Growing up Kids

I find that as a newly made responsible adult that I am constantly finding ways to revert back to my childhood, as many people in their early twenties and beyond constantly are. We buy gadgets to sublimate for toys. We join club sports leagues in place of after school games. And for many of us, like myself, who are on a limited income, we bring our lunch to work, instead of to the classroom.

Making my lunch becomes a nightly ritual that I have found somewhat enjoyable as I decide what I will eat the following day; how it will be a slight variation on the day or two days before. In an effort to to keep the excitement going while concurrently jumping back a decade in time, I have found myself scouring the web for lunch boxes. And not just any lunch boxes, metal lunch boxes of the "old school" variety with characters from a past life, where PBS was the highlight of my morning (and possibly my--at the time--stay at home father's as well).

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a perfect lunch box, though my roommate (who has recently joined the hourdes of lunch bringers) and I have certainly tried. Iming back and forth our favorites we wandered through the web looking for the right fit. So many of what we found were soft and "insulated", with sports team logos or just plain navy blue. It seems that both she and I agreed, we wanted metal, square and something from an era where Dora the explorer and Pixar were not even around yet.

What is fascinating is that she and I are not the only ones who are in the market for some old time fun. Websites like lunchboxes.com stay around probably for people who collect lunch boxes, a practice I find strange since they aren't the most attractive items. It made me wonder what the kids now-a-days carry their lunches in or if they are bred on the Kraft lunchables that were so popular and "cool" in my day. Do kids still trade items from their lunches or is everything now so delicious and processed that kids can get chubby and happy on their own foods?

One thing is for sure, whatever the kids are doing now, so many of us, I'm sure, can agree that we wish we were doing it too, instead of this daily grind we've been relegated to.

What we chose:

A Literati stuck in a digital Age

I'm new to the world of blogging. I've been a child of newspapers, books and magazines since before I can remember. I keep talking about how I aspire to be a journalist and when people ask me what kind of journalism I'd like to be in I immediately say Print. But print is a dying medium. The newspapers are going broke. People don't like the feel of the ink on their fingers or the trouble it takes to fold the New York Times over four times just to read one article, only to have to do it again to read another article on the next page five minutes later.

Frankly I've always found the idea of blogging self indulgent, like going to a psychiatrist. Though I do like talking to a shrink. It feels relieving unburdening all my problems onto someone else who probably won't tell me something I don't already know or who won't ask me a question I haven't heard before but having their Ph.Ds and MD diplomas in front of me makes me feel like my money is being justly spent by having someone "experienced" tell me what my problem is. And here I go again, ranting about what I feel. I just wonder who really cares about these opinions.

I said something very similiar to my roommate when I told her I was starting a blog and felt a little embarrased by it. She responded very quickly and rationally saying "It's no different from facebook or myspace where people are constantly posting how they feel one moment or what they did the next. What do you think all those status updates are for?" So here I am blogging with the best, or maybe just the rest, to flex my writing and cramp my fingers. My father said I should write down how I'm feeling for ten minuets a day, even if it's just to say that my stomach hurts and the dog took a big-- well you know-- outside. So in the spirit of self indulgance and narcism I've decide to write my thoughts down on the world wide web for, well, the whole world to read or not.