By DAN SIMONS

Mouthing Off editor / old-school scholar

It all started when a girl in a bar wrote her first and last name on a scrap of paper, drew a smiley face, and scribbled down the word “Facebook.” The modern equivalent to a number written on a napkin.

No, this isn’t a tale about a failed relationship. This paper does not have enough pages for me to go into that. This is about when I realized how easy our generation has it.

A long, long time ago …

All we need is a name and we can start on the adventure of getting to know someone. Back in our parents days, when Julius Caesar was all like “I’m the president of everything” and the horsepower of your ride literally meant how many horses you had pulling it, the average person would know maybe a hundred people in their life, most of them family. So getting a hold of someone to go out was a pain in the ass.

First you had to meet this person, like face to face. Then you had to get a number, and not to a cell phone. This meant calling a number multiple people share and God forbid, maybe talking to someone else in that family, like her potentially homicidal father.

Once that was all taken care of, you then had to avoid a gunfight in the saloon and watch out for Spanish Flu, all while going uphill, both ways.

Back in my day

I still remember the days when I needed to call a friend’s house to hang out with them. Phone numbers were memorized, not stored in the phone itself. Kids these days have it so easy.

Yes, I’m only 22 and already pulling this card. The “Back in my day” card.

Back in my day we had to rewind our video tapes. None of this fancy skipping about with a DVD player remote, we had to sit right next to this giant black machine and hold down a button to skip ahead or rewind it. Special features? If you were lucky, they were after the credits, and that too you had to hold a button down to skip. Did I mention the primary diet of a VCR machine is to eat video tapes?

Back in my day, we had to blow on our video games to make them work. Smacking your Super Nintendo was a legitimate trouble-shooting technique. There was no auto save feature and sometimes there wasn’t a save feature at all. If your dog accidentally bumped your Sega, Sonic blinked out of existence, the Sega logo popped up again and Dr. Robotnik was still a pain in the ass. We only had 151 Pokemon, and damn it, we liked it.

Back in my day, when we wanted to go online, we used a damned phone line. And when it tried to connect (Yes kids, it didn’t work every time) it made this soul-rendering abomination of a noise that sounded like a robot was giving birth in an electric storm. You know this sound. It is the soundtrack to your nightmares.

When we finally got online, websites moved as fast as a turd uphill, and it still blew our minds.

Great generation, or the greatest?

Our generation is a damned lucky one. We experienced our childhood in a rare window between worrying about those blasted commies and worrying about those damned terrorists.

Politics boiled down to if you liked Backstreet Boys or N*SYNC. We didn’t have energy drinks yet, but the tragically short-lived soft drink Surge did a damn fine job of helping kids bounce off the walls up until their pancreases failed. I’m fairly certain any medical problems in my future might be traced back to Gushers, Fruit by the Foot, and Warheads.

The majority of my generation misses the TV shows most of all. Any life lesson you could ever use was covered in “Full House,” “Boy Meets World” or “7th Heaven.” I still think twice about walking over a man hole cover because part of me thinks there could still be a group of teenaged mutant ninja turtles down there.

Nickelodeon cartoons take the crown here. People miss watching Angelica be a bitch to the Rugrats and what adventures “Hey Arnold!” would go on in this episode. The Facebook group “I want my 90’s Nickelodeon back” has over a million people in it. That’s a lot of people to put on a big orange couch or cover with slime.

Kids these days know nothin’

Why are we already nostalgic for our youth when we’re still relatively young? Everything from our childhood is still fresh and probably available on YouTube. We don’t have to open an archaeological dig to relive our past. And yes, I might still have Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael action figures in my room, but that doesn’t mean I long for yesteryear.

It means that we, the iGeneration, the results of the ’80s and the first teenagers of the 21st century, realize we had a damned good growing up. Sure, we didn’t fight Nazis or put a man on the moon but we did save Princess Zelda from Ganon and we all have held up a cat at least once and dramatically said “Simba.”

Back in my day, vampires were badasses, we didn’t question if Dora the Explorer had a green card, and the only member of the Cyrus family we had to deal with was Billy and his achy-breaky heart. Kids these days, I swear. They will never know what it’s like to develop film at a pharmacy or the horrible hand cramps of playing Goldeneye with a Nintendo 64 controller.

Soon I’ll have to tell them to get off my damned lawn. Someone bring me a Capri Sun and a Game Boy.