Dating Myself (long)

The latest Beloit College mindset list for the class of 2009 is available. I went through the first mindset list, the one for class of 2002, to see how closely I matched it. I am exactly one year older, so there should not be too much difference, right?

1. The people starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1980. Close. 1979.
   
   
2. They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era, and did not know he had ever been shot. True and false. I've seen the footage many times, but my mother was the one who first told me about it.
   
   
3. They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged. True. January 1991 was a very interesting month. Hershey's released a heat-proof candy bar later that year that tasted like crap. I miss them dearly.
   
   
4. Black Monday 1987 is as significant to them as the Great Depression. True.
   
   
5. There has only been one Pope. They can only remember one other president. True.
   
   
6. They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart, and do not remember the Cold War. True.
   
   
7. They have never feared a nuclear war. "The Day After" is a pill to them--not a movie. True.
   
   
8. They are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up. False.
   
   
9. Their lifetime has always included AIDS. Fuzzy. I recall getting the lecture in school, wherein my 6th grade teacher, Gwen Dukeman, wrote on the chalkboard in big, teacher-perfect cursive handwriting "If you get AIDS, you will die". Prior to that, AIDS was not a subject commonly broached to elementary school children.
   
   
10. They never had a polio shot, and likely, do not know what it is. True.
    
    
11. Bottle caps have not always been screw off, but have always been plastic. They have no idea what a pull top can looks like. False. I remember my last pull top can intimately. It was a small can of juice given to me while I was in the hospital as a kid.
    
    
12. Atari pre-dates them, as do vinyl albums. I suppose so.
    
    
13. The expression "you sound like a broken record" means nothing to them. Not entirely true. But I admit I learned it mostly from context.
    
    
14. They have never owned a record player. True. Sure, I own a record player now. I never ever use it. It probably went into a yard sale this summer. Here's the thing: I never really owned vinyl until about two years ago. In fact, in elementary school I was terrified that the teacher would ask me to work the classroom record player because I had no idea how to do it. Angie Michaels did, however, which makes me wonder about her, even to this day.
    
    
15. They have likely never played Pac Man, and have never heard of "Pong." Completely false. Steve tells me that Midway did an "original arcade" version of Pac-Man that he alleges was better than the Atari 2600 version. He is clearly lying.
    
    
16. Star Wars looks very fake to them, and the special effects are pathetic. False. Tatooine has two suns, m----rf----r. How in the hell did they get that shot? Magic. What's pathetic are all the digital remasterings that Lucas is still making.
    
    
17. There have always been red M&M's, and blue ones are not new. What do you mean there used to be beige ones? False. Red M&Ms still weird me out a little. I get over them the same way I get over missing the beige ones: I just don't bother looking at them anymore.
    
    
18. They may never have heard of an 8-track, and chances are they've never heard or seen one. False. My favorite 8-track was one my father owned. Something akin to The Carpenters Greatest Hits. We could only listen to it in his pickup truck, the only 8-track playing thing my family still had.
    
    
19. The compact disc was introduced when they were one year old. False. I must have been two.
    
    
20. As far as they know, stamps have always cost about 32 cents. False. I used to collect stamps, old-school. Philately was a past-time for me the same way other boys in the neighborhood played football, rode their bikes, and impregnated their classmates. I was big into domestic commemorative plate blocks. I remember when stamps were 22 cents, and I was as pissed as a kid could be when they upped them to 29 cents because that made the math hard.
    
    
21. They have always had an answering machine. False. I am proud to say that I am the raison dêtre for my family buying their first answering machine. "Hey, sis. Somebody called for you." "Who was it?" "I don't know." "Did you get their number?" "No." <Insert hours of ranting about ruining her life here.> She pitched such a fit that our mother bought an answering machine the very next day, as I recall.
    
    
22. Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black & white TV. False. Not only did I have to get up to change the channel, but I had 3-13, 2 (which was HBO and we didn't get that), and U. U. It activated the UHF dial beneath it, where you could tune into something like 50 different kinds of static. The TV started dying when I was in junior high, and we put it on life support for a few more years by wrapping a rubber band around the dial to keep it steady.
    
    
23. They have always had cable. False. See above.
    
    
24. There have always been VCR's, but they have no idea what Beta is. My last exposure to Betamax was in a dirty, dark little mom & pop video store in some strange corner of rural PA that even I consider out of the way. They had a Beta shelf that I think contained a copy of Police Academy: City Under Seige. No wonder the format died.
    
    
25. They cannot fathom what it was like not having a remote control. False. See above. My sister used to yell at me for "changing the channels too fast" and wearing down the dial.
    
    
26. They were born the year Walkmen were introduced by Sony. False. Again, I must have been one year old.
    
    
27. Roller-skating has always meant in-line for them. Au contraire, I was invited to no fewer than two roller skating parties back before the cliques formed and parents thought that inviting everyone from Jenny Whipple's class to her surprise party was a bright idea.
    
    
28. "The Tonight Show" has always been with Jay Leno. False. Few remember that Carson had a sweet deal with NBC wherein he didn't have to work on Mondays. I think that late-night talk shows have suffered in their recent shift to single hosts. Jay talks to Kevin, Conan banters with Max sometimes. These are bandleaders, not sidekicks. No one liked it when Doc Severinsen would act like he didn't belong over on the far right side of the stage. And another thing: remember when there were no such things as talk show reruns? Joan Rivers does.
    
    
29. They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool. True. I didn't get it at the time, but then I hit puberty and Suddenly Susan hadn't even been pitched yet, so the idea of Brooke Shields mincin' around sans shorts was quite appealing.
    
    
30. Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave. False. Jiffy pop was something strange and weird to my mom, so she would make popcorn in the heavy iron skillet. It took forever. Viva Redenbacher.
    
    
31. They have never seen Larry Bird play, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a football player. True and false. Kareem isn't a football player, silly. He's an airline pilot. See his nametag?
    
    
32. They never took a swim and thought about Jaws. False. When I was in first grade doing my phonics schoolwork, we had to spell "shark" in our workbooks. There was a realistic line-drawing of a shark. I wrote "shark" in the space allotted, and in the margin I squeezed in "Jaws". My teacher gave me a checkmark, and next to the shark she wrote "Just when you thought it was safe....".
    
    
33. The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as WWI and WWII or even the Civil War. True.
    
    
34. They have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran. False. I feel kind of nostalgic for the time when hostages were not decapitated in videos on the Internet after, like, a week. Modern terrorists are lazy and impatient.
    
    
35. They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are. True, but then again I have an eye thing.
    
    
36. They don't know who Mork was, or where he was from. False. Mork was from Ork. He lived in Colorado and had a crazy-huge son who looked suspiciously like Jonathan Winters.
    
    
37. They never heard the terms "Where's the Beef?", "I'd walk a mile for a Camel" or "De plane, de plane!". False. I was sad the day Hervé Villechaize killed himself.
    
    
38. They do not care who shot J.R. and have no idea who J.R. is. True and false. Oh, Mr. Ewing, did your time spent as an Air Force pilot living with a genie teach you nothing?
    
    
39. The Titanic was found? I thought we always knew where it was. Bob Ballard is a personal hero of mine.
    
    
40. Michael Jackson has always been white. I don't know. I think on the cover of Thriller he has....vaguely...African...features? [link]
    
    
41. Kansas, Boston, Chicago, America, and Alabama are all places--not music groups. True, false, false, true, false. And apparently, there is a place called "Oak Ridge" as well.
    
    
42. McDonalds never came in Styrofoam containers. False. I remember the clamshell. And the space-age technology behind the McDLT.
    
    
43. There has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows. True. Because let's face it: Yo MTV Raps! had absolutely nothing to do with music.