on cartoons and wasted youth

For most parents, TV represents a serious quandary. How much should kids watch? What channels? Should you even own a TV?

My parents had no such dilemmas. They handed my two brothers and I the remote and left the room. Granted unlimited screentime, we were raised on a steady diet of around twoa to three hours of cartoons per night. While other kids did things like play instruments or practice sports, we were watching. When I did my homework, I was watching. The only time I didn't watch TV was during dinner and when I was reading, and trust me, I tried to make both of those fit into my main hobby as well. Occasionally, my dad came into the living room and asked us if we were watching something ‘educational’, and when we said no he sort of wandered away shaking his head slightly and we went back to Cartoon Network.

The main result is that I now have an encyclopedic expertise of pretty much all children’s show that aired between 2001 and 2008. Do you remember when it was revealed that Walt from ‘Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends’ has a weird arm because he sacrificed it to save his best friend from being hit by a basketball, or when we learned that certain members of the Kids Next Door get to keep being members and work as undercover agents instead of having their memories wiped at 13 and Numbuh 5 will probably get to do that, just like her love interest Numbuh 9? I do.

These cartoons formed the basis of my personhood. Looking back on the classics of the era -- Codename: Kids Next Door, Courage the Cowardly Dog Show, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Fairly Odd Parents, and, of course, Spongebob -- I can see the early seeds of my humor.

My brothers and I basically built our relationships on these shows. On long car rides, we used to recite our favorite episodes of Spongebob. We adopted the character’s dialogue as our own; we still say goodnight as ‘ganaga sqwaug’ (‘goodnight Squidward’) and ‘ganaga patar’ (‘goodnight Patrick’), as they do in the Spogebob BC episode. I couldn’t find a clip of the moment and nobody has ever gotten the reference, which goes to show just how obscure our knowledge is.

As a kid, I assumed that everybody did the same. I think it’s natural to imagine, at that age, that your circumstances extend to everyone. But I sort of grew to realize that other people did not, in fact, spend vast chunks of their free time on TV. In fact, I learned, some people didn’t watch TV at all. When I heard stuff like ‘we don’t have cable’ or ‘my parents don’t let me watch that’, it sounded to my eight-year-old ears like ‘we eat toothpaste with chili sauce’.

I like to think that, these days, I’m a bit more accepting of people who had different childhoods. Still, I can’t imagine being a kid who didn’t base all their expectations of teenagerdom on iCarly and Victorious.

Was it bad for me? It’s hard to say. On one hand, I didn’t get national merit; maybe rotting my brains during my youth was a factor there. On the other hand, my older brother got a 2350 on his SAT and watched just as much as me, so it’s hard to say. Sometimes I wonder if I could've spent those years more productively, but honestly, I was pretty happy and I still read a bunch and played soccer and socialized actively and did all kinds of things that normal, well-adjusted kids do. Sure, I didn't become a prodigy in anything, but I did plenty of stuff and, more importantly, I was happy.

In any case, I can't change the ways in which I squandered my youth. All I can do now is look back and reminiscence fondly on those days in which the greatest crisis in my life was when Timmy almost lost his fairies for the millionth time that season. And since regret is futile, I've chosen to embrace those years- so if you gave me the chance, I wouldn't change the thing.