Bigger. Better.

Connecting with my old high school classmates on Facebook has been an interesting exercise. Some of them I've wondered about a lot through the years. I've been pretty easy to find, having rode the wave of the interwebs longer than most people. But nobody ever found me.

Now, suddenly, they're all on Facebook, with their smiling children and spouses. Some divorced, some on their second marriages. And OLD. They look old. Not all of them, but some. And they all have normal hair! What's up with that? Didn't ANYONE retain their eighties-ness?

And I think about the eighties, and I feel sort of sad and wistful. Our childhood was certainly different than the kids I'm teaching now. Their lives are so...complicated. I graduated in 1990, and I don't think we had one pregnant girl in school the entire time I attended. This class I'm teaching has three. THREE. And gun scares and drug busts. I'm not saying my generation didn't do drugs. We did. I guess we just didn't get caught.

I worry about them. They have a ridiculous sense of entitlement, and a bizarre sense that the world is made up of pixels and .mp3 files. They do not go outside. When I was younger, I was outside every single night, playing with the kids on my street. My best friends all lived within ten blocks of each other. This generation's friends live across the country, or even across the world, and they have never met in person.

I can feel childhood innocence slipping away forever. Yeah, our parents said that too, that our generation grew up too fast. We did, but at least we knew it. We could feel the wind through our hair and just prayed for a safe landing. But this new generation is a flock of mini-adults, haughty and bitter about being made to go through all this "kid" stuff. They want to get it over with as quickly as possible so they can go on to bigger and better things, and their parents? Well, they just don't understand.