Wow: Old Farts

I went to Toys 'R Us today with some of my friends. When we went there we found toys that would have made our childhood safer, more stimulating---or just better.

We found Nerf swords, Easy-Bake Ovens, and some of my beloved board games like Candyland. Now I wasn't so lucky to use the "nerf" swords, because we had to play with sticks in the yard when we were younger.

It hurt like H. E.double hockey sticks  when we hit each other with those sticks. Hell was once a bad word too.

No, I'm not exaggerating. We may have had television growing up and may have grown up with the internet---but that doesn't mean we sat inside all day on the computer and watched tv all day. I made mud pies and played hiding-go-seek. I was always terrible at that game.

I actually asked the guy at Toys R' Us for a FURBY. A flippin' FURBY.

Then about a month ago, I couldn't sleep and I was watching some tv. (What else do you do when all you can think about is your job interview?) Then I found 90's Nickelodeon starts at midnight on weeknights.

That is just the icing on the cake.

Today, I really feel old, because, dressup, sleepovers, babysitters, and when MTV first released the "Real World", was almost twenty years ago.

Wow.

I was in a production of RENT, the musical last fall and it dawned on me, when the spread of AIDS and HIV infections were rising, in 1990. I wasn't born yet, but that was twenty two years ago, yet the show seemed so new and contemporary. It was before it's time.

I also remember vaguely the Bill Clinton political scandal. I remember a lot of Bill Clinton on the news, all the time.( You must remember I was about 6 or 7, so I remember this event vaguely.)

Yes--that scandal.

So, some nights I'll stay awake and watch Rocko's Modern Life, or Ahh Real Monsters in the morning because it would be on at 6 am. My favorite show had to be "Hey Arnold." All you 90's children know what I'm talking about. The cartoon with Rhonda the snotty girl and Helga the girl who was in love with Arnold the footballhead, and Lila the midwestern cutie who Arnold had a crush on.

Someone told me today that MARVEL is redoing all their comic books and starting at 1 all over. They need to bring a new generation a newer, better publication because their standards are higher. They are used to Playstation 3 and Xbox graphics, they aren't going settle for doodles and comic strips with word boxes, they will probably be interactive dvds that can play 10 different stories with computer animated characters and settings.

Better yet--they will be BLu-Ray. I'm still not sure what that contraption is.

I grew up with a 4X3 television. The children of the new millennium  are growing up with Hd te;evision video-games, oversaturation the media has in their lives. I remember the turn of the century, we partied like it was 1999, on New Years Eve of 1999.

It sure had a big impact on mine growing up. When I was growing up, I would watch a movie or a television show and the characters would kiss. I don't know who taught me that you were supposed to kiss someone you liked--my family--or the T.V.

 I grew up with Playstation 1 and Gameboy COLOR and N64. they grew up with Nintendo Wii, and PS2 and 3, Xbox and Gamecube. We bought all that, but we had the original first.

Ah, but we didn't. The generation before us did. Sorry guys, but we need to accept the fact that we were not first.

It's hard to believe that while I was busy living my life, a whole ten years have gone by with new kids in school who knew how to turn on the television before they knew how to write their name. Now there's a whole new generation of kids who are being born in the new millennium who will never know the joys of playing outside, what a sitcom is, what a standard size television is, that people actually used to ring your doorbell when they wanted to come out and play, we remembered phone numbers of people we liked to call, and being a teenager and graduating high school seemed to be like it was a lifetime away.

Now all the older people reading this will say, "You feel old?? You're still a kid! I'll tell you about feeling old!" Yes they're right when twenty years may seem like not so long ago.

To us however, it's our whole lifetime.

Wow.

Connie

I've fallen in love with a beautiful woman this year--Get your mind out of the gutter, you pervert. 

Her face, striking with a smile that rivals some of the most beautiful beauty queens. Her face holds so much wisdom, yet so much youthful willingness to grow and learn. She came to college to study, to learn, to love. I genuinely believe some of us were meant to walk  the halls at LCCC, just so she could seduce some of us with her charm and her wit. I've never met a woman that seems to have life so figured out, and be so with it. 

She has learned how to play one part extremely well in her life, and that part is Connie, the only role she knows how to play.

If there is one thing I've learned from her, it's that learning from your mistakes allows you to move forward. Her abitily to write is that of a genius. She can write with the passion she has in her life to learn,she can speak it even better.  When she speaks it's like a melody playing through the airwaves when she says the word "love."

 I think she allowed herself to fall in love-- because she misses her daughter. She treats us all like her children when she asks us if we want cookies in the midmorning, or she asks us if we need a ride home. She hugs us like a mother hugs her children. Somehow, I think we are an outlet for her love, because she has so much love to give, and it's so easy to give it to us less experienced children. She sometimes says to us even if she knows all of our names, "Hey Kid!" Then sometimes she precedes to give us a compliment and ask about our love lives, our careers, our families, our crappy part-time jobs, or our weekend plans. She knows  how to approach us.

Not like our condescending parents. 

She treats us with respect and shares her experience so all of us can learn from the life she's lived, and shows us that in order to love, we need to be ourselves and not be afraid of the mistakes we've made, but learn from them--and go from there. She has lived her life as an optimist, and that getting lost isn't always a bad thing. Connie has reminded me of that time and time again.

She is Connie, the one and only. 

There's No Place Like Home

Couple Too-Tree, Tree, Mayan, Y'all, pock, yeh, and all those other little tid bits we hear on a daily basis allow for conversation, if you could actually understand what the hell those Bostonians or those North Carolinians are trying to say!

Accents, are hard to not to notice when they aren't the same as our own. I used to have a slight Philadelphia accent, and when I moved to Nort-eastern Pennsylvania or NEPA as more people call it, or "this valley". I'm still trying to figure out where this "valley" is referring to! Just a dialect thing that has never been explained to me.

Well, "this valley" has some pretty strange sounds to a suburban me. Sounds like, "anyways, maya, didjew?, couple two-tree, I seen it, nort, dare, deeze, doze, and one of the most baffling, "henna".

I went to my Intro to Mass Communication class one Friday, and remember sitting confused for about 20 minutes because my teacher and another student were having a conversation in what seemed to be a different language to me, when they were using the term "henna". I was so unfamiliar with it, I could not understand what they were saying or what it meant.

That was one of the strangest communication flukes I have ever encountered. It was the weirdest thing. Sometimes though, I feel the accent is a comfortable place, it makes us feel welcome when we're around people who talk like us. Sometimes if the accent is slight, we don't notice it until it's pointed out to us. You'll have a conversation with someone and they'll tell you about your accent, and you yourself don't hear it or recognize it.

Before I moved to Northeastern Pennsylvania, I never really referred to Pennsylvania as "PA", like most people call it Northeastern PA or NEPA.

When I moved here, everyone pointed out to me, my accent, I never even thought I had one. The cool things about accents is, we don't even realize we have them! 

I know, I really haven't picked up on the "Valley" dialect, or the Philadelphia accent. I've kind of lost my slight accent, but occasionally, I do pick it up again. It seems when we hear a familiar accent, we slip right back into it, because it reminds us of wherever we call home. 

I can go to LCCC, and notice a Philadelphia accent,  from anyone who has ever lived in the city of brotherly love for even a short period of time, and even at a foreign college. The accent is just so bluntly there and hard to ignore. I really love the sounds of the Phila accent. When I hear people talk that way--Dead give away--You're from Philadelphia.

The way they say wooter. It's just so beautiful, sometimes I wish I grew up in Philadelphia, just so I would be able to talk like them.

Well, I think all accents are cool to listen to in their own home dialects, wether it be Boston, New Yawk, Nort-eastern PA,  Caro-lah-na, or wherever, it reminds us that even in a united nation with the same language, we can still have a different culture. Our English language is the same, but there's just no place like home.