MetaChat - What do you miss about the "good old days"?

In the old days people didn't HAVE ulterior motives. You could just take them at their word.

posted by small_ruminant 13 May | 11:37

In the old days I could ride in the bed of the truck and it was fun!

posted by small_ruminant 13 May | 11:37

I miss being seventeen and having all the secret codes and poignant moments, the drama and the intrigue and the feeling that only you knew how the world should be and everyone else was full of shit.

When things like "street cred" actually meant something.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 13 May | 11:46

I miss seeing every single one of my friends every day at school.

posted by Ambrosia Voyeur 13 May | 11:49

These are the good ol' days. Things are downright peachy. Call me pollyannish, but I am happier in my life now than I've ever been.

posted by netbros 13 May | 11:51

In the good old days I could go barefoot all day. I could run around in nothing but my bathing suit from morning 'til night. In the good old days I would style my hair in several different ways that only a young girl could: side ponytails, two ponytails, all sorts of French braids. Hot rollers, crimping irons, crazy pretty barrettes in the shape of butterflies.

In the good old days I could climb trees and pick Japanese plums and drink water from the hose.

In the good old days I could have a high for weeks on a new and exciting crush.

In the good old days my butt was perfect.

posted by LoriFLA 13 May | 11:53

I miss having crushes on boys. I mean huge, semi-stalkerish, "OMG he totally touched my hand when he passed me the exam!" sort of crush.

But I recognize that it's just nostalgia, and that at the time it was really frustrating and drama-rama to live like that.

posted by muddgirl 13 May | 11:56

I miss the days of wonderment. Right after college, everything was neat and interesting. Look at this internet thing! Look what it can do! Look at this great museum and all the things it can teach me! Look at this funny movie! Now I have all my favorite museums memorized, the movies are just retreads of movies 10 years ago, and the internet is ... never mind.

posted by Melismata 13 May | 11:57

Dusty blackberries on a hot day tasted better in the old days.

posted by small_ruminant 13 May | 12:15

Dusty blackberries on a hot day tasted better in the old days.

Srs. Nowadays a dusty blackberry just means the screen is harder to read.

posted by mullacc 13 May | 12:19

Hmm.

Sunbathing. Skinny dipping.

Having the patience, time, and lack of distractions to tackle The Big Books, like "War And Peace" and "Ulysses."

When MTV played videos, and everybody did videos.

Group Houses. Kinda. I mean, I miss some of those cats fiercely, but I coldn't live like that now.

(I've never stopped getting crushes on people, and I don't think I ever will. I thought this was normal. Oh well.)

posted by rainbaby 13 May | 12:21

I miss eating peanutbutter and fluff sandwiches and having hours to sit on my rug and work on collages.

posted by rmless2 13 May | 12:23

Summer vacation.

posted by JanetLand 13 May | 12:27

I miss the cheap pizza from college, kept cheap thanks to competition not crappy quality. (Well, some of it was crappy.)

I miss hanging out for hours at the coffee shop in town in high school. Those were the days.

posted by me3dia 13 May | 12:39

IN the good old days I had so much unprogrammed time that I could do things like learn the guitar or obsessively read a single author's entire ouvre.

In the good old days it was all potential. It was all about to happen.

In the good old days, I had summers off and could travel and sail and work at camp, which was being paid to live with fantastic people, loll around in canoes, play with kids, get crazy silly, climb trees, and make fires.

In the good old days I didn't have to be in touch with everybody, all the time, to the point where losing one day's communications is a giant setback.

In the good old days, people had time.

posted by Miko 13 May | 12:43

Listening to the AM radio blast out top-40 while sitting in the back seat of my mom's car, the hot vinyl searing the back of my thighs. In the good ol' days, you could turn the station on the radio by twisting a knob and watching the red line travel across the dial. You could play with the static and make it sound like a theremin.

posted by not_on_display 13 May | 12:48

I still get crushes on people, rainbaby, but regular sex w/ MuddDude really knocks out a huge component of sexual desperation, I guess.

posted by muddgirl 13 May | 12:56

My good old days are right now, so I don't miss 'em.

posted by eamondaly 13 May | 13:13

I'm with netbros and eamondaly - today is much better than yesterday.

posted by deborah 13 May | 13:25

Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.

Horse troughs.

posted by TheophileEscargot 13 May | 13:27

The unstructured time, the vast possibilities and unencumbered health….

Back when I was in middle and high school we had a 10-acre spread. And, I had a horse. So, I’d come home from school, eat as many potato chips w/ dip and/or cookies as I pleased, then head out for hours and hours with the horse, or playing in the drainage ditch, or exploring the woods, tasting the green things growing just to see if they were edible, watching the clouds, weaving grass stalks into things….

I miss the world being about the possibilities, rather than the regrets, failures and losses.

posted by mightshould 13 May | 13:42

I still get crushes all the time. I don't see anything wrong with that, and don't see much I could do about it. Keeps life interesting, and crushes are not actions, as long as they stay inside my pointed little head. . .

I miss:

Being able to eat without gaining weight.

Having enough time to keep up my proficiency on guitar.

Living within a block of the beach. (Including drunk middle-of-the-night swims, clothes left up on the beach.)

Hitchhiking without a thought for my safety, and picking up hitchhikers with likewise no concerns.

The trust that the money would always somehow be there.

Having mainly a good time with a variety of drugs.

posted by danf 13 May | 13:50

I miss being reckless and going skinny dipping in a pond at night while drinking vodka from the plastic bottle as it floated by.

posted by sperose 13 May | 13:51

Yeah, I'm pretty much the same as most people. I miss the unstructured time. I miss Friday afternoons in college with my best friend when we used to get the window seat at our favourite coffee shop on the main street and watch the world go by. I miss getting home from school just after 3, dammit! I miss lying in bed all day Saturday and reading. I miss getting on my bike and leaving for hours, not knowing where I would go, but knowing that it would be fun.

(I get crushes all the time, too. It's kind of fun. I know they are only going to last for a week or two, so I enjoy them while they are there.)

posted by gaspode 13 May | 13:54

If there’s an emotion more useless than nostalgia, I don’t want to know what it is. Life is dynamic. Things have always changed, and they always will – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Often, it’s a draw.

OK, so now that that’s out of the way: I have found that the older I get, the easier it is to slip into the “things were better when…” trap. There are times when I can shake it off and remind myself that they weren’t necessarily better, just different.

Then again, there are some things we as a culture have lost (or are in the process of losing, unless there’s a drastic change coming in the near future) that I think we were better off having. Everyday things like book stores and record stores – both new and used, repertory movie theaters, radio. And, y’know, little things like affordable housing and healthcare.

posted by bmarkey 13 May | 14:05

I've more or less banished nostalgia. I think it's a coping mechanism from all the moving I've done since from when I was a child, because if I were to be nostalgic about all the people and places I've left, I wouldn't have time to feel anything else. It's especially critical now, when my family is on another continent.

So, I don't indulge in a lot of thoughts about the past. I've allowed myself a wee bit of nostalgia about the city we left a year ago, though - because I can get there on a fast train if I want to, we own a bit of property there, my husband's family is there... so it won't completely slip from my grasp. It's still a place that I can go back to, even if it won't be quite the same for me as when I lived there.

I think I keep a pretty tight (probably unusually tight) rein on my sentimental feelings because I fear that they could bloom like the Little Shop of Horrors flower and start consuming me entirely.

posted by taz 13 May | 14:28

Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

I do miss owning my own time. Even though childhood came with unstructured time, I structured it out pretty well - to learn and explore to a depth I haven't been able to for many many years. Now I get that vicariously through my kids, and I have a blast playing with them, and I know it's only going to get better until the hormones kick in (on them).

posted by plinth 13 May | 14:54

I don't think the stuff I'm nostalgic about actually existed. Like, I could say I missed being skinny and young and beautiful but at the time, I had no idea that I was skinny and young and beautiful and I just wore huge baggy clothes and schlumped around smoking too much pot. Oh wait, hey, that wasn't so bad. But. I was also angst filled and emo, even though the word didn't exist yet. And when I was a kid - ah, nostalgic free range kid loose in the woods experiencing nature - actually I was bored a lot and covered with poison ivy and dreading going home. The same holds true for the years when my kids were small which now seem to exist in a sort of honey colored immaculate light in which everyone was adorable and loving and kind and cute sweet things happened daily. In reality there was conflict and anguish and not enough time for anything and the car was always full of sticky melted candy and I lost my temper and yelled or locked myself in the bathroom just to get away. So. I need to remember that this time of my life, too, will look wonderful in retrospect. There are no good old days.

posted by mygothlaundry 13 May | 15:17

Drinking.

posted by seanyboy 13 May | 16:07

i miss being able to drive for hours cross country for under twenty dollars. i miss looking at my wallet and knowing i could be seeing the sun rise in a completely different part of the continent.
i miss comic book racks and paperbacks for under five dollars and ridiculously huge heroes from the corner deli.
i miss easily available, cheap and potent acid.
i think that's it.

posted by ethylene 13 May | 16:28

Hm. Well in school I was bullied a lot, didn't have many friends and got in fights with the teachers because I was a mouthy little smartass. Dad split when I was small, Mom worked and was gone all the time, so I spent my time equally being bored, lonely, avoiding homework, watching TV or reading, and getting yelled at for all of it. Or, alternatively angsting about what a lazy fuckup I am/was and still doing nothing about it. Sure I lived on a farm and rode horses and played with fire and walked in the woods and pranked people but those were all kind of ephemeral and the whole horse thing? Yeah, that was my mom's passion, not really mine so much. My school years were one long, grinding drudge of loneliness and mediocrity.

My 20s thru my mid 30s were pretty much lost in shallow self-importance and getting myself stuck in a dead-end relationship because I told myself that was what "normal" people did. Maybe I'm just a late bloomer, but I have to agree with the others who say nostalgia's overrated.

Especially those ghastly "retro" 80's bubble dresses/leggings combos I see popping up lately. Bleh.

I mean shit, I can't even say I miss Pop Rocks candy because you can still mail order it off the internet.

posted by lonefrontranger 13 May | 16:45

Today is better than yesterday for me, too, but there are still things that were better in The Old Days.

posted by small_ruminant 13 May | 16:47

I miss nostalgia.

I miss all the free-and-easy stuff that people have already mentioned - riding in the back of utes (trucks to you 'merkins), hours and hours and hours of free time to do nothing, doing all sorts of crazy shit without anything resembling a helmet or any other bodily protection.

I miss having competitions to see who could peel the biggest piece of skin from someone's sunburnt back. I miss not feeling guilty for swimming outside the flags. I miss being able to drive down the beach. I miss having no responsibility.

Like taz, I tend to keep a tight rein on things for fear that I could be totally consumed by regret over the things I didn't do when I had the chance. I think it's absolutely true that youth is wasted on the young.

posted by dg 13 May | 17:35

The good ol' days weren't always good,
And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.

-Billy Joel

posted by Doohickie 13 May | 17:49

My birth mother fixing my hair. She'd twist the wet strands and wind them tight to my head, fasten them with bobby pins. In the morning, I'd have a head full of pincurls.

Spending hours in the bathtub. I'd run the hot water tap again and again to reheat the water. My fingers all pruned.

Sunday skating at the Wonderland of Ice. Showing off a new little outfit, those short ruffled skirts that flared when you'd spin. Hot chocolate and French fries drowned in ketchup after. My adopted mom freezing in the stands in her fake fur.

Handstands and cartwheels. If I tried one now, I think I'd need an ambulance.

Spin-the-bottle. I was a make-out queen.

Perky boobs. Damn gravity.

I could go on, but...

I do, however, at this very moment, rmless2, have the fixins for fluffer nutters. I haven't had one for years, but bought the peanut butter and fluff just this weekend. Would you believe a jar of fluff goes for only $1.19? Quite the bargain, I'd say.

I also have summers off. I count myself very lucky that way.

posted by Pips 13 May | 17:58

Having my mom cook good and healthy food every day. Now I just have really random dinners. Today it was carrots and beets. I'm still hungry.

posted by Stewriffic 13 May | 18:16

Sanity.

posted by jonmc 13 May | 18:58

I'm with mygothlaundry and lonefrontranger. I did enjoy many aspects of my childhood, like the yard of the house I grew up in: garden snakes, turtles, woods and meadow, and make believe. I liked playing in my room, with the radio or the record player on, molding clay and making up stories. But I was alone a lot - mom was a single parent after dad left, and she was tired on the weekends. I got picked on in elementary school because we were poor, and I wore handmedowns. I pretty much flew under the wire in high school. My first marriage had more wrong with it than good. And the years I was a single parent, I was stressed and I wish I'd been a better parent, though my boys seem to have turned out alright (thank God). I had great times, I had sad times, and I'd say every "time" in my life had things I'm nostalgic for. I do get a great joy in wondering what lies ahead, as despite the ups and downs I seriously enjoy this journey of life.

posted by redvixen 13 May | 19:55

What taz said.

I don't feel so much as if I've left experiences behind; they're still in me, but with other ones accreted around them.

posted by tangerine 14 May | 16:38

13 May 2008