Life
Like many of my fellow millennials, I constantly find myself fighting the urge to check my phone. While I think it was a probably a good thing that a phone wasn't available to me when I was a kid, but that didn't mean I didn't experience the homework struggles that every kid had in the '90s. Where there's a will, there's a way, right? For the most part, I was a good student but, still, who wants to do homework? The lack of technology didn’t slow down '90s kids from procrastinating. If anything, it just made their procrastination attempts (and, usually, successes) that much more elaborate and imaginative and crafty. Like, literally, we did crafts. How else could we entertain ourselves until Tiny Toons came on? Just kidding. Sort of.
Seriously, as a slightly older millennial, most of my early memories came from the '90s, and I have a warm, nostalgic longing for the lazy afternoons I spent at my parents' house, popping a video into our aging VHS player, attempting to connect our computer to our modem, and using the Casio keyboard I loved with a fiery passion, all in an attempt to avoid sitting down and doing my homework. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and when I ran out of ideas on how to avoid homework, I simply tried my hand at the following:
We Wandered Over To Our Friend's House
Because now kids just text or FaceTime or use Facebook or send a tweet or do something that doesn't require them actually going outside and traveling to their friends' houses.
We Watched Daytime Television
I can think of two main categories: Jerry Springer and everything else. I'm pretty sure that, technically, I wasn't supposed to watch Jerry, but it still, um, happened on occasion. Luckily for me, gems like Saved By The Bell and Animaniacs were also in regular rotation. What do kids watch now? Is MTV's TRL still a thing?
We Flipped Through Magazines
Do kids even purchase magazines? Wait, do they even know what magazines are?
We Discussed (At Length) Leonardo DiCaprio, Backstreet Boys, N Sync, And Jonathan Taylor Thomas
Talk about the ultimate crushes. I mean, say what you will about Harry Styles and his now-solo career, but he has nothing on JTT. Nothing, you hear me?!
We Flipped Through Tween Catalogs For Fashion Insporation
Confession: I never ordered a single thing, but I thought about it all the time.
We At Processed Snacks
It sounds kinda bad, but weren't all snacks processed in the '90s? Now kids are into organic, fresh, farm-to-table treats, and that's definitely not what the '90s were about.
We Played On The Monkey Bars (Over Concrete)
Safety first, right? Thankfully, we've lived to tell about it.
We Talked On Corded Telephones
Those who were lucky enough to have their own phones in their own rooms had it made. Now I think kids in elementary school have their own cellphones.
We Wrote Notes To Our Friends On Notebook Paper
And then we folded them creatively and handed them over at school the following day. None of this newfangled texting. Our emojis were actual facial expressions.
