Graduated high school in 1989. It was a completely glorious time to be alive

Freshman in HS in '84.

That's something older millenials like to call themselves since they're not gen x.

I still have my numchucks from the 80's

And we called 'em numchucks (or just chucks for short)

not "nunchukas"

My Mom used a wooden spoon after the wooden yardstick broke.
We knew better to hide my Dad's metal one from her.

Wrong.

I have nothing in common with someone born in 1990 and later.

I didn't have computer until I was 17 years old.

I didn't have a cellphone until I was 19.

I spent most of my childhood playing outside, exploring, and building stuff or breaking stuff.

I grew up on He-Man, Transformers, and Reagan as President.

WTF are you babbling about?

My Mom used a wooden spoon after the wooden yardstick broke.
We knew better to hide my Dad's metal one from her.

I *heart* this thread.

NICE

My mom liked the broom for its reach.

Hell, I got beat once with a metal extension for one of the old roll around canister vacs. Mom used whatever she could get a hold of at the moment. Dad, it was always, always the belt.

my mom had a wooden slat that was used as a surveyor marker she pulled out of the ground.  It still had orange spray paint on the end of it.  It was known as "the stick".... as in, if you kids don't stop this fighting, I'm gonna get "the stick".  it lived in the cupboard above the oven.

Yep, Class of '90

Word up.
Born in 73.
Watched the 80s with my shades on all day long.

I agree.

Who reared Y and Z again?

Does Barry manilow know you raided his closet?

I would tell you what year I graduated, but unfortunately I died of dysentery;)

Remember having a B/W Tv
Summers were spent fishing at the creek or fooling around in the woods with BB guns or building forts.
If you wanted something,  you had to work to earn it, not just given to you.
Evel Knievel,  SWAT, GI Joe, Adam-12

I can identify with every point made. Best post of the thread!!!!!

My Mom liked to use the old all metal coat hangers and untwist them, bend it into a U shape combine 2 or more and tell me to tell the doctor I fell down

This gen x born in 78 checking in

Yeah, Dad's was the belt too. He worked 3rd shift, slept during the day. You NEVER wanted to wake him. Pretty embarrassing to have the old man come outside in his PJ's with belt in hand and whip you in front of your friends.
Main reason I never played in our yard when I was a kid.

There was a wooden paddle from Six Flags under the couch. If that came out you knew you had screwed up. My Mom actually broke it too so it got taped up and continued in service until my teen years.

Our first VCR had a remote control. With a 15 foot cable and 5 functions.

Things later generations just never quite grasp.

73

1972...it's true...all of it.  Red Dawn was a training documentary.

Attached File

You and some others here, care about it too much to be a real Gen X.  


We need an emoticon drinking a Coke, and a Chinese virus sub-forum.

Born in 1973, hell I still have the paddle that my parents beat me with and the names of all my friends that got their ass beat too!
Attached File

I broke my first tooth in third grade. Got into a fight with a fat kid on the concrete playground. Chipped a tooth on the cement cheese

Class of '88 here.

We got beat with an old pizza peel that had the sides broken off and was basically a bat. Good times.

My mom wielded those lengths of orange Hot Wheels track like a samurai sword and threw her flip flops like Ninja Throwing Stars.

And got the mullet senior portrait to boot!

WTF was the name of the shitty knife store in every mall?
Sold all that D&D bullshit, fake Rambo knives,  and all that ninja shit..

Nice, class of '88 here,also!

I ordered my Rambo knife out of the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Speaking of ordering thing, remember Columbia House? I must have ordered about a thousand tapes and CDs from them and never paid more than a few cents over the years.

I did pay for all those bitchin' skateboarding videos I ordered from the back of Thrasher though.

About the same age, I slipped on money bars and caught a rung just under my bottom lip, driving my top teeth through my bottom lip.  I needed stitches on the inside and outside to close it up.  

I was the remote control.  Remember the TV tuner knob breaking and using vice grips to change tv channels?

In January 80, I was in 6th grade.  In December 89, I was leading a Marine rifle squad in Hawaii.
The 80s were awesome.

Yep. And UHF stations that were all reruns, monster movies, and odd local shows.

And the first cable TV with the sliding knob box and HBO guidebooks for the current month.

Remember getting that first microwave oven?

I remember that store, but can't for the life of me remember the name.

Class of 89 checking in.  A golden age.

What was that show on NBC where the old man carried the briefcase for of throwing stars?

Cutlery World?

On a serious note, I posted this on my page a while back after a discussion on here regarding Gen X.  This is my take on it:

I had a discussion recently regarding "Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. The discussion seemed to hinge on how Gen X is somewhat of an enigma in ideological, societal, and political terms. Being Gen X, I will explain it to everyone.

Gen X is the forgotten generation. We are a small group population-wise. We were raised by the boomers and largely sold the "American dream."

You were expected to go to college if you wanted to have any life (trades were looked down on.) Our media fed us a steady diet of middle-class comfort and high-class glitz.

We went to college-- or in many cases-- off to trades against the wishes of guidance counselors. We started clawing our way into the job market-- FULLY expecting to do better than our fathers. After all, the American Dream we were sold was that the child is a progression to a higher rung than the previous generation.

We did well for a while. The economy of the late 90s was good. What we didn't realize is that we were in a boom cycle largely built on speculation.

It didn't last. We found ourselves saddled with student loan debt and a lot of hard work to do. We realized that a lot of what was sold to us was simply not the case.

We could have gone down the road of feeling we were owed something. But we didn't. We were instilled from birth with the work-ethic of our fathers. We just felt that we kinda got screwed with how things turned out.

Then, as a whole, we put our noses to the grindstone and started trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

But what you got also was a generation that really doesn't want to hear any more advice from anyone. They just want to be left the hell alone.

We abandoned the power ballads of the heavy metal bands and settled into our Nirvana-esque nihilism. We understand that it ain't going to be like we envisioned it to be. We are going to have to scrape and claw our way to anything we get. No one is going to have some magic secret that solves all the problems that we have or society has. We don't respect pipe dreams.

Because of all of that, we are critical of and have disdain for anyone selling anything- whether that be an idea, a service, a product, or themselves. Naturally, politicians and the political process are completely distrusted.

We just want to be left alone. In that vein, we leave everyone else alone. And we get PISSED when someone can't respect the deal we are offering.

Now, we are in our mid-to-late 40s. We are finally starting to see some rewards for decades of blood, sweat, and tears. Many of us (except me, I have an 8 year old) are seeing our children going out into the world, taking that financial burden off of us. It is time to start breathing easier for once.

But no... now we are seeing an entire crop of politicians violating the "deal" we tried to establish: Leave me the hell alone and we will leave you the hell alone.

We see an entire generation of young people that now believes that we OWE them things that we worked to get on our own.

We are nihilists. All of us are in some way. We made peace with that reality. And how dare anyone demand things that we realized wasn't for us-- but expect us to pay for it for them when we have only begun to be able to do ANYTHING for ourselves.

We are seeing "Leave me the hell alone, and I will leave you the hell alone" violated with impunity.

The problem is that we are a small generation. We do not have the political power to fight it or stop it. Again, we have a reason for our nihilism.

I often wonder if the "boog" movement is more of a gen X thing than it is younger generations. We know we can't fight you at the ballot box. We know our voices will NEVER be heard. We know that "leave me the hell alone, and I will leave you the hell alone" is being violated. And we have little recourse-- except that we aren't going to keep playing this game.

We are the "walk away" generation. "Just leave us the hell alone. You can do all the shit you want, just leave me out of it, or I am out of here."

A Millennial once asked me if we had porn on the Internet in the "old days."

I explained how we would log into a service provider using our dial up analog lines and find alt.binaries on a Usenet server. After downloading all the text files associated with a specific picture, we would use UUDecode to convert the text files back to a graphic. Opening it, you'd finally see what you got, which was usually a shitty flatbed scan from a Playboy.

He just looked at me with his mouth open.  

Kids these days don't know how easy they got it.  

Born in 1972

Graduated 1990

I remember when we got cable it was a white box on a long cord.  There was a slider that changed channels.

Our microwave (1979) was HUGE.

My Schwinn had a coaster brake.

My tennis shoes were Zips or from Thom McCann

GI Joe's were a foot tall

Mom broke MULTIPLE wooden spoons and hairbrushes on my ass

CHiPs and Dukes of Hazard were the most awesome shows on TV.  So were That's Incredible and Real People

I remember that it was near impossible to quit BMG or Columbia House. Letters, phone calls, etc., yet the friggin "Monthly Selection" kept showing up with a bill. I finally just returned to sender each package, it ended eventually. It was the forerunner of the impossible to quit AOL.

We had one called "Eastern Arts".  They sold shitty, overpriced Asian crap, and at the back, they had a big display of various weapons.  All sorts of radical ninja stuff.  I still have this headband from there that my brother bought me when I was probably 4.  It is black, with the word "NINJA", some kanji (probably random gibberish), and a silhouette of a ninja wielding sword.



I experienced all of that.  However, I wasn't born until late in 1980, so I guess that puts me in about the same boat as Subnet - the "Oregon Trail" generation.  My parents were from the "Silent Generation", my siblings were all firmly GenX, and my friends were all a few years older than I was, so I'd say I have more in common with people born in 1975 than in 1985.  We terrorized the neighborhood on BMX bikes, launched bottle rockets all over the place, shot everything in sight with BB guns, and got our asses beat with racetracks.  On the other hand, I did have an NES, and died of dysentery more than a few times on the old Apple IIe at school.  All I know is that the '80s were way more fun for me than the '90s, so I guess I don't really give a shit what category I fall into!