80s

I found this banner on my Facebook stream, one of my friends posted it.  The article came from the basement of my email account.  I think this is just worth sharing to friends who were also born in this generation to remind you what a great childhood you had and to know that this childhood is worth replicating for to the next generation.

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE

1950's, 60' s, 70's and early 80's!!

For all those born in the 80's!

First, some of us survived being born to mothers who did not have an OB-Gyne and drank San Miguel Beer while they carried us.  While pregnant, they took cold or cough medicine, ate isaw, and didn't worry about diabetes.  Then after all that trauma, our baby cribs were made of hard wood covered with lead-based paints, pati na yung walker natin, matigas na kahoy din at wala pang gulong.

We had no soft cushy cribs that play music, no disposable diapers (lampin lang), and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, no kneepads, sometimes wala pang preno yung bisikleta.  As children, we would ride in hot un-airconditioned buses with wooden seats (yung JD bus na pula), or cars with no airconditioning & no seat belts (ngayon lahat may aircon na).

Riding on the back of a carabao on a breezy summer day was considered a treat. (ngayon hindi na nakakakita ng kalabaw ang mga bata).  We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle purchased from 7-11 (minsan straight from the faucet or poso).  We shared one soft drink bottle with four of our friends, and NO ONE actually died from this. Or contracted hepatitis.

We ate rice with Star margarine, drank raw eggs straight from the shell, and drank sofdrinks with real sugar in it (hindi diet coke), but we weren't sick or overweight kasi nga......

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

Simplicity

It is quite ironic that we have all these powerful tools in our hands yet our problems are getting complicated the moment we try to advance. Looking back 15 years, life was simpler. Our family lived a simple life in the suburbs of Iligan City. I grew up in a typical Pinoy childhood. We played real games and have real friends and get punched real bad and laughed real hard. The virtual world back then was still in the realm of the impossibility though I already saw advancements during those days.

Lenny

As I am going through this post, I'm in my room connected to our private WIFI network and Lenny on my lap as I try to type away my thoughts. My sister is in the living room watching YouTube videos and my other sister is in the other living room watching TV and my brother is on his iPhone, checked in at KFC. You see, scenarios like this is commonplace nowadays. The sad reality of this complexity is we're more disconnected than playing Monopoly together for 4 hours.

"Life was much simpler when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits."

It was perfectly fine for us back then to be not to be up to date with all this tech. All I had before was a 486 machine with no hard disk! I use the now extinct micro floppy disc to boot up my system and enter notepad on MS-DOS. Yep, I'm very much of an MS-DOS kid. My computing days started with the very basic of windows. Sometimes I still prefer renaming, deleting, searching for files using MS-DOS than the Windows Explorer. I did not cheat on our typing subject, so my typing skill of 70-90 words per minute gives me the edge to type faster than clicking and analyzing. Then finally my 486 machine was replaced with an another 486 machine but this time it now runs Windows 3.1. The world back then was already at Windows 98 and I'm still stuck with Windows 3.1, still I did not complain. I play classic games like Prince of Persia, got to play with MS-DOS simple programs like choice and batch files. I get to set my PC back then to make me either to choose to proceed to Windows or stay on MS-DOS.

For years until high school that was the setup. Even when I get to experience the internet, it did not really matter because personal internet access before was a hassle and quite expensive compared today. It was much slower too. We were never really in sync with the latest trends and updates.

It is not that I am complaining, it's just a realization that what we look forward to when we were kids is now finally here, there is confusion. The tools that were supposed to make our lives simpler, easier and to help us with our daily task are becoming a hassle to maintain. Cellphones were simple back then. It was just plain SMS and voice calls. Now we have smartphones with different brands and models. These phones also depreciate very fast too. Once my iPhone 3Gs was dubbed as the fastest iPhone today in one of Singapore's highways, now with the coming of the iPhone 5 next month, I feel that I really need to catch up with the current model. Do you know how it's like to own an Apple product?

Youth

Kids

Just now, before typing I made a promise to me-self that I will never ever make a wish that I'd be a kid again.  Why?  Well, the cycle will never end.  When I was I kid, I couldn't wait to grow up.  I'm sure some of you wished that when you were younger and now some of you wish you'd be young again.  But then again you're back to the time you wish you'd grow up and so on.  Anyway, this is a beautiful paragraph from Mary Schmich's "Wear Sunscreen".

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

The question is, have we really enjoyed every single time when we were young?  Where did we spend our energy when we still have loads of extra firepower within us?  For one, I think my childhood was spent very differently with kids of today.  I could say there was no dull moment for every day was like an adventure.  7am we're already gathered on the neighborhood streets playing - you know the typical pinoy kid in the barrio.  But in retrospect there could have been times that I should have done some other things.