Growing Up In HD

Looking at today’s sophisticated technology, I’m relieved I got my growing up out of the way a long time ago. Growing up in today’s world would not be fun.

When I was a kid, the only cameras available weighed about three hundred pounds each and used film. So not only did you have to wrestle with the bulky monstrosity just to take a picture, you also had to go through the work of sending the film out to get developed. What a pain! Just the thought of it makes me want to lie down and rest for several hours. Plus, you never knew what the pictures were going to look like until you got them back and realized your thumb was partially in front of the lens on every single picture in the roll.

As a result of these layers of difficulty and uncertainty, I starred in relatively few pictures while growing up, and they're all grainy and unfocused, making me look like some of the early Bigfoot photographs. I could easily have had a bad hair day, perhaps even a bad hair year, and looking back now nobody would even be able to tell. Personally, I like this. It adds some mystique to my life.

Today’s kids aren’t so lucky. Taking pictures is ridiculously easy with digital cameras, and their quality is impeccable. Kids don’t even have a chance. I mean, if you’re a child of the digital age who had a perpetual runny nose during the first and second grades, all eight thousand pictures and videos taken of you during that time are sure as heck going to show it, to the point of eerily resembling Niagra Falls. And don’t even get me started on zits. (shudder)

Just think of the amount of blackmail material parents can compile on their children these days. It’s nothing short of staggering. Imagine what they could share when their sixteen-year old brings home his first date, should they want to exercise their parental option of completely humiliating their offspring for the total fun of it:

“Here’s a ten minute video of Jimmy running through the yard in his underwear and a Spider-Man mask. I think he was thirteen at the time.”

“Here’s two-hundred and fifty high-res pics of Jimmy on his sixth birthday, when all he wanted to do, for some strange reason, was pick his nose. I still get queasy looking at them. I could text you a few, if you want!”

“This is when the fort Jimmy was trying to build fell over on him and pinned him to the ground. It was hysterical!”

“Here’s a video of Jimmy in a diaper singing some ‘N Sync song. He’s using a popsicle as a microphone! It’s just priceless!”

As a kid these days, your only real hope is that your parents take so many pictures that they become totally unmanageable. In that case, they’ll be spread out among five or six hard-drives, never to be organized, and impossible to sift through. Either that or you could strategically delete them when nobody’s looking. (Better hurry with that one though, before they’re all stored in the cloud and showing up on random advertisements all over the web. That, however, is another story.)