you can't miss it if you missed it.
October 31, 2005,

ANOTHER series of �I Love the 80s�?

Since this isn�t �my� decade, I guess I just don�t get it. I have no direct connection to the most of the pop culture of the 1980s. These shows are strangely alien to me.

I am 42, and it should be very much my decade. 16 when it began, 26 at the end�how could the eighties NOT be my decade? But here�s the thing.

The Reagan years, so fondly remembered by yuppies and the consumerist offspring they spawned, were not kind to everyone. I spent most of the decade struggling through, first working and going to school, and then either unemployed and searching for work, or working 2 jobs, 16 hours a day, to make ends meet. I didn�t really manage to glean a whole lot of fun out of that decade. When I was a senior in High School, I managed to have a tiny measure of fun�even though it was the only time in his life my dad was EVER unemployed�so we were pretty damn broke. No grad party, homemade prom dress, no money for any kind of �extras�.

At least I felt my situation less acutely in college, where so many other people were in that same boat alongside me. But part of me was vaguely aware that there were students out there actually enjoying their education, and that stung a bit.

I spent most of my engagement to Spouse 100 miles away from him, trying to squeak by on the miniscule wages I got from my 2 full shifts a day at 2 different restaurants. I still hate the smell of cooking grease to the depths of my soul.
Back then, I was sleeping at my parents� house or in my car. I had no money or time for new music, trendy clothes, watching TV, clubbing, or even long distance phone calls to the man I planned to marry.

I had a shoestring wedding in 1985�cheap as we could possibly pull off and still make my mom feel respectable. Then I moved to back to SE Wisconsin, and faced an employment situation more hopeless than the one I�d just left. No jobs at all. I was, except for four months in retail, unemployed from 1985 to 1989. We scratched by on Spouse�s pitiful paycheck, as he watched the field he�d chosen for a career become obsolete technology. We did without a telephone, in order to save a little money. The high point of my employment record in the 1980s was 1989, when I got a job as a clerk at the brand new Wal-Mart. It took us till 1994 to shake of the grip of poverty and grim survival the 80s had on us.

So watching (yet another) series on the 1980s can be interesting, the same way a documentary on ancient Egypt or Mayan civilization can be interesting. In a detached, remote, and vaguely intriguing sort of way. But I don�t connect to it on the same level as so many people seem to. So I deep down, I don�t get why there needs to be a third season of nostalgia for it.


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