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Earn Your Oxygen

I was having a conversation with a young man, a gaming addict all of 14, where the point of my discussion was to encourage pay-backs — but only in the positive sense. It’s like this I said to him, — this is no free ride.  It’s time to start thinking about contributing to the world, to society, to life. Simply put , I told him, — you must earn our oxygen.

The young man looked up at me, bugged eyes at that phrase and I honestly didn’t have the slightest clue where it came from. But I liked it. I became quite impressed with myself. Face it, the phrase has panache.

Back to business. Think about it. Oxygen is no longer the pure, abundant natural resource it once was. You know the drill — pollution, volcanoes, more pollution, oil slicks, and even more pollution. We are screwing up. The world and her resources don’t owe us squat, but we have a hefty IOU mounting up in the form of destroyed and diminished resources.

And so — the days of being owed our oxygen are gone. Instead, I proffer that we find ways to, most aptly said, earn our oxygen.

The Virtual Child: the Monster of Tomorrow

I am flabbergasted. I didn’t grow up this way. I now live in a house where I am constantly sucking in what would otherwise be an explosion of outrage and frustration. I live in a house where the noises of faux sirens and screeching tires ring in the rafters. I live in a house where a 14 year old boy commandeers the only flat screen television. I live in a house where a child rules from the controls of his video games.

I don’t get it. I certainly do not deserve the medal for mother of the year for the upbringing of my now 24 and 26 year old children. But my children did not spend ten hours a day playing video games, or ten hours a day doing any one particular thing! My children also did not grow up believing the world revolved them, like this 14 year old child does.

I just read an article about the current generation of kids, I like to call them the Bit and Byte Brats. The article claims that “Unchecked use of digital devices … can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it.”

Now this is scary. But something makes it even scarier. What could be scarier? Enter parents who allow their kids to imbibe in a new kind of addiction. Parents who are afraid of their kids, afraid of the wrath of an addict without a fix, and afraid of having to deal with their kids in some sort of alien interpersonal way.

The End of a Blogging Era

 

A month ago, I suddenly could no longer get into my five treasured, albeit oft-ignored, blogs here on WordPress. In a flurry of activity I had inadvertantly erased my old password and cannot retrieve it because the email address associated with my blog account is no longer active, and so —- get the picture? Poof — there went five years worth of meanderings, musings, and blog-manuscripts in one memory blip. Sigh.

The Lost Blogs: The Found Self

 

So now what? That’s what I’m working on trying to figure out. I feel sad, mad, excited, depressed, and a whole slew of other stuff about this blog thing. I have lost most of my virtual self. I have become a digital wisp, an invisibale stream of bits and bytes.

Hmm — — could it be that at last, at long last, I have found myself? The sweaty, stinky, flesh and blood version of the real self? The ground zero self?

My blogging self was out of control, not, like I said, because I wrote a lot, but rather, because I didn’t, and the reason I didn’t was because I had so many going that I never could really focus myself in any one direction or on any one thing. Now, if this whole thing isn’t a message for me, I don’t know what is …

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