> The worst part was that I was practially cut off from pop culture while I was going through 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Those are pivotal years, I was always geeky but when I got back to the US I was three years behind the times. My freshman year of high school was hell. But thats another story.

I experienced that too. Although I don't look upon it as "the worst part" -- I don't have any regrets; this is just something that happened. It was worse for me, because I was out of the country from 5th to 9th grade; 10th was my first year back. To this very day, my wife will make a reference to something that happened in the eighties and, at my blank expression, exclaim, "You've never heard of ----? Oh, that must have been when you were overseas." We did get a trickle of American pop culture over there. Three months after Top Gun opened here, it was a huge hit there and was the fad of the month for a while. Fat laces and skateboards also made it over there. But I was never one to be taken in by fads, so I was never really into these things anyway. At any rate, some parts of pop culture made it there in some form, usually a few months after they hit here, but some never did. We came back to the U.S. in 1988 and found it almost as big of a culture shock as it was going to Germany and England and so forth in the first place.