The Presidential Physical Fitness Test is back. We have notes.
Reinstated in 2025, relaunched this year, back in gyms this fall. What the Presidential Physical Fitness Test actually measured, and why your kid’s version isn’t yours.
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Gen X parenting humor: the deadpan is hereditary
We’re the first generation to parent on purpose – and the deadpan still comes out of our mouths anyway. On gen x parenting humor, inherited delivery, and the subtitle track.
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Pay phone nostalgia: we were reachable only when we felt like it
The quarter in your shoe, the collect-call loophole, and the hours nobody could account for. Pay phone nostalgia isn’t about the phone.
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School book fair nostalgia: the order form was the best part
School book fair nostalgia isn’t about the books. It’s the grey newsprint order form, two weeks of circling, and a five dollar budget. IYKYK.
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Gen X Dial-Up Internet Nostalgia: The Sound Was the Whole Event
There’s a sound most people under forty have never heard, and if you played it for them, they’d assume something was broken. For us, it wasn’t a malfunction. It was the doorbell. Gen X dial-up internet nostalgia isn’t really about the internet — it’s about the fifty-six seconds of screeching, clicking static that stood between…
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Gen X answering machine nostalgia: the blinking light ran the whole house
For about fifteen years, one blinking red light decided how the rest of your evening was going to go, and it did this from a beige plastic box sitting on a kitchen counter or a hallway table, doing a job nobody had officially assigned it: deciding who got to talk to you, and when. That’s…
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Gen X roller rink nostalgia: the couples skate was psychological warfare
The roller rink didn’t advertise itself as a rite of passage. It was just where you went on Friday, because your parents needed three hours and the rink needed your $4.50. Nobody called it socialization. Nobody called it anything. You just knew: skates on, quarters in your sock, and if the DJ said “grab a…
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Video rental store nostalgia: the aisle-walk was the whole plan
Nobody agreed on a name for it. Your friend’s house called it “going to get a movie.” Yours called it “the video store.” Either way it meant the same six things, in the same order, every single time: pile in the car or walk if it was close enough, produce the laminated card like a…
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Gen X Halloween: The Candy Got Checked. You Didn’t.
Gen X Halloween ran on two rules, and nobody ever wrote either one down. Rule one: you got yourself there. Rule two: whatever came home in the pillowcase had to clear inspection before it touched your mouth. Everything else — the costume, who was handing out what, the kid three houses down whose mom gave…
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If your latchkey kid shirt has to say “latchkey kid,” you weren’t one
Nobody handed you a manual. You got a key on a shoestring, a Post-it on the counter, and a house that made a sound at 4pm you’d recognize blindfolded thirty years later. That’s the whole latchkey kid shirt pitch, and somehow every shirt selling it gets that part wrong. Go look. The current crop —…
