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[cosmolinguist]

Watching "I Love the '80s" (no, wait, it's "I Love the '80s Strikes Back" now, isn't it? nice marketing ploy by VH1 after the first one did so well, eh?), I had this terrible realization.

I do love the '80s. Sure, I'm only watching this because the "Modern Marvels" episode is one I've seen before and, as cool as the Autobahn is, this is funnier--or at least, it was until I realized that I love the '80s.

It was because of the jellies. There was a bit about colorful plastic shoes and I listened to women say "Oh, god, I had a ton of those," "I wore them all the time," "What was I thinking?" and "They give you blisters and make your feet sweaty." But all I thought was Oh yeah, I remember wanting those! So much. And my mom refused ... Which, of course, makes perfect sense to me now, because they're stupid. But then, I was stupid, throughout the entire decade, because even at the end of it I had only just turned eight years old.

The '80s may have been stupid, but I could love them because I was stupid.

I didn't catch on to a lot of things at the time, and have learned about greed and the Berlin Wall and Culture Club in the same way I learn about the Beatles and Thermopylae and the Big Bang and other things that happened before I was born. There's a distance to it. But when I come across things that made an impression on me in those dimly-remembered years, I get all excited.

Some of those things I actually still like--like the video games! I seriously cannot understand how people now think they're intrinsically lame, but I guess that just means I'm a romantic. Some things I cringe at--like how much I was in love with Thriller, the first album I bought with my own money. That's the kind of music I mock my roommate for listening to now!

So, though I watch most of this as if it's a foreign culture I'm reading about, but sometimes I remember things and I love them. Of course. Because I'm stupid. It's so interesting.

And yet scary. Maybe I'll just watch "Modern Marvels: The Autobahn" after all.

Edit: I found the picture again; I'd seen this earlier yesterday but then lost the link, which I thought a shame because it goes so well with this entry. Here's something that makes me nostalgic for the eighties!

The Oregon Trail!

Just seeing this picture gave me instant flashbacks of grade school. It was pretty weird.

Comments

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

The 80's rocked... by far and away the best decade ever. My current gf doesn't get it, cause she missed half of them. That's the only problem I've found so far with dating someone younger than me.

anyway, have you checked out the 80's community... um...

/me checks your friends page
/me checks my friends page

backintheday

[hephaestos.livejournal.com]

If you think the '80s were stupid, it's probably a good thing you missed the '70s. *grin*

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, VH1 has a show about that too! I've only seen a few minutes of "I Love the '70s" but it was enough to convince me that it's a good thing I missed the '70s. :-)

[iblis-kukl.livejournal.com]

[cosmolinguist]

I didn't even know he was ever on SNL--but then, I was -1 years old in 1980--I see him only in the has-been roles ... like being on "Hollywood Squares," which I know because my mom likes to watch that show. I don't think she thinks he should be allowed in front of a microphone either.

And can SNL in its youth possibly be as bad as it got in the mid-'90s or so (and, as far as I know, still is, though I don't watch it anymore)? That seems difficult ... but then, if Gilbert Gottfriend was on it, and he's not funny at all, I can probably believe it.

[fantome14.livejournal.com]

I had jellies in the 90's, too. They were light blue jelly platforms that I wore to High school... and I had a uniform, too! They looked so good with my Catholic School Girl skirt, I'm sure :P

[writerdog.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry what were the 80s about again -- big hair and hair bands? Wasn't that era tagged the "me" generation or some such nonsense?

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, people then were supposed to be supremely self-centered ... but then what would that make the '90s? Or whatever you call this decade we're in now.

What actually made me think that I loved the '80s was the fact that, five or ten years from now when VH1 makes a show called "I Love the '90s," I won't be able to watch it. I hate the '90s. It's a story of popularity ruining everything--MTV, Nirvana, Napster, U2, Woodstock ... I suppose by then I may have romanticized the decade into something else, though, which is a sort of scary thought.

[writerdog.livejournal.com]

Sad but true, kid.

That's the thing about "looking back," in most cases everything does become romanticized. It was no different with the folks from my youth, who thought they were changing the world, who then grew up to produce those slimmy little gremmies in the eighties and nineties, who drive around in Hummers and drink lattes, and think they are the culture's elite.

It makes you wonder if anyone ever stays true to their ideals.

[cosmolinguist]

WI remember hearing Paul McCartney being asked in an interview how he remembered his time as a Beatle, and he said that it's like vacations or holidays or something when you're a kid: no matter how bad it was at the time, eventually you only remember the good parts. I've noticed that happening myself--I mean, really, I was either bored or tormented a lot until I got to high school, but I don't think of that now. If I think of my childhood at all, I think of video games and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and the Twins winning the World Series and other good stuff.

And that doesn't seem like such a bad deal to me. I mean, of course the bad things are still there--but I didn't have it all that bad and there are definitely people who had a lot more trauma to deal with than I did. Even so, I don't really like to think about some things, and so I just don't. I wonder if our brain's tendency to gloss over things keeps us from going crazy, or something.

Of course, the people who block their memories too effectively are, by definition, mentally unstable (at least they are in movies about killers with multiple personality disorder .. and about alien abductions ... and other movies that I, of course, am not interested in), but still. It may be annoying that we sugar-coat the past, but if we went around thinking about what it was really like, we probably wouldn't be able to do much else.

[photomoviegeek.livejournal.com]

seeing the oregon trail pic reminds me of a game I played back on the Apple II--a clone/combo of centiped & space invaders. The great thing about it that I laugh about to this day is that when I shot at the aliens, the sound effect said "orney" or "horny"--a great sound for 7th grade boys...

so anyway you're not stupid for liking the 80s. if you *still* liked Michael Jackson that would be another matter...