Glory Days Quotes

“The truth is that sending your parent to the past is unlikely to make them see the error of their ways. Physicists refer to this phenomenon as the Boomer Father Paradox, which was originally posited by Austro-Hungarian logician Kurt Gödel, who wrote in a 1931 monograph that “he’s never going to fucking change, no matter what. He’s just going to keep pulling the same damn shit forever.” In layman’s terms, what this means is that your parents are incapable of growth. You can spend millions of dollars, rupture space-time, and taser the heck out of them, and they won’t learn a thing. It’s a foundational law of the universe.”
― Simon Rich, Glory Days: Stories

“My great-grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the TV shows they liked. If they both liked the same show, they’d exchange memes from it. But here’s the thing: GIFs did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud, “Do you remember the part when…,” and then you would perform the meme yourself, using your face and body to imitate what an actor had said and done. Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text, because when you text someone a meme and they don’t respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it but just didn’t have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme with your body and the other person didn’t like it, you would be able to tell, because instead of laughing they would just kind of sadly look away and say, “Yeah, I remember that part.” And you would have to just keep on walking to the restaurant.”
― Simon Rich, Glory Days: Stories