Reclaiming my lost youth

When I was a teenager, many years ago...how many? I can still remember telling a class of students my age for some reason, and having one of them, who was 16 or so, say 'oh, so you're twice as old as I am!' It was even worse when I did the math and realized that he was right. And that was a few years ago.

But to return to my original thought...when I was a teenager, far too many years ago, I used to periodically make cassette tapes for people. Sometimes friends, sometimes acquaintances. I didn't have much in the way of sound equipment, just a record player and a cassette recorder. I'd play the songs I wanted to record from the records they were on, with the sound turned all the way up, and tape them. Open air. In retrospect, I can't even imagine how bad the sound quality must have been. At the time, I didn't think about it. The recipients were always quite gracious and thankful, and probably never played the end product, or at least not more than once.

It didn't matter. I'd spend hours making the playlist, timing them so that I could get the maximum amount in the tape length I had to work with, and of course doing the actual taping. I'd make very detailed liner notes. They were precious, one-of-a-kind items.

Since then, I've moved on to a world with cd's, cd burners, and iTunes. And I've just spent the afternoon blending my new technology and old interest together, and making a cd. I had forgotten just how much fun it could be to share something in this way, in this case with a small group of friends, family and blogpals. It's the perfect blend of copying (I didn't perform the music myself, after all) and creative thought...will there be a theme, is it aesthetically balanced, does it express who I am, or how I see myself, is it all stuff that the recipients will have heard before, or can I surprise them just a little bit? And I still spend lots of time ensuring that the liner notes are just so.

So, now, I am wondering. What other childhood or adolescent pleasures have I forgotten, which deserve to be remembered? I know the things which have carried over from then...non-stop reading, though I rarely have the time these days to read a book or two a day as I often would do then; bicycling, which I did in my childhood and have rediscovered here in bike-friendly Denmark, travelling whenever possible. But there must be many things that have been lost, too.

So, perhaps you can all inspire me. What childhood joys have you kept, or perhaps rediscovered? Or which ones have you not kept for whatever reason, but miss?