FB Questionnaire: Top 10 Records of My Teens ~ Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Monday, January 16, 2017

FB Questionnaire: Top 10 Records of My Teens

January 16, 2017

Sixteen.

This latest Facebook questionnaire asks you to name the top ten records of your teen years. This one sparked more than a few, shall we say, enthusiastic discussions among my social network. There were some near-Unfriending incidents. Granted, mine is a particularly musically-charged gang of misfits. Dear friends absolutely demolish each other over hot button issues such as whether or not Billy Squire got robbed. (Update: Don't @ me.)

Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Wonder

Colour By Numbers - Culture Club

Purple Rain - Prince

Rocky Horror Picture Show - soundtrack

Working Class Dog - Rick Springfield

Rapture - Anita Baker

Pretty in Pink - soundtrack

Thriller - Michael Jackson

Love Songs - The Beatles (compilation)

*Runners-Up

Dream Into Action - Howard Jones

No Parlez - Paul Young

Even Now - Barry Manilow

Afterburner - ZZ Top

Off the Coast of Me - Kid Creole and the Coconuts

Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Generation X: People of a certain age who are reluctantly connected by a world of ideas at a peculiar time and place in American history.

This is a Gen X blog. The average American Gen Xer went from analog to digital to virtual and AI in a blur of just fifty-odd weird years. Our science fiction became science fact, and I think we deserve some freakin' credit.

There's something comforting in that shared experience of taking a flying leap across a great chasm, from childhood when our highest-tech toy was an Etch-A-Sketch to the very first iPads, from wall-tethered telephones that served an entire family, to everyone having a smart phone, even our kids. Could we have conceived such a thing? How old were YOU when you first got rights to partake of the analog phone? I bet you remember what room it was in. Waiting until after 7pm for the rates to go down.

We shared the experience of our toys, our games, our music, our TV shows and movies. TV shows aired once a week...if you missed it, you missed it. There were four or five channels.Movies showed in the THEATER, for a certain number of weeks or months, then that was it.

We stayed out all day long in summer. Our parents had no idea where we were or what we were up to. We have stories.

To Generation X, technology advancing rapidly is comforting. We have been part of it. We had a big hand in building the cloud, and if not directly then indirectly by using it. Anybody remember all those AOL CDs that came in the mail? If you ever popped one of those things, or had an AOL AIM account, you were part of building the cloud, too. Personally my role was more direct. I worked in telecommunications after college. I have stories from the cubicle throughout the 1990s, when Developers stood in front of a room, a drawing of a cloud on a PowerPoint, talking LANs and VPNs and Backbone Concentrater Nodes. We were building it.

Technology moved fast. We climbed the mountain, we surfed the wave, we sped along the information superhighway with all the windows open. We optimized for mobile like champs. Ours was a triumphant grand jete across the great digital divide, and I tell ya, we're doing a pretty good job of keeping up.

I have been keeping Diary of a Low Budget Superhero for over 25 years...if you're counting, that's years before the word "blog" was coined. The intent back in 1999 was to see, after a lot of years of writing the blog, how an ordinary Gen Xer had it all turn out in the end,

I guess we'll see. Gen X is not done yet.

Monday, January 16, 2017

FB Questionnaire: Top 10 Records of My Teens

Most Popular Posts

Tags

By Date

Gen X on Reddit

Get new posts by email:

Support For This Writer

Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Other Cool Blogs

Movies

Doggy Poo (Movie Review)

TV

The Star Wars Holiday Special: Merry Gen X'mas

Google Tag

Music

Music Makers and Dreamers of Dreams

Post-Stroke

I'm Back!