"Seen some stuff"

I do a life-table-calculations lab in one of my classes. We use data that were collected from various cemeteries, and then I have the students go through calculations of deaths-by-age-class, survivorships, and then finally they plot survivorship curves.

This is one of those labs where some people get what is going on almost immediately and others struggle a bit. This class had relatively few people who struggled, so I could just walk around the class and listen to people work.

I kind of smiled to myself because a couple of the men in one group:

Student 1: "Whoa. This guy was born in 1871 and he lived until 1972"
Student 2: "I bet he saw some stuff!"

It made me smile both because of the casual "Seen some stuff" (a less G-rated version of the meme is here but also because that tells me they are thinking about more than the simple mechanics of what they are doing; also they are thinking about "Wow, these were all human beings whose data we are working with")

But also, I got to thinking: Yeah, I've seen some stuff too.

I'm a few weeks away from being 47 but still I've seen a lot of stuff.

I once commented that the world of "A Christmas Story," despite being set in the very early 1940s is more similar to my growing-up world than the world of kids today is. (I am going to assume 1940, even though the official year given is 1941, because there is NO mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor and I think for a kid that would even be something that made an impression).

And really: my birth year (1969) is closer to 1940 than it is to my niece's birth year (2013). So arguably, my childhood was more similar to Ralphie Parker's than my niece's will be to mine.

And a lot of things have changed enormously. Technology, especially. When I was a kid, answering machines were either rare or non-existent. Phones were rented from A T and T (who were then broken up in the 80s, but have slowly been reforming, kind of like a cellular slime mold slowly aggregating as it prepares to reproduce....). My family had two phones: a pale turquoise blue one that more or less matched the kitchen decor, and a black one in my parents' bedroom. And we had ONE phone line. And woe unto any kid who might be talking with a friend of hers when one of the parents wanted to use the phone.....

And now, everyone has voice mail. I have caller ID, which is a fantastic invention and totally worth what I pay for it (though part of me feels that telemarketers who violate the Do Not Call list should be fined, and those fines go to help subsidize the cost of caller ID for those who sign up for it). Most people have cell phones - shoot, most people have the Internet In Their Pocket thanks to smart phones.

The Internet didn't exist when I was a kid. Or at least, not outside of the military or maybe some college research institutes. I remember my FIRST e-mail account, circa 1990, on the old all-text Zeniths that Michigan had. (They set them to have blue screens with yellow type. Hail to the Yellow And Blue....) It wasn't until much later that the WWW became a thing, during my second go-round of grad school, in the mid 1990s. (I was also on Usenet for a while. And on a Nero Wolfe e-mail mailing list. I dropped off a number of years back partly because I got busy but partly because we were on our third or so trip through the novels and I ran out of clever things to say).

But none of that was around when I was a kid. In some ways, it may have been a good thing: there was no cyberbullying. And I didn't have to plead with my parents for an account, or ask them WHY I wasn't allowed a Facebook page* or similar things.

(*Knowing my parents, they wouldn't have wanted me to have one, both for privacy reasons and for avoiding cyberbullying)

We didn't have cable. Oh, it existed, but my parents didn't subscribe to it until I was in college, I think. I remember when local tv really was local - I remember all the goofy local shows Big Chuck and Little John, and the kids' shows like Barnaby, and I remember (and still kind of miss) the Del and Tom show. (it was a much nicer way to ease into the morning; they did a LITTLE news but also did a lot of silliness and joking and human-interest type stories instead of the doom and gloom that the morning news usually contains)

I also remember more local store-chains. I commented on Twitter the other day that "even just typing the name O'Neil's makes me feel old and sad." O'Neils was the mid-range price chain - fairly nice stores, fairly nice stuff, but not outrageous given my family's budget. Most of my clothes as a high schooler came from O'Neil's. I also remember when department stores were department stores: the old downtown O'Neils had a fancy tearoom in it, and I think even the ones in the malls had places to eat. (The one in the Stow-Kent Plaza had a lunch counter, I think. At least, I remember getting grilled cheese sandwiches there while on shopping trips with my parents). They also had a small book department and a Hough bakery store in the department store. (The other day there was a story on Consumerist about how some department stores are going BACK to having restaurants, as a way of trying to get people to come in instead of shopping online. And I expressed my longing for department stores as they used to be, with book departments and sewing-supply departments and bakeries and lunch counters....though given how the modern world works, I suspect they'd look more like a Wal-Mart with a McDonald's in it than like an O'Neil's with a Georgian Room.)

I also remember the bad economic times of the 1970s. I remember Carter's admonition to wear a sweater and turn down the thermostat, and I remember my parents turning UP the thermostats briefly in the winter when I was going to go take a bath, so I wouldn't be cold. I JUST remember the gas lines, where you could only buy certain days of the week, and I remember sitting in the back of one of our old cars (probably the Maverick) while my dad groused about having to wait in line and how the shortage was largely artificial, or so he thought.

(Funny. I don't remember feeling fear or concern during those bad economic times. I remember my parents, especially my dad, regularly saying "We're not made of money" (for example, when exhorting us to turn off unused lights), but I don't remember WORRYING like I sometimes do now. I suppose that's the difference between being a kid who trusts her parents will take care of her and being an adult who believes, rightly or wrongly*, that keeping a roof over her head and budgeting so she will be able to eat is 100% on her)

(*If things went really bad and my university closed, I think my parents would either help me out or let me move back with them if I couldn't find another job quickly. At least I like to hope they could do that)

I remember the hostage crisis in Iran, and before that, I remember the Jonestown massacre - that was the first big, bad, sad news story (I was about 10) that my parents didn't manage to insulate me from. I remember the space program; I remember Voyager and feeling like it was going to be FOREVER before it reached the planets it was bound for to collect data on (and then that day came, faster than I thought it would when I was a kid). I remember the excitement of the first space shuttles. I remember the sadness of the two shuttle explosions and the astronauts lost in both.

On a happier note: I remember ALL the generations of My Little Pony, even if I only started really caring about them when G4 came around in 2010. I remember the first incarnation of Strawberry Shortcake and I even had one. I remember how crazy popular Star Wars figures were when they first came out and how I scored big one year by being able to find and buy a particularly coveted one to give my brother for Christmas.

I remember when Care Bears made the scene - shoot, I remember the resurgence of interest in teddy bears (antique as well as modern) in the early 1980s - I had several of the Bialosky's books about them, as I "collected" stuffed toys as a kid and teen (And I still do, as an adult***).

I never did find an antique teddy bear I could afford but I have now decided I prefer modern toys; they are more hygienic/less allergenic (no old sawdust stuffing) and also, if the old bears are like the modern Steiffs - well, they are not cuddly in the way that a modern Gund bear or the Aurora ponies are.

(***When I saw the Coco Pommel stuffie had come out and was for sale on Amazon, I ordered one. She is my birthday present to myself. And the projected delivery time is right around my birthday, though it might actually be sooner - which raises the question, do I open the box when it comes, or save it for my actual birthday? And yes, I may well try making some clothes for Coco, she will be about the right size to be easy to sew for)

I also remember the resurgence of quilting - it built kind of slowly through the 1980s (French blue and mauve, anyone?) and just kept on going and getting bigger.

And I remember the resurgence of knitting - it grew a LOT with the internet; as I said the other day I remember Woolworks, which was one of the first-ever online free knitting pattern sites. I got interested in knitting about the same time that patterns became available - I remember the "magic" of learning how to knit mittens in the round, and later on, socks. (Funny no one tried to teach me to knit in the round when I was a kid - I just learned how to knit flat and didn't find it nearly as compelling). And one of the beauties of the growth of the Internet is that (a) People living in remote areas who are not near a proper wool shop don't have to rely on Red Heart from their local Wal-Mart, they can order what they want and (b) similarly, small independent dyers or spinners have an almost world-wide clientele for their products.

So yeah, I've seen some stuff.

I've also seen some stuff that might not actually BE stuff, like my regular assertion that people are becoming meaner, more selfish, and more prone to "other" people who are different from them. (And that last probably isn't, on average, true, given that some of the casual racism and similar of the past is long-gone, because "nice people don't say those things"). And what feels to me like an acceleration of work, where more and more people in less and less life-saving jobs are expected to be "on call" like doctors and reserve police officers once were. And things like more people having to work such long hours that they lack the energy for things like religious participation or participation in civic groups....