Party Like It's 1992!!!

Topic: Blogging

An eighth-grade student had to choose a year from U.S. history, and live for a week as if it were that year. Billy Frolick chose 1992. Prepare to feel old.

My brother Chris was the most reluctant to participate in the project, as he is way obsessed with the new Maroon 5 CD that he downloaded and didn’t like having to listen to crud like Billy Ray Cyrus and Boyz II Men for the duration of the control period. He has a massive DVD collection, which was out of bounds, too, given that DVDs had not been invented in the olden days of 1992. Though Chris has an abiding attachment to one of the girls on “The Real World: Philadelphia,” I told him that, for the sake of historical verisimilitude, he had to learn to live without her—and TiVo or his iPod—for a week.
...
I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. At first, I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were not in widespread use back then; there were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry.

Attending school for a week without my cell phone aroused feelings of depression. It seemed like everyone around me was text-messaging each other, and after a while I became convinced that they were text-messaging about me. I felt really humiliated, and it made me appreciate the world I live in today.

Read the entire article, its great. Published in the New Yorker.

I also have to wonder how many 8th graders know the word "verisimilitude." Must be those SAT prep courses.

Forget about DVDs, I didn't buy my first CD until 1994! Although, I already knew Billy Ray Cyrus and Boyz II Men were losers back then. So what if they made more money than I ever will. Funny thing about cell phones too, my parents had one of those huge car phones, but I didn't get a cell phone until... 2001, I think. I put that one off as long as I could. Now I don't even have a land line!