#293

It's funny that a mischievous thing for M 'n' m to do is enable the 'WiFi hotspot' on my phone to siphon off data. They do this sneakily in the car, for example, where WiFi is painfully absent. It's odd, I guess, because the mischievous things I did involved spitballs, whoopie cushions, playful theft of tangible shit. Times have changed. Are fart jokes even funny anymore? Regarding WiFi, places still exist without it. Parks, pools, lakes. OMG! No WiFi?! Ugh. I suppose the height of inhospitableness these days is no WiFi. How rude, primitive, barbaric. It forces us to look at each other and not our devices, and talk face-to-face. It's so refreshing, quaint. Michael gets a small amount of cellular data every month. Meg doesn't; she has an iPad and Android phone but no cell plan or number yet. At home, of course, WiFi is taken for granted as much as electricity, toilets, water. Kids enter their houses and bam, they're connected. It's instant and automatic (isn't everything these days?). I'd love to see a Millennial deal with dial-up. Never mind fat, low-res monitors, kilohertz processors, horrible graphics, s-l-o-w networks. PCs that hourglassed forever. Floppies. Today we are super-connected and over-informed. We're lucky. I remind M 'n' m, however, to be human beings also. This means talking to other people in person, understanding social mores, recognizing social cues (that aren't texted, IM'ed, emoji'ed, instagrammed, or snapchatted), and once in a while being present to the physical surroundings and five senses (or is it six?) that God gave us. Technology is cool, useful, powerful. This is good. But tech can depersonalize and shrink us, too. And as long as I'm lecturing M 'n' m about crap, I intend to mix in this little unrelated tidbit I'm big on lately: Do not squander your credibility. Squander money, candy, energy, material things that don't matter in the end, whatever, if you must, but do not squander your credibility. Accidents and poor choices happen, but credibility and honesty are genuine and deep and they need to be preserved, solid, unflimsy, unfragile. We need to have mutual sincerity, trust, and respect. Amen.

Megan is on her device too much but she's also very artsy-and-craft-y the old-fashioned way. She still draws (and I hope she does so forever). Her latest thing is acrylic painting. And she frequently embarks on random, awesome, creative misadventures with Sophie (involving food, chemicals, clothes, clay, wax, soap, plants, makeup, pretty much any raw material you can think of). Stains, dirty sinks, and beautiful messes are encouraged, even if I bitch about them. Recently, the girls made banana ice cream and ate it as they planted cacti in pots they intricately painted. God bless Sophie and her influence on Megan.

"... our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again." – from Pulitzer winner John Cheever's short story "Goodbye, My Brother"

From the same story, a favorite piece of writing and a kind of koan or question of philosophy for M 'n' m: "Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?"