Trust grownups to take a potentially fun event and make it into the snooze fest of the year.
So, the newspaper you’re holding in your hands and reading Bug Boy and other amazing stories and news every week is celebrating a pretty big birthday this month!
Young World is turning 30! Which is super old I know. Maybe it’s time to start calling it Old World? Ancient World? Geriatric World?
Well, for a 30-year-old, the ‘Young’ World is still kickin’ it! Which is impressive, considering how most old people can’t even bend down to clip their toe nails.
So, Amma wanted to celebrate the milestone because apparently, she read Young World when she was a kid too!
Anyway — celebration to me, means a party! Music! Food! Cold things to drink! A giant trampoline! Water balloons! Fun stuff! I called all my friends and invited them! I promised them this was going to be the party of the millennium!
But, since adults don’t really know what the word fun means Amma had planned, wait for it…a reading party.
A reading party. What is that exactly? People sit around in a room and… read? Isn’t that called a library? Or English class? Or detention?
By the time I had this piece of information, it was too late to un-invite my friends! And soon everyone was at my place waiting for a totally amazing evening… not a visit to snoozeville. Even worse, Amma had invited her friends too!
Amma and all her friends had brought out their scrap books. Apparently, back then it was cool to cut out interesting articles and facts from Young World and put it in a scrap book. I’m going to admit — the scrap books were unique and kind of cool! Going through all of them was like going through a history book. But not a boring text book!
Did you know that people thought that all the computers in the world were going to go crazy when the year 2000 hit because of a bug called y2K? Or that there used to be a wall dividing Germany into two parts — East and West? And that it was broken down in 1989? That Hotmail was the first free web-based e-mail in the world and started back in 1996 and was founded by an Indian named Sabeer Bhatia?
Pretty soon, me and my friends were sitting together reading and sharing stories from all these old issues and talking about ones from new issues too. The grownups told us stories about how these news events affected their lives. It was — and I hate to admit how wrong I was about it — fun.
At the end, the grownups proved they had some street cred by making us pizzas and juice and brownies! And then they let us have a water balloon fight! Outside of course.
My friends and I might start our own scrap books now.
Maybe you could too?
