AIM made all the difference

Last week my boyfriend Ryan blogged about how our 3 years one day age difference makes for some interesting differences in our memories growing up, especially relating to technology. I thought I'd like to give my thoughts on it as well. I am 26, and Ryan is 29.

The TV shows we watched and loved were more or less similar, but there are a few of his favorites that I just barely missed out on. Most notably is GI Joe. I have no recollection of ever watching it, but it was one of Ryan's childhood favorites.  He-man and Transformers are a couple others. We had a lot of cartoon crossover though, running from Thundercats to Tiny Toons to Doug. But at some point, he probably started hanging out with friends and watching preteen/teenager shows when I was still stuck in kiddie land. I don't think he watched Are You Afraid of the Dark or All That. And since I have a younger sister, I watched shows Ryan has never heard of, Gullah Gullah Island and Eureka's Castle to name a couple.

Just for kicks, here are some of my favorite shows as a child. (Vote for your childhood favorite on the poll on the right)

So TV was not too too different, but our technology growing up seems to be worlds apart. I don't recall records, and Ryan got records as presents. We both had computers at a fairly young age, but how we used them was definitely different. I used the internet to write research papers in high school. I had the benefit of sparknotes and went online daily both at school and home.  I would pop into the computer lab at school every chance I had to check my email. This was totally not the case for Ryan, who hardly used the internet while he was in high scool.

Ryan mentioned in his blog that he took typing class in middle school on a typewriter. That literally makes me LOL. I didn't just use a computer for my typing classes... I started in 1st grade!!! (Now this is just obviously a difference in schools and location because I was in 1st grade before Ryan was in middle school.) I can't hardly remember a time without typing. I typed papers in middle school and occassionally before that. To this day, Ryan and I type at completely different speeds. I of course touch type and if I'm typing from my head, I easily type well over 100 wpm. I just took one of those typing tests online where you type a passage about tigers and I typed 94 wpm. I'm pretty fast, and I owe it all to one thing, AIM. I started using it around when it came into existance in homes. I spent many many nights typing away to friends I had seen all day at school and friends who lived in different parts of the country. Ryan did not, and despite the typing classes we both took as kids, I still see him glancing down at the keyboard now and then, and I never hear the rapid clicking of keys coming from his computer that I hear all the time from my own. This makes for a real difference in school.  I was able to knock out 10, 20 page papers like they were nothing - my limiting factor was my brain, not my fingers. My blog posts are also about 10 times as long as his.

Ryan and I feel pretty different in age sometimes. Some pretty big things happened while we were young, so the 3 years does make a difference. Of all the things that were different, when we adopted AIM into our lives seems to be the biggest and most impactful difference. I wonder if there is a similar difference in people based on when they joined facebook or when they got their first cell phones or first e-reader.

On a slighly related note, as you might have noticed earlier on, Ryan's and my birthdays are one day apart (9/2 and 9/3), and despite our massive 3 year age difference, our labor day birthdays give us a fair bit of relatability, and I'm not talking about astrology. We share the disappointment of school starting around our birthdays - buying school supplies and being sad about the end of summer overshadowed our birthdays. Never getting to celebrate our birthdays at school with cupcakes because they fall just a hair too early. Always amongst the youngest in our grade, last to turn 13, 16, 18 and the all-important 21. For those of you Superfreakonomics readers out there, you know our birthdays have prevented us from becoming professional hockey players. Our friends' son Julien is 2 years old and was born on September 4, one day after my birthday. Maybe one day we will all bond over our birthdays. Julien is the youngest reader of my blog. Hi Julien!!!