It's amazing how much talk can be packed into a seven-minute drive when something needs to be said.
Last night I drove my boy off on another adventure. Not camping with the Scouts this time, but participating in a robotics competition someplace about a hundred miles from here. He spent the night at his robotics club leader's house so they could get an early start in the morning.
Before we left, the seminarian said goodbye and asked him if there was anything I'd neglected to lecture him about. No, James said, "she's pretty thorough." We went over the location of the spending money, the phone, the key, the team t-shirt...
As always, I started crying a little bit as we left the house. "Why do you always start bawling, Mom?" he asked. He was very polite, but I know it's annoying. We talked about how hard it is for parents to watch their kids grow up and start doing things separate from the family. He speculated that he'd understand one day, when he is a parent, and I told him that he might not because typically it's the mom who has the harder time. Then I wondered how he felt about us not going along to watch the competition. We would like to see one, but it didn't work out for us to go this time. He said he didn't mind, and actually kind of liked it, being on his own with his friends.
But I was not quite satisfied. He had told me earlier that one of the families had driven up to the competition location the day before, staying in a hotel overnight to avoid the long drive in the morning. The whole family was going to watch the competition. I wondered if he felt neglected because we didn't do that. No, he said, he didn't. He said he likes having something that is his own. And he added that he likes the freedom. I didn't ask exactly what he felt free of. A crying mommie, for one thing.
I pulled into the driveway and he jumped out quickly. He grabbed his things out of the back seat, said "Love you Mom," slammed the car door and walked up to the house. I watched as he rang the bell and as his friend greeted him. They nodded in that way men have. He walked in the door, and then it was shut.
He never looked back.
I guess that's what we want, isn't it?
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Eat Cake (A book review)
Who needs a fun, light, optimistic book to read? Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray came to me via a bit of book serendipity - a random comment on someone's Facebook page. I requested it from the library as soon as I saw the title. I don't buy much fiction anymore, and surely not a book I am not sure I will like well enough to reread. Sorry about that, Ms Ray, nothing personal, that's just the way it goes.
But by page 2 I knew I was hooked when I read this:
Cakes have gotten a bad rap. People equate virtue with turning down dessert. There is always one person at the table who holds up her hand when I serve the cake. No, really, I couldn't, she says, and then gives her flat stomach a conspiratorial little pat. Everyone who is pressing a fork into that first tender layer looks at the person who declined the plate, and they all think, That person is better than I am. That person has discipline. But that is not a person with discipline, that is a person who has completely lost touch with joy. A slice of cake never made anybody fat. You don't eat the whole cake. You don't eat a cake every day of your life. You take the cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious. You have a slice of cake and what it reminds you of is someplace that's safe, uncomplicated, without stress. A cake is a party, a birthday, a wedding. A cake is what's served on the happiest days of your life.Ruth is a suburban housewife who takes great pleasure and comfort in baking wonderful cakes. Then one day her world turns upside down and she needs to make sense of a new order in her life. Could that new order include cake?
There is not one bit of unpleasantness in this book. It is as sweet and light and fluffy as the frosting on one of Ruth's cakes. It is funny and charming and totally predictable - nothing that happened came as a surprise and nothing happened that I didn't want to happen.
Get it sometime when you are feeling a little out of sorts and just need something fun and easy and with no sadness whatsoever.
And speaking of sweet, there are some lovely cake recipes in the back. I think I will have to make the lemon layer cake with lemon cream frosting. Imagine, lemon curd and whipped cream blended together to fill and frost a cake. Wow.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Who deserves a baby shower?
Today I found myself at The Shades of Pink, a new blog for me. I think I clicked through a link on someone's Facebook page to get there. The topic is intriguing: When a church gives a baby shower for an unwed mother, are they celebrating sin?
Apparently a young unwed mother was not given a baby shower at her church, and some ugly things were said to her regarding her sinfulness. The blogger asked the question:
After leaving my comments I discovered I have more to say on the topic. But I think I used up my comment space there, so here it is.
First of all, no one should be saying ugly things to anyone else. Obviously. But how does showing the love of God translate into a baby shower?
My church gave a shower to an unwed teen mother last year. I didn't go because I was busy that night, not because I was boycotting it, though I admit I found the idea a bit unsettling. Another woman, a mother of teen girls, confided in me that she was bothered by the upcoming shower too. She felt that the celebration was sending the wrong message to other young girls in the congregation. She felt we were saying "go ahead, have a baby, we'll celebrate you, we'll give you a party" and that immature young women might not see beyond that.
Maybe young girls saw it that way; maybe they didn't. Mine didn't, because I talked to her about it. Though we didn't go to the shower we gave a small gift and helped in other small ways. We didn't exactly celebrate, but we didn't shun mother and baby either. Many women in the church did as we did. That young woman got a lot of quiet help; she was not judged or condemned. But her pregnancy was not celebrated by all.
People talk a lot about nuance and I think that's what's missing here. People are seeing "no shower" as "judging and condemnation." It's not, necessarily. We can love people and help them and try to give the baby the best possible start. But we don't have to have a party for it.
Once the shower is over, does anyone still feel like helping? Who is taking more diapers over when the gift cards run out? Who is bringing meals long after the party leftovers are gone?
It might surprise you to know that often it's the women who objected to the shower.
It warms the heart to see a church rallying around a young person in trouble. That doesn't have to include giving them a party. No one deserves a baby shower. It's a gift. I don't give my kids gifts when they mess up. I give them love and forgiveness and help if they need it. I guess that's a gift in itself. That's the gift God gives me when I mess up. But do we throw a party?
You know what would warm my heart even more? If a young unwed mother was offered a shower and she turned it down. If she said "thanks, but you know, I don't think it's really appropriate." That would be a wonderful thing to see.
Either way, I'd buy diapers and cook dinner for her. And I think most of you would do the same. And so, believe it or not, would most of the women who objected to the party.
.
Apparently a young unwed mother was not given a baby shower at her church, and some ugly things were said to her regarding her sinfulness. The blogger asked the question:
Was throwing her a shower "celebrating her sin" or do you believe that everyone has to be embraced and shown the love of God?The blogger and most of the commenters were appalled at the idea of refusing to give a shower for the baby of an unwed mother. So far in the comments I'm the only one who thinks this is not necessarily the wrong attitude. There's a lot of talk about grace, and about people who seem to think they don't sin, and how people are too ready to judge and condemn. Those are my general impressions; you can click over and read the original post and the exact comments, including mine.
After leaving my comments I discovered I have more to say on the topic. But I think I used up my comment space there, so here it is.
First of all, no one should be saying ugly things to anyone else. Obviously. But how does showing the love of God translate into a baby shower?
My church gave a shower to an unwed teen mother last year. I didn't go because I was busy that night, not because I was boycotting it, though I admit I found the idea a bit unsettling. Another woman, a mother of teen girls, confided in me that she was bothered by the upcoming shower too. She felt that the celebration was sending the wrong message to other young girls in the congregation. She felt we were saying "go ahead, have a baby, we'll celebrate you, we'll give you a party" and that immature young women might not see beyond that.
Maybe young girls saw it that way; maybe they didn't. Mine didn't, because I talked to her about it. Though we didn't go to the shower we gave a small gift and helped in other small ways. We didn't exactly celebrate, but we didn't shun mother and baby either. Many women in the church did as we did. That young woman got a lot of quiet help; she was not judged or condemned. But her pregnancy was not celebrated by all.
People talk a lot about nuance and I think that's what's missing here. People are seeing "no shower" as "judging and condemnation." It's not, necessarily. We can love people and help them and try to give the baby the best possible start. But we don't have to have a party for it.
Once the shower is over, does anyone still feel like helping? Who is taking more diapers over when the gift cards run out? Who is bringing meals long after the party leftovers are gone?
It might surprise you to know that often it's the women who objected to the shower.
It warms the heart to see a church rallying around a young person in trouble. That doesn't have to include giving them a party. No one deserves a baby shower. It's a gift. I don't give my kids gifts when they mess up. I give them love and forgiveness and help if they need it. I guess that's a gift in itself. That's the gift God gives me when I mess up. But do we throw a party?
You know what would warm my heart even more? If a young unwed mother was offered a shower and she turned it down. If she said "thanks, but you know, I don't think it's really appropriate." That would be a wonderful thing to see.
Either way, I'd buy diapers and cook dinner for her. And I think most of you would do the same. And so, believe it or not, would most of the women who objected to the party.
.
Baking Bread
Leslie asked me about my bread baking. She knows I bake bread because she's having a give-away of one of her lovely knitted creations and I mentioned my Kitchen Aid mixer and King Arthur Flour baguette pan in my comment/entry. So here is some bread talk.
I do like to make my family's bread, or most of it. My baking is pretty straightforward: loaves of bread. I have tried to make hamburger and hot dog buns, but that hasn't worked out for me. I do make naan once in a while, with my husband's help. And I may have made pita bread. Did I ever make bagels? Not sure, but we talk about it frequently. Mostly it's simple loaves.
My flour choices are pretty simple too. White bread flour (yes, I admit I use white flour), whole wheat, sometimes rye. Sometimes I mix them, and sometimes I add other fun ingredients like oatmeal, other cereals, flax seed, wheat germ...
Making bread is easy with the Kitchen Aid mixer. I don't have to knead. It would do my arms good to knead bread dough, but there just isn't the time. Two minutes of kneading, or 15? We'd never have bread if I had to knead it. I suppose a bread machine would take even less of my time but that is one appliance I never felt a need for.
Most of my bread is based on the King Arthur Flour Hearth Bread recipe. It's very simple (I actually have it memorized now) and can be adapted to other flours. The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook (King Arthur Flour Cookbooks) has a great bread-making tutorial that takes you through all the steps for making bread, and how to vary it. The recipe can also be found on their website, but for a beginner the instructions in the book can't be beat.
When I make baguettes, I use my wonderful baguette pan. My husband gave this to me one Christmas or birthday years ago. Ever since we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area 13 years ago, we have been searching for good bread, and I suppose that's when I started making our own. I haven't mastered sourdough yet, mostly because I don't want to deal with the starter, but I can make a pretty good crusty French bread using the KAF hearth bread recipe and this pan.
I keep experimenting with ways to make it more sour without using a starter that I have to tend. (My husband used to make a great sourdough with a starter, but he doesn't have time for that these days.) My latest method (which is not my invention) involves making a sponge and letting it sit overnight on the counter, or for a day or two in the refrigerator. The sponge is simply the water, yeast, and sugar called for in the recipe, plus 2 cups of the flour. I just put it in the mixer bowl, cover it, and let it sit overnight, then in the morning I proceed with the recipe. Usually I just make it plain; occasionally I toss some grated parmesan and black pepper into the dough when kneading it. After the first rise I form the loaves and ease them into the baguette pan. Sometimes, if I remember, I sprinkle some poppy and sesame seeds on the loaves just before putting them in the oven.
They are delicious and everyone wants to rip into one as soon as they're out of the oven. The baguettes are small so it's not too horrible if my family of 4 consumes one immediately. These also freeze well; I try to "bake ahead" sometimes and have a few in the freezer for days I just can't get the baking done.
For whole wheat bread, I follow the same basic recipe but use, well, whole wheat flour or a mixture of whole wheat and white (which makes it not whole wheat, right?). Occasionally I'll buy some white whole wheat flour but that's not so easy to find here yet and it's pretty expensive. This is when I add other grains to the bread. Sometimes I soak a mixed-grain cereal like Bob's Red Mill 8-Grain cereal in some water and add that. I'm still messing around with that method. The first time I tried it, I just tossed the dry cereal in with the flour but it came out a little too crunchy. Better to soak it in hot water for a bit to soften up. The trick here is getting the right proportion of "other" ingredients to flour, because they lack gluten and will weigh the bread down. If it's used for morning toast, it will get eaten anyway... but I don't like heavy bread. I add Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten flour to the dough when I use any grains other than white flour. And I just use regular loaf pans when I make this bread, not the baguette pan.
Recently I tried the nine-grain bread recipe from The Il Fornaio Baking Book: Sweet and Savory Recipes from the Italian Kitchen which I have owned for years, but don't use often enough. That was a sentimental purchase as we used to go the restaurant when we lived in San Jose. The biscotti recipe is wonderful. This uses cereal as noted above. It also uses a very small amount of yeast so it takes longer to rise, but the flavor is wonderful. The slower the rise, the more time the flavor has to develop! But sometimes I am in a hurry. When I make this again, I will add some of that gluten to make it a little lighter.
I also add the gluten to my rye bread to keep it from being heavy. We love rye bread but I don't bake it often enough. Remember party ryes? I loved it when my mother bought those little rye breads. I used my baguette pan to make my own for our New Year's Day party. They were perfect. Oh, my rye bread recipe is also from King Arthur.
We sometimes talk about getting a grain mill to do our own flour, but that is for someday, maybe. Right now I have neither the space to store one or the inclination to use one. I buy my white all-purpose and bread flours in 25- or 50-pound bags at Costco. If I could buy whole wheat flour like that, I would. I like having a lot of flour, and store it in large buckets we bought years ago. Oh, I also buy a 2-pound bag of yeast at Costco and store it in the freezer. I always have plenty of yeast. I think I could be out of every other kind of food but could still make bread.
So that's my bread story. Anyone can make bread. Get a basic cookbook from the library, or look at the KAF or Bob's Red Mill sites, and start. You don't need a mixer, or fancy pans, just flour, yeast, water and salt (even the sugar is not necessary, though it does help the yeast grow). Strong arms are a plus, but this is a good way to get the kids involved. You can take turns! Have a competition to see who can knead the longest!
What kind of bread do you like to bake? Have a favorite baking website? Let me know!
I do like to make my family's bread, or most of it. My baking is pretty straightforward: loaves of bread. I have tried to make hamburger and hot dog buns, but that hasn't worked out for me. I do make naan once in a while, with my husband's help. And I may have made pita bread. Did I ever make bagels? Not sure, but we talk about it frequently. Mostly it's simple loaves.
My flour choices are pretty simple too. White bread flour (yes, I admit I use white flour), whole wheat, sometimes rye. Sometimes I mix them, and sometimes I add other fun ingredients like oatmeal, other cereals, flax seed, wheat germ...
Making bread is easy with the Kitchen Aid mixer. I don't have to knead. It would do my arms good to knead bread dough, but there just isn't the time. Two minutes of kneading, or 15? We'd never have bread if I had to knead it. I suppose a bread machine would take even less of my time but that is one appliance I never felt a need for.
Most of my bread is based on the King Arthur Flour Hearth Bread recipe. It's very simple (I actually have it memorized now) and can be adapted to other flours. The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook (King Arthur Flour Cookbooks) has a great bread-making tutorial that takes you through all the steps for making bread, and how to vary it. The recipe can also be found on their website, but for a beginner the instructions in the book can't be beat.
When I make baguettes, I use my wonderful baguette pan. My husband gave this to me one Christmas or birthday years ago. Ever since we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area 13 years ago, we have been searching for good bread, and I suppose that's when I started making our own. I haven't mastered sourdough yet, mostly because I don't want to deal with the starter, but I can make a pretty good crusty French bread using the KAF hearth bread recipe and this pan.
I keep experimenting with ways to make it more sour without using a starter that I have to tend. (My husband used to make a great sourdough with a starter, but he doesn't have time for that these days.) My latest method (which is not my invention) involves making a sponge and letting it sit overnight on the counter, or for a day or two in the refrigerator. The sponge is simply the water, yeast, and sugar called for in the recipe, plus 2 cups of the flour. I just put it in the mixer bowl, cover it, and let it sit overnight, then in the morning I proceed with the recipe. Usually I just make it plain; occasionally I toss some grated parmesan and black pepper into the dough when kneading it. After the first rise I form the loaves and ease them into the baguette pan. Sometimes, if I remember, I sprinkle some poppy and sesame seeds on the loaves just before putting them in the oven.
They are delicious and everyone wants to rip into one as soon as they're out of the oven. The baguettes are small so it's not too horrible if my family of 4 consumes one immediately. These also freeze well; I try to "bake ahead" sometimes and have a few in the freezer for days I just can't get the baking done.
For whole wheat bread, I follow the same basic recipe but use, well, whole wheat flour or a mixture of whole wheat and white (which makes it not whole wheat, right?). Occasionally I'll buy some white whole wheat flour but that's not so easy to find here yet and it's pretty expensive. This is when I add other grains to the bread. Sometimes I soak a mixed-grain cereal like Bob's Red Mill 8-Grain cereal in some water and add that. I'm still messing around with that method. The first time I tried it, I just tossed the dry cereal in with the flour but it came out a little too crunchy. Better to soak it in hot water for a bit to soften up. The trick here is getting the right proportion of "other" ingredients to flour, because they lack gluten and will weigh the bread down. If it's used for morning toast, it will get eaten anyway... but I don't like heavy bread. I add Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten flour to the dough when I use any grains other than white flour. And I just use regular loaf pans when I make this bread, not the baguette pan.
Recently I tried the nine-grain bread recipe from The Il Fornaio Baking Book: Sweet and Savory Recipes from the Italian Kitchen which I have owned for years, but don't use often enough. That was a sentimental purchase as we used to go the restaurant when we lived in San Jose. The biscotti recipe is wonderful. This uses cereal as noted above. It also uses a very small amount of yeast so it takes longer to rise, but the flavor is wonderful. The slower the rise, the more time the flavor has to develop! But sometimes I am in a hurry. When I make this again, I will add some of that gluten to make it a little lighter.
I also add the gluten to my rye bread to keep it from being heavy. We love rye bread but I don't bake it often enough. Remember party ryes? I loved it when my mother bought those little rye breads. I used my baguette pan to make my own for our New Year's Day party. They were perfect. Oh, my rye bread recipe is also from King Arthur.
We sometimes talk about getting a grain mill to do our own flour, but that is for someday, maybe. Right now I have neither the space to store one or the inclination to use one. I buy my white all-purpose and bread flours in 25- or 50-pound bags at Costco. If I could buy whole wheat flour like that, I would. I like having a lot of flour, and store it in large buckets we bought years ago. Oh, I also buy a 2-pound bag of yeast at Costco and store it in the freezer. I always have plenty of yeast. I think I could be out of every other kind of food but could still make bread.
So that's my bread story. Anyone can make bread. Get a basic cookbook from the library, or look at the KAF or Bob's Red Mill sites, and start. You don't need a mixer, or fancy pans, just flour, yeast, water and salt (even the sugar is not necessary, though it does help the yeast grow). Strong arms are a plus, but this is a good way to get the kids involved. You can take turns! Have a competition to see who can knead the longest!
What kind of bread do you like to bake? Have a favorite baking website? Let me know!
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
A book I tried to avoid, but couldn't.
Half (or more) of the Christian-mommy-blogosphere is talking about One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp, the well-known blogger of A Holy Experience. Her book, which was released just weeks ago, has been highly anticipated and is already apparently a best-seller.
I'll be blunt and say right off that I didn't want to read the book. See, the author's writing style just doesn't work for me. (And judging by the reviews, I am the only person on the planet who feels this way.) Where others see "poetic prose," I see odd syntax. Honestly, it's a little hard for me to read phrases like "my eyes have rolled haughty" or "the radical wonder of it stuns me happy," sentence construction which would earn a red mark on a composition assignment. Then there are sentences like "I fly to Paris and learn how to make love to God" which is, grammatically speaking, a perfectly fine sentence, but is way over the top for me. Actually that entire chapter ("the joy of intimacy") is over the top for me. But enough of that; let's get on to the good stuff.
Anyway, I did buy it. Last week I was feeling lonely and edgy because the seminarian was going camping for a couple of nights and I was going to be the sole adult in charge at home. I just don't like that. So, I wanted some comforting reading. I wanted something new. And I read yet another blog post about it and... went right over to Amazon and placed my order. It was inexpensive, I got free shipping, and I had it in my hands less than 24 hours after ordering.
And so I started reading, and I found that... it's a good book. In many places, a very, very good book.
The basic premise is simple, though not easy: start being grateful for the gifts in your life, and you will see more and more to be grateful for. You will experience God and your life in a different way. You may find the joy you've been seeking. This idea of hers has been around for a while; you may have seen blog posts with gratitude lists. Maybe you've posted one yourself. If not, you can see what that's all about here. I think it is true, that the more we find to be thankful for, the more we will see God, and the good, in our lives. It's the stopping to see and notice that's so hard to do.
There is more. She quotes Isaiah:
One review I read (don't ask me where, please) included the comment that Mrs. Voskamp is not "someone who's studied theology in a seminary for years" (paraphrased) as a positive about the book. I like theology students; I'm married to one. But this is not a theology book and it should not be read like one. It's a very personal book about one's woman's experience with God and loss and gratitude. And change. It's raw and emotional and sometimes painful to read. Her doctrine and theology may not be a perfect fit for yours. But it's her own story.
So after all I'm glad I read the book. I'm glad I could separate the message from the style. I still think it's odd that I felt compelled to buy it after I hadn't wanted to. It's also interesting that just about every word she wrote about worry applies to me right now. I'm in a sort of worrisome time of life these days. So it was good. Comforting and convicting:
Oh, and I started my own gratitude list. I'm not likely to blog it; I enjoy reading others' but it's a little too personal for me to share with the world (small as my blogging world may be). It's been only a few days but I can see the value in it, particularly when I turn something scary or annoying or worrisome into something to be thankful for. And that, of course, is the point.
I'll be blunt and say right off that I didn't want to read the book. See, the author's writing style just doesn't work for me. (And judging by the reviews, I am the only person on the planet who feels this way.) Where others see "poetic prose," I see odd syntax. Honestly, it's a little hard for me to read phrases like "my eyes have rolled haughty" or "the radical wonder of it stuns me happy," sentence construction which would earn a red mark on a composition assignment. Then there are sentences like "I fly to Paris and learn how to make love to God" which is, grammatically speaking, a perfectly fine sentence, but is way over the top for me. Actually that entire chapter ("the joy of intimacy") is over the top for me. But enough of that; let's get on to the good stuff.
Anyway, I did buy it. Last week I was feeling lonely and edgy because the seminarian was going camping for a couple of nights and I was going to be the sole adult in charge at home. I just don't like that. So, I wanted some comforting reading. I wanted something new. And I read yet another blog post about it and... went right over to Amazon and placed my order. It was inexpensive, I got free shipping, and I had it in my hands less than 24 hours after ordering.
And so I started reading, and I found that... it's a good book. In many places, a very, very good book.
The basic premise is simple, though not easy: start being grateful for the gifts in your life, and you will see more and more to be grateful for. You will experience God and your life in a different way. You may find the joy you've been seeking. This idea of hers has been around for a while; you may have seen blog posts with gratitude lists. Maybe you've posted one yourself. If not, you can see what that's all about here. I think it is true, that the more we find to be thankful for, the more we will see God, and the good, in our lives. It's the stopping to see and notice that's so hard to do.
There is more. She quotes Isaiah:
10 if you pour yourself out for the hungryIsaiah 58:10-11 (ESV)
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.
11And the LORD will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters do not fail.
Yes, the more we give of ourselves to others, even to the point of emptiness, we will be filled. Fulfilled. This is good to read on a night when you're exhausted, and anxious, and feel like you've given away too much.
One review I read (don't ask me where, please) included the comment that Mrs. Voskamp is not "someone who's studied theology in a seminary for years" (paraphrased) as a positive about the book. I like theology students; I'm married to one. But this is not a theology book and it should not be read like one. It's a very personal book about one's woman's experience with God and loss and gratitude. And change. It's raw and emotional and sometimes painful to read. Her doctrine and theology may not be a perfect fit for yours. But it's her own story.
So after all I'm glad I read the book. I'm glad I could separate the message from the style. I still think it's odd that I felt compelled to buy it after I hadn't wanted to. It's also interesting that just about every word she wrote about worry applies to me right now. I'm in a sort of worrisome time of life these days. So it was good. Comforting and convicting:
If authentic, saving belief is the act of trusting,
then to choose stress is an act of disbelief... atheism.
Yikes, right? Hard to read, hard to think about.
Oh, and I started my own gratitude list. I'm not likely to blog it; I enjoy reading others' but it's a little too personal for me to share with the world (small as my blogging world may be). It's been only a few days but I can see the value in it, particularly when I turn something scary or annoying or worrisome into something to be thankful for. And that, of course, is the point.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
A world I don't fit into
Today my girlie has a friend over. It's an all-day, all-night playdate. Fun. They've scrapbooked and goofed around and now they're working on a Broadway-style production. I love this girl and her family.
So I'm not annoyed as much as puzzled by this exchange with our young guest.
Eleanor: Be careful! Don't squish your cellphone! (The girls were climbing in and out of a big shipping box and taking turns decorating it. Yeah, they're 10 1/2 and 12 and still play in boxes.)
Guest: It's getting in the way!
Me: Where is it?
Guest: It's in my pocket!
Me: Why don't you just put your phone with your other stuff? You don't need it now.
Guest: Well, my friends keep texting me to ask where I am. And I have to text them back to say "I'm with a friend and can't talk now" but they text me back to ask what I'm doing and I text again to say "I can't talk now!"
Me: Why don't you just stop answering them then? You don't have to respond immediately.
She didn't answer this. Not out of rudeness; she just didn't have anything to say. And their game went on.
I don't get the impression that the phone and the texting was troublesome to Eleanor, who does not have her own cellphone and has never received a text in her life. (She has sent a few to her Dad, dictated by me while driving.) I haven't had a chance to ask if it bothered her, and will probably forget about it by the time I do. It's not particularly troublesome to me, except: here is this girl, not even a teen yet, who already feels the urgency of responding immediately to every text message from friends. While, by the way, at the home of another friend.
Of course, it would seem rude to the texting friends if she didn't respond to them immediately. Because they know she has the phone, and that she has constant access to it. It's not as if she might be out of the house and away from the home phone. She has the phone, she can answer the phone... so she must answer the phone.
I know I'm getting old but I just don't want to be a part of that world. And I don't want my kids to either.
But I don't guess I can stop it.
Do you ever ignore your cell phone? Do your kids?
So I'm not annoyed as much as puzzled by this exchange with our young guest.
Eleanor: Be careful! Don't squish your cellphone! (The girls were climbing in and out of a big shipping box and taking turns decorating it. Yeah, they're 10 1/2 and 12 and still play in boxes.)
Guest: It's getting in the way!
Me: Where is it?
Guest: It's in my pocket!
Me: Why don't you just put your phone with your other stuff? You don't need it now.
Guest: Well, my friends keep texting me to ask where I am. And I have to text them back to say "I'm with a friend and can't talk now" but they text me back to ask what I'm doing and I text again to say "I can't talk now!"
Me: Why don't you just stop answering them then? You don't have to respond immediately.
She didn't answer this. Not out of rudeness; she just didn't have anything to say. And their game went on.
I don't get the impression that the phone and the texting was troublesome to Eleanor, who does not have her own cellphone and has never received a text in her life. (She has sent a few to her Dad, dictated by me while driving.) I haven't had a chance to ask if it bothered her, and will probably forget about it by the time I do. It's not particularly troublesome to me, except: here is this girl, not even a teen yet, who already feels the urgency of responding immediately to every text message from friends. While, by the way, at the home of another friend.
Of course, it would seem rude to the texting friends if she didn't respond to them immediately. Because they know she has the phone, and that she has constant access to it. It's not as if she might be out of the house and away from the home phone. She has the phone, she can answer the phone... so she must answer the phone.
I know I'm getting old but I just don't want to be a part of that world. And I don't want my kids to either.
But I don't guess I can stop it.
Do you ever ignore your cell phone? Do your kids?
Maybe there should be a tv show about what teens should be doing
The only thing I know about the TV show "Skins" is what I've seen linked on Drudge Report. I followed one link to a preview of the show but when I saw I had to verify my birthdate to view it because of the mature content, I knew I didn't need to spend waste my time.
But then I saw this defense of the show by one of the stars:
So, maybe there should be a tv show about what teens should be doing.
But who would watch that?
But then I saw this defense of the show by one of the stars:
It's what teens are doing.
So, maybe there should be a tv show about what teens should be doing.
But who would watch that?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)