I have my nephew over with me and the one thing he always reminds me about it how bored he is.
With his multiple gaming consoles of every brand, hundreds of games, television, computers and the internet.... I'm always surprised to see that anyone in this day and age can be bored. For when I was a boy, we were never bored. There was always something to do.
This comic pretty much sums it all up for today's youth.
http://www.arcamax.com/zits/s-723402-770841
When I was a kid, the only thing we really had was our bikes. Everything else we made ourselves. Boomerangs out of paddle pop sticks. Spears out of tree branches and a knife. Rockets out of Coke bottles, some vinegar and a bit of baking powder. The list can go on all night, as far back as my memory can take me.
Yet, my nephew can sit there as we both build a fire so we can cook a BBQ dinner. I don't use gas bottles and instant flames. I burn things the old fashioned way, using discarded wood, old fench posts that have been sitting in the weather for over 50 years and have now been replaced with colourbond steel.
I got him to build the fire. And while we waited for the embers to make enough heat for us to cook on, he said "I'm so bored.... is the fire ready yet?"
So I explained that we have to build up the fire to get it up to temperature so we can cook our food.
He didn't get it. Why do it this way when you can just turn on the gas?
So he sat there, with a pair of tongs in his hand turning the meat when I told him to. Wishing he was inside where he could play his game boy, his play station, switch TV channels because he lost interest in the other 4 shows that are on at the moment.
I love my nephew, but he really reminds me of all the other kids I dislike.
When you're young, you look at adults when seem to not get you. As you get older, you figure out what they were blabbering on about. "The bloody kids these days!"
Honeymoon on Mars, 1928
2 days ago
4 comments:
just take him out shopping and try to act cool around him, that will get him back.
Only problem with that is he doesn't bother with that. My niece on the other hand is a bit older, and being a mid-teen girl, is now very self aware. It's extremely easy to embarrass her.
Sad the way kids are now days. Like you I didn't have much other than a bike and my buddies and myself had a blast ridding out in the boonies. That was long before mountain bikes, but we made it anyway. I guess that's where I got my love for just being out in nature. I think there was a total of 1 TV station at first and then when the second one opened we thought we were really rolling. Roy Rodgers, Sky King and stuff like that was about all there was to watch back then, but it did quiet well on Saturday mornings. Of course there were plenty of chores to go around. Now days I don't think most kids even know what a chore is. No lawn mowers either. I'm talking manual labor hoeing an acre of weeds and stuff like that.
Even so, I'm a few years younger and had TV and all that other stuff. I still got on my bike, and rode and rode and rode. In fact, once I did a google maps thing on where I rode in Pasadena and Altadena in California and it turned out I rode about 15 kilometres a day at the age of 11, on a bike too big for me because that's all we had.
We made our own toys and our own fun.
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