to beat the high score on Pac-Man while ignoring the fact that our parents were still paying for that dreadful cable package that only offered like ten channels. Well, ten channels if you counted the static from that one broken one that no one dared touch.
Remember the joy of getting your allowance, rushing to the nearest Blockbuster, and finding out the newest John Hughes masterpiece was already rented out? You’d be left standing there contemplating the crushing reality of your childhood while scanning the shelves for the least popular movie, praying it had at least one relatable character. But that’s when you’d notice your friends hyping up some B-movie, claiming it was the “worst” film ever despite you somehow ending up glued to a classic like “Manos: The Hands of Fate” with a bowl of microwaved popcorn, all the while thinking, “Why didn’t I just rent ‘The Goonies’ again?”
And can we please take a moment to lament the beauty of mixtapes, the elaborate art of expressing your feelings through the most obscure collection of tracks? You remember those painstaking hours of recording songs off the radio—half of them interrupted by the DJ’s uninvited chatter? And don’t get me started on the first wave of grunge music that made us all question our wardrobe choices. Doc Martens and flannel shirts became our modern-day armor against the harsh light of midday, while calling ourselves “alternative” in high school meant renouncing everything mainstream, like listening to that one Nirvana album on repeat while writing angsty poetry in our Lisa Frank journals.
As we sit here gazing through the rearview mirror of life, let’s take a moment to embrace our delightful blend of nostalgia and exasperation. Sure, technology has evolved and the world is a different place (hello, smartphones that can outsmart our geometry teachers), but there’s a certain allure to the awkward charm of our youth. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find my old cassette player and blast some Bel Biv DeVoe while trying to remember which end of the floppy disk was the “right” one to insert. Ah, sweet memories of our Gen-X paradise, where every little thing felt "totally rad" even when we were stuck with dial-up Internet and hair that required an entire can of Aqua Net.