Jenna is without a doubt the number one rawdogging journalist on planet earth! I would be in the dark about the latest trends without your substack.
This just goes to show that most of Gen Z are just a bunch of attention whores that need to record and document everything they do for clicks. They literally are recording themselves "doing nothing" to insinuate that life is boring without some sort of screen time, but are still using some sort of device that they shouldn't be using for the challenge to record the challenge lol!
A few years back, I was on the shuttle bus to the rental car center. A family was sitting across from me, parents and a young adult son. The parents were glued to their phones. The son was not, just looking around. It was heartening.
I hate when children use that word! The "b" word. Where did they get the idea that they should be constantly entertained and can call any activity they don't want to do, "boring"?
Mine learned very early never to use the word bored, or in the next second they’d have a new chore.
“Spend 2 hours looking at the Sears catalog” triggered memories. Mine was JCPenneys and, by the time we received the new catalog, the old one looked more tattered than the Playboy magazine my neighbor’s kid stole from his dad’s collection and hid in the basement.
Announcing you are bored? That's when kids at our house got put on doggy-poo patrol and had to walk the entire yard with a plastic bag and a pooper scooper. Following that, if anyone else was stupid enough to announce their own boredom, there was also; peeling potatoes/carrots for dinner, cutting grass, raking leaves/grass, washing the car, washing the dog, cleaning the bathroom, cleaning windows, emptying the trash and washing out the cans, painting the fence or the dreaded 'cleaning our room!' And God forbid you ever said that at the grandparents!! They had an actual GARDEN with weeds!! I, of course, carried on the family tradition! LOL!
To this day, I will not announce my boredom! Being quiet and happily bored is a gift! LOL!
I remember it as “blow up yer TV,” which hit home for me. John had a way with words like no one else. Chortles abounded from listening to many of his songs (Dear Abby never fails me).
Wow, you mean if we take a positive practice and reframe it as a "challenge" with a silly name attached to it, people will actually do it en masse? This strategy has enormous potential for those of us who want to harness mass psychology for mass awakening 💡
Fold a fitted sheet challenge, sweep and mop the floors without a roomba challenge, do the dishes by hand challenge, hang the laundry to dry challenge…
OMG, it's actually possible to fold a fitted sheet?! I always just bunch it up, stuff it in the linen closet, and shut the door really quickly before it falls out 😆
After a lady in a laundromat watched me fight with a fitted sheet way back when I was in my very early 20’s, she kindly walked over, asked for my sheet and said, “watch”. I thought she was a genius! I still fold my fitted sheets neatly to this day thanks to her.
Karen, there's a youtube for that... [he assumed, without checking because... what's the penalty if he's wrong?].
Challenge: Jenna McCarthy, post a link to a video showing you showing your husband how to fold a fitted sheet, followed by him attempting to follow your example. (I consider it possible that you too don't know how to fold one, but the difference is that YOU are capable of learning how.)
I can't believe it... the exact same thing happened to me when I was about your age, and like you, I still do it the same way to this day! Those kind ladies at the laundromat!!
My husband still mocks and laughs at me when I fold them properly as I was taught. I don’t dare let him touch one because they would just turn into pillow stuffing in our closet. I’ve tried to teach him over the years, but he just ends up giving me a “nyehhhhh” groan halfway through and crumpling them like a used Kleenex.
Gee, my husband, too. This is a man who is an engineer, so I know he’s completely capable of folding sheets properly. I learned early on, that was his way of getting out of it. I’ll give him a pass on this one, since I like military grade corners and he gets to clean the chicken coop!
We often went to grandmas for Sunday brunch. Pancakes, bacon and cantaloupe when in season. Of course my brother and I would run around and talk too much and fight of course, as my mom and grandma cooked in the minuscule kitchen. If we got too rowdy someone would get out the egg timer and if we shut up for five minutes we got a nickel, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Other times they’d make me draw, not sure what my brother would have to do…
After the timer drill we sat at the table ‘driving’ our Fiesta ware plates. 🤣
Often my brother and I had stayed the night and watched Lawrence Welk and ate popcorn or vanilla ice cream with creme d’mint liquor on top. No wonder we were kinda nuts the next day!
(It was Portland, so it rained a lot, thus explaining the indoor activities)
I actually lived 56 years without knowing until a friend showed me a YT video, and I was like....why didn't I think of that!? Basically you tuck the opposite elastic ends into each other. Still isn't perfect but closer than the wad it up method.
Challenge: "Turn off your assumptions. Set aside your hatreds. Abstain from government programs. Imagine you are not the center of 'everything that is.' Educate yourself--over time--to the level the founding fathers assumed future generations would need to maintain their freedom."
Lawdy! Guess I’m a bit ahead of the curve. I’ve been doing that for 50 years. Sit in the woods for hours on end, sometimes from before sunrise to after sunset! 😱 Don’t recall ever having been bored. Am I weird?!
Love the green stamps reference. I loved looking through the catalogue. All was possible! Too funny. I always yelled at my boys, when they were still mildly under my control to lead your own life rather than looking at someone else’s! Create your own adventure rather than watching someone else. But in all honesty, after I sent a link to my son he shot back “mom! Stop your doom scrolling”. So there you go.
Cultivating the internal monologue is so important and scores 100 points in the maturity game, however recording yourself doing the “trend” is -50, posting it another -60…. So net loss.
And how many retakes of the recording were there? They can’t get anything with the first shot… did it take you three hours to record this 15 minutes?
Longish car trips (5 hours or so) have recently become a favorite activity. It's due in part to a playlist I love, but also to the time it allows to think. I often find myself pausing the music to think without distraction for a while.
My daughter and I just did a road trip to my niece's baby shower. Eight hours in the car Friday and again Sunday. She talked the entire time (seriously - she didn't shut up once. I don't know how she finds so much to talk about). No phones needed for entertainment.
I have found a Le Carré groove recently, that makes the time fly by. And I emerge cleverer about how the "game" is played. Such a genius. And I got them for free using the Libby App.
I used books on tape to keep my sanity when I had a 30+ minute commute to the office everyday. Then books on CD. Now it's books on the app. Work from home these days but still breaks up the monotony of house work!
I know! I remember learning to turn a cassette over at 60 mph as being a thing you needed to be able to do, and the passenger seat being your audiobook storage section. Mercifully, in my neck of the woods, the A1 always had treacherous roundabouts and lights, at which you could queue and faff about with the next cassette. Or pull over at a petrol station to dig them out of the footwell. Same for CDs. And oh my beating heart, the minidisc player which could contain the whole book and downloaded so fast on Gracenote.
Yes... life west of the Mississippi has been good. Lots of open roads. The "east" is insane these days. Oh, "west" excludes California. Driving around LA is pretty crazy too.
Just think about how utterly ridiculous this is. People who spend every waking moment staring into their devices, many 18 hours per day, are attempting to "raw dog" it for a mere 15 minutes, as if it's a big deal, while at the same time using those devices to take pictures of themselves doing nothing. This is the dumbest thing I've heard this week.
Let me understand this as an old timer , I’m in a public restroom, some 25 yr old is videoing herself and doing selfies and blocking the stalls . I said “ please don’t do videos in the bathroom.” ( As I can see myself on the screen behind her ) . Her response was “B*tch shut your mouth “. I guess I should have said … “ Rawdog is a happening thing , get with it chick. “. 🤣. Thanks Jenna , it was in terminal 2 San Diego airport right before you check in by Einstein Bagels , with the pretty seashells at the entrance.😁😉🤗❤️
You didn’t have to tell us you were an old timer. You used the term “videoing taping” and probably meant to type videotaping, and the term and the typo both tell us that you’re at least our age (50’s) if not a bit more. 😉
I love hardware shops. Such a happy place and filled with all the good tools, (as opposed to many of my fellow citizens). And what were Dads thinking when they were comparing drill bits? I mean, no one needs to do that much thinking outside of the toilet.. And rewinding VHS tapes. If you're British.. Channel 4 (horse) racing, any form of cricket, Variety performances, the proms, Blind Date, prize-giving, the school Christmas service, (after which you were "free to go, see you next year"), any performance alerting you to the dangers of drink/drugs/sex, (but strangely never pedophiles). Too many to count. I don't want to boast, but we are the masters of TV as the opium of the people.
I tried this new fad for a minute. The moment I couldn't hear it the noise of t'internet, I could hear my neighbours through the Victorian walls of my terraced house. They were having a whale of a time, chuckling before coughing up a lung - go CV-vaccine. I could listen to the radio, or listen to them. How I am not medicated is a complete mystery, and the product of stoicism learn in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Oh hang on, there is a teenage boy screaming outside the front, at someone for something in the kind of entitled, cracked voice that makes you want to punch something. Or pick up a bazooka. When all that is done, there will be sirens, factories churning, high speed trains, low speed, creaky buses, the pedestrian crossing beeping, and the silent screams of people who voted for Starmer's Labour party, paying even more income tax, as Labour breaks yet another election promise.
Car journeys.. dear God. And if you want the true, visceral price of boredom, try all that tedium in an un air-conditioned car and then peeling your bare thighs off of a PVC car seat whilst adults look on irritably, having travelled all that way on sheepskin/towelling seat covers. THAT is rawdogging.
Want to confuse a Gen Z’er? Tell them you’re about to shoot them with a “bazooka”. They only know the term “RPG”. And even that, they only know it from their weapon choices in video games, not their gum wrappers or little plastic army men toys.
I mean I'm glad they're "discovering" this. But it makes me really, really sad that they have to. And that for many of them, it's just gonna be something they try and then shake off as a fun little experiment/video they posted on tiktok but noooooo thank you, not doing THAT.
ALL those things, we did all of them! Also, we scraped fake snow off of the windows for hours after Christmas. We rode all the way to the beach, 8 hours, lying in the BACK window of the car, coloring —-using actual crayons. There was a huge stain up there for years from melted crayons. If it wasn’t my turn to lie in the window, I might lie in seat or even curl up in the floorboard and use the seat as a desk, reading Nancy Drew or Trixie Beldon mysteries.
Jenna is without a doubt the number one rawdogging journalist on planet earth! I would be in the dark about the latest trends without your substack.
This just goes to show that most of Gen Z are just a bunch of attention whores that need to record and document everything they do for clicks. They literally are recording themselves "doing nothing" to insinuate that life is boring without some sort of screen time, but are still using some sort of device that they shouldn't be using for the challenge to record the challenge lol!
The irony is so strong. I laughed too.
Only boring people get bored.
Another sign of the complete vapidity of the west.
Watching every single person in a subway car glued to their phones makes me weep for society.
A few years back, I was on the shuttle bus to the rental car center. A family was sitting across from me, parents and a young adult son. The parents were glued to their phones. The son was not, just looking around. It was heartening.
I hate when children use that word! The "b" word. Where did they get the idea that they should be constantly entertained and can call any activity they don't want to do, "boring"?
Mine learned very early never to use the word bored, or in the next second they’d have a new chore.
“Spend 2 hours looking at the Sears catalog” triggered memories. Mine was JCPenneys and, by the time we received the new catalog, the old one looked more tattered than the Playboy magazine my neighbor’s kid stole from his dad’s collection and hid in the basement.
If I made the mistake of complaining to my mom that I was bored, her standard reply was, "Good. You can polish the silver".
No comment ;)
I think I saw what you did there....:-)
Good Lord, I hope not ;)
Announcing you are bored? That's when kids at our house got put on doggy-poo patrol and had to walk the entire yard with a plastic bag and a pooper scooper. Following that, if anyone else was stupid enough to announce their own boredom, there was also; peeling potatoes/carrots for dinner, cutting grass, raking leaves/grass, washing the car, washing the dog, cleaning the bathroom, cleaning windows, emptying the trash and washing out the cans, painting the fence or the dreaded 'cleaning our room!' And God forbid you ever said that at the grandparents!! They had an actual GARDEN with weeds!! I, of course, carried on the family tradition! LOL!
To this day, I will not announce my boredom! Being quiet and happily bored is a gift! LOL!
My mom used to say that.
I will never forget the lyrics from John Prine. They have saved me for 50 years.
“Turn off your TV. Throw away your paper. Move to the country, and build you a home.
Plant a little garden. Eat a lot of peaches. Try to find Jesus on your own.”
He was the greatest!
Scott, never heard it, or of him. Thank you for bringing both back.
John Prine and his songs are the best! Very clever.
One of my favorites “In Spite of Ourselves”..
https://youtu.be/1bRt13ygKwE?si=fwYiICD-uWu5CyQo
The song that has those words that Scott B shared…”Spanish Pipedream”
https://youtu.be/NWOoiMtevdY?si=gebRxs27Ec8On-M5
I love seeing his cute grin when they’re singing ‘In Spite…
I love that!
I remember it as “blow up yer TV,” which hit home for me. John had a way with words like no one else. Chortles abounded from listening to many of his songs (Dear Abby never fails me).
You are correct on the lyrics….
Memories...
Wow, you mean if we take a positive practice and reframe it as a "challenge" with a silly name attached to it, people will actually do it en masse? This strategy has enormous potential for those of us who want to harness mass psychology for mass awakening 💡
Fold a fitted sheet challenge, sweep and mop the floors without a roomba challenge, do the dishes by hand challenge, hang the laundry to dry challenge…
OMG, it's actually possible to fold a fitted sheet?! I always just bunch it up, stuff it in the linen closet, and shut the door really quickly before it falls out 😆
LingOL! :)
After a lady in a laundromat watched me fight with a fitted sheet way back when I was in my very early 20’s, she kindly walked over, asked for my sheet and said, “watch”. I thought she was a genius! I still fold my fitted sheets neatly to this day thanks to her.
I need an in person demo!
Karen, there's a youtube for that... [he assumed, without checking because... what's the penalty if he's wrong?].
Challenge: Jenna McCarthy, post a link to a video showing you showing your husband how to fold a fitted sheet, followed by him attempting to follow your example. (I consider it possible that you too don't know how to fold one, but the difference is that YOU are capable of learning how.)
She probably won’t trust me, I still haven’t done the tin foil cat photo challenge yet! 🤣
Great idea!! Jenna?
We CAN do hard things! 😉
https://youtu.be/454Bbse__B0?si=A6LN7AQkJLmkmEwO
The comments are fun too!
Guess I’m going to have to do some laundry and practice, hey, or grab one that got stuffed into the linen cupboard!!
Thank you!
Too hard! Why would anyone bother?
I can't believe it... the exact same thing happened to me when I was about your age, and like you, I still do it the same way to this day! Those kind ladies at the laundromat!!
Bless her! and her memory!
It IS Possible. I taught my father. He thought I was a genius lol.
My husband still mocks and laughs at me when I fold them properly as I was taught. I don’t dare let him touch one because they would just turn into pillow stuffing in our closet. I’ve tried to teach him over the years, but he just ends up giving me a “nyehhhhh” groan halfway through and crumpling them like a used Kleenex.
Gee, my husband, too. This is a man who is an engineer, so I know he’s completely capable of folding sheets properly. I learned early on, that was his way of getting out of it. I’ll give him a pass on this one, since I like military grade corners and he gets to clean the chicken coop!
EXACTLY - my husband does some things half-assed just so he gets out of doing them in the future.
Those pesky husbands or ‘partners’ always deferring to us, because “we do it so much better” to get out of doing s**t.
I think it’s a plot…
😂🤩
We often went to grandmas for Sunday brunch. Pancakes, bacon and cantaloupe when in season. Of course my brother and I would run around and talk too much and fight of course, as my mom and grandma cooked in the minuscule kitchen. If we got too rowdy someone would get out the egg timer and if we shut up for five minutes we got a nickel, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Other times they’d make me draw, not sure what my brother would have to do…
After the timer drill we sat at the table ‘driving’ our Fiesta ware plates. 🤣
Often my brother and I had stayed the night and watched Lawrence Welk and ate popcorn or vanilla ice cream with creme d’mint liquor on top. No wonder we were kinda nuts the next day!
(It was Portland, so it rained a lot, thus explaining the indoor activities)
You had me at "Fiesta ware"... Ahhhh, my godmother in Schnellville, Indiana even had those... They felt "home." Yes, thanks.
I have some of hers. I used to display them on the wall! Multicolored of course.
You’re welcome, good memories for sure!
Thank you for sharing that delightful memory, Karen!
❤️
...always the last item of fresh laundry that gets put away ;-)
...because maybe you'll be hit by a comet before you have to do it.
I actually lived 56 years without knowing until a friend showed me a YT video, and I was like....why didn't I think of that!? Basically you tuck the opposite elastic ends into each other. Still isn't perfect but closer than the wad it up method.
MAA There is a way to fold a fitted sheet and it’s quite simple…look on YouTube. That’s if you even care! 😉🤪
Glad I’m not the only one!! 🤣
Yep!!
The No Vaccine Challenge. "Here I am telling the pharmacist at CVS to fuck off!"
😝😝😝😝😝😝😝💕🚫💉
👏
Challenge: "Turn off your assumptions. Set aside your hatreds. Abstain from government programs. Imagine you are not the center of 'everything that is.' Educate yourself--over time--to the level the founding fathers assumed future generations would need to maintain their freedom."
Ooh, that's good. How about The Beginner's Mind Challenge?
I call it Practicemaxing
Lawdy! Guess I’m a bit ahead of the curve. I’ve been doing that for 50 years. Sit in the woods for hours on end, sometimes from before sunrise to after sunset! 😱 Don’t recall ever having been bored. Am I weird?!
(Rhetorical question) 😂
Thanks for the lols Miss Jenna!🙏💖
Is a Rawdog activity reading an actual book (with no pictures) for more than 15 minutes?
I especially liked, “Rewind a cassette tape with a pencil.” My having done this 1,000 times in my childhood makes me a zen master!
🤣🤣🤣
Mrs. "the Knife"
Are you telling me that Gen Z just discovered life???
Yes Virginia, normal life involves not staring at a phone.
...and it Makes News. Talk about BORING...
It makes "engagement" (content?). What the heck are "we" engaging with?
Our youth (anyone under 40?) appear to be largely "lost". Maybe they should consult their GPS? (we know they can't read a map)
Love the green stamps reference. I loved looking through the catalogue. All was possible! Too funny. I always yelled at my boys, when they were still mildly under my control to lead your own life rather than looking at someone else’s! Create your own adventure rather than watching someone else. But in all honesty, after I sent a link to my son he shot back “mom! Stop your doom scrolling”. So there you go.
Cultivating the internal monologue is so important and scores 100 points in the maturity game, however recording yourself doing the “trend” is -50, posting it another -60…. So net loss.
And how many retakes of the recording were there? They can’t get anything with the first shot… did it take you three hours to record this 15 minutes?
Longish car trips (5 hours or so) have recently become a favorite activity. It's due in part to a playlist I love, but also to the time it allows to think. I often find myself pausing the music to think without distraction for a while.
My daughter and I just did a road trip to my niece's baby shower. Eight hours in the car Friday and again Sunday. She talked the entire time (seriously - she didn't shut up once. I don't know how she finds so much to talk about). No phones needed for entertainment.
🤣🤣🤣
See! We don't need those airplanes! Just hop in the car and let your mind wander (yes a good playlist does help).
I think I’m the only one on the airplane every time we go down to visit my son in FL who reads a book or just sits there looking out the window lol 😝
Wow... really? That's what I've always done.
Yup, when I look around everyone is on their devices or watching movies from the plane!
🤦♂️ Phone batteries never drain down if you turn it OFF and put it in a faraday bag! (and nobody can track you)
I have PTSD from long car rides as a child. And camping. Definitely camping.
I loved camping as a kid. It was worth it for the chance to drink coffee alone! Not to mention, we saw some really great things
I have found a Le Carré groove recently, that makes the time fly by. And I emerge cleverer about how the "game" is played. Such a genius. And I got them for free using the Libby App.
I used books on tape to keep my sanity when I had a 30+ minute commute to the office everyday. Then books on CD. Now it's books on the app. Work from home these days but still breaks up the monotony of house work!
I know! I remember learning to turn a cassette over at 60 mph as being a thing you needed to be able to do, and the passenger seat being your audiobook storage section. Mercifully, in my neck of the woods, the A1 always had treacherous roundabouts and lights, at which you could queue and faff about with the next cassette. Or pull over at a petrol station to dig them out of the footwell. Same for CDs. And oh my beating heart, the minidisc player which could contain the whole book and downloaded so fast on Gracenote.
You must live out west. Traffic east of the Mississippi (and west of the central valley) requires too much attention to think.
Yes... life west of the Mississippi has been good. Lots of open roads. The "east" is insane these days. Oh, "west" excludes California. Driving around LA is pretty crazy too.
Just think about how utterly ridiculous this is. People who spend every waking moment staring into their devices, many 18 hours per day, are attempting to "raw dog" it for a mere 15 minutes, as if it's a big deal, while at the same time using those devices to take pictures of themselves doing nothing. This is the dumbest thing I've heard this week.
I'M SURE GLAD I'M STARING INTO A MONITOR INSTEAD OF A STUPID PHONE FOR HOURS ON END!
Let me understand this as an old timer , I’m in a public restroom, some 25 yr old is videoing herself and doing selfies and blocking the stalls . I said “ please don’t do videos in the bathroom.” ( As I can see myself on the screen behind her ) . Her response was “B*tch shut your mouth “. I guess I should have said … “ Rawdog is a happening thing , get with it chick. “. 🤣. Thanks Jenna , it was in terminal 2 San Diego airport right before you check in by Einstein Bagels , with the pretty seashells at the entrance.😁😉🤗❤️
You didn’t have to tell us you were an old timer. You used the term “videoing taping” and probably meant to type videotaping, and the term and the typo both tell us that you’re at least our age (50’s) if not a bit more. 😉
Hehe yes 60’s , thanks for the spelling correction 😂
Wow nice mouth on her! 😮
This is utterly priceless.
I love hardware shops. Such a happy place and filled with all the good tools, (as opposed to many of my fellow citizens). And what were Dads thinking when they were comparing drill bits? I mean, no one needs to do that much thinking outside of the toilet.. And rewinding VHS tapes. If you're British.. Channel 4 (horse) racing, any form of cricket, Variety performances, the proms, Blind Date, prize-giving, the school Christmas service, (after which you were "free to go, see you next year"), any performance alerting you to the dangers of drink/drugs/sex, (but strangely never pedophiles). Too many to count. I don't want to boast, but we are the masters of TV as the opium of the people.
I tried this new fad for a minute. The moment I couldn't hear it the noise of t'internet, I could hear my neighbours through the Victorian walls of my terraced house. They were having a whale of a time, chuckling before coughing up a lung - go CV-vaccine. I could listen to the radio, or listen to them. How I am not medicated is a complete mystery, and the product of stoicism learn in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Oh hang on, there is a teenage boy screaming outside the front, at someone for something in the kind of entitled, cracked voice that makes you want to punch something. Or pick up a bazooka. When all that is done, there will be sirens, factories churning, high speed trains, low speed, creaky buses, the pedestrian crossing beeping, and the silent screams of people who voted for Starmer's Labour party, paying even more income tax, as Labour breaks yet another election promise.
Car journeys.. dear God. And if you want the true, visceral price of boredom, try all that tedium in an un air-conditioned car and then peeling your bare thighs off of a PVC car seat whilst adults look on irritably, having travelled all that way on sheepskin/towelling seat covers. THAT is rawdogging.
Want to confuse a Gen Z’er? Tell them you’re about to shoot them with a “bazooka”. They only know the term “RPG”. And even that, they only know it from their weapon choices in video games, not their gum wrappers or little plastic army men toys.
Fistful, you were boasting. About UK. Again. Thank you!
What is a Sears catalogue and SNH GREEN stamps?!
HaHaHa, we all are giving away our ages.
Or a JC Witney or Penneys Catalog, and don't forget the Blue Chip stamps!
They were S&H green stamps, and in some other places <somebody-else> gold stamps.
"There," said this oldster, "THAT ought to help!"
You’re not from around here, are
ya? (Southern Speak meaning, “How on earth do you not know what that means?”
Kidding. Yoi must be young.
I mean I'm glad they're "discovering" this. But it makes me really, really sad that they have to. And that for many of them, it's just gonna be something they try and then shake off as a fun little experiment/video they posted on tiktok but noooooo thank you, not doing THAT.
ALL those things, we did all of them! Also, we scraped fake snow off of the windows for hours after Christmas. We rode all the way to the beach, 8 hours, lying in the BACK window of the car, coloring —-using actual crayons. There was a huge stain up there for years from melted crayons. If it wasn’t my turn to lie in the window, I might lie in seat or even curl up in the floorboard and use the seat as a desk, reading Nancy Drew or Trixie Beldon mysteries.
We used to color the rocks in the cement sidewalks in my Queens NY neighborhood as kids. Loved it and loved those Crayola crayons!