I’m such a newbie that
until a couple years ago:
a) I hadn’t ever even heard of the term,
which was soon followed by:
b) me sadly learning I was one
No matter. We are not here to solve the problems of the universe, cyber-speakingly. We have higher aspirations to aspire to. And please know now, that includes my free use of ending sentences with prepositions, making up words like “cyber-speakingly” and any and all free poetic and less-literary licenses I so wish to invoke.
So there.
And no grammar police, thank you very much. If I dangle participles or flaunt some other heinous, villainous written crime, I don’t want to hear about it. I write like I think, and I can’t change my brain to abide by any other standards than my own thought processes.
Our first journey together? World peace? Ending hunger?
Hardly.
I watched my 17 year old son yesterday tool around on one of the electric carts at Kroger. No, he wasn’t just fooling around…ok, he was….but he also technically needed it for medicinal purposes, since he’s recovering from knee surgery. If you haven’t been on one of these puppies (thankfully I haven’t had the need to use one as of yet, but 25 more years I’ll most likely be a broken hip away) well, you know the beepbeepbeep garbage trucks make backing up? Imagine that annoyment on Aisle 12, stuffed between the sweet relishes to your left shoulder and beef jerky calling your name while nudging your right elbow.
I’ll take this moment now to inform you my Prius makes the same freakin’ damn noise when set in reverse. I’m fairly sure those remarkable albeit duplicate little hybrids in Japan don’t have such an obnoxious noise built in, and that it’s just a way to poke at Americans from 20,000 miles away, post WW2. All those short, dark-haired engineers in Toyota lab coats smirking at us.
Now, I could have gone and Googled the approximate distance to Japan, but hell, that would have required opening a new tab. Or guess I could have done some uber-lazy voice-text thing, but again, not the point of my story. Japan is damn far. Let’s leave it at that.
And Japan isn’t the point of the story, either. Stop making me digress. Jeesh.
It was this… I hadn’t ever, not once, given a single thought to the funky little scooter/basket thingys that forlornly wait at the front of the store by their more popular, yet less electrical, shopping cart neighbors. I think that if I’d been in a horrific car accident and had both legs crushed with casts up to my hips, the idea of thinking…hey, once I roll out of my car door, hit the pavement… and dog-crawl my way over the blistering asphalt…
…and assuming my 6″ clearance would activate the automatic door sensor so that I could even manage to get through the door in the first place…
well, I still wouldn’t be thinking, yep, all the funky-smell, asphalt gravel embedded into my skin is now worth it, because I can hoist my car-oil and dirt-encrusted body onto one of Kroger’s scooter/basket thingys.
And therein lies my point. It’s all about the tech. Millennials and younger use every available tech gadget and gizmo to their advantage. We (ok, maybe just me) are forever in a catch-up mode. Whatever we touch (again, maybe just me again) rapidly becomes yesterday’s has beens for the un-newbies. They all got off Facebook the minute we started uploading pictures of them and our dogs. The second our group got on Match, they bolted for Tinder.
Yes, I’m playing catch-up. And I’m jealous. Except now I have a blog and can write about it.
Which means kids are now busy voice-texting 5-paragraph essays for their English class, like I saw same said 17-year old the other day. The entire damn essay.
I wonder if Siri automatically added notations and footnotes.
Can you say “typewriter”?
Yes, I’m damn jealous.
heartandhumor 