a prediction

as everybody in our spoiled-rotten first-world country knows, we are in the middle of a huge technology boom. those who can afford these shiny new toys are doing absurd things like talking to someone in europe whom they have nothing to say to, while writing to someone in texas who they have nothing to say to, while pretending to drive a car, while driving a car, while listening to music from the seventies on a music player the size of a cracker, while *making delicious new lunches in under two minutes!*. this hilarious age of multi-tasking and tech-consumerism probably started because of the (ooh!) new millennium; everyone wanted to stop writing about legless robot maids and start making them.
however, i don't think that this stuff is going to last very long.
you see, there are two groups of people who rely on this new technology: frazzled grown-ups who are
a) oober-excited about it, and/or
b) think that it makes their already crazy lives easier.
then there is my generation-the quote unquote "txt generation", who are unimpressed but use the stuff anyway, out of boredom. i think that once the older generation (the ones who think they need this junk) die off, and the younger generation get more mature, the flashy metal wonders will be put away to collect dust. sure, we'll still have things like the internet and cell phones (because we have rapidly re-designed our lives to rely on those things), but we won't still buy the latest "smart" phone to impress our friends. at least, that's what i *hope*.

we are QUIET we are LOUD: the best young writers and artists in america

that is the title of an amazing book i am re-reading. its an anthology of poems, essays, short stories, paintings, and photographs that won awards. and they're all by teenagers.
i know that i almost never publish reviews or recommendations, but there were a lot of essays in the book that i wanted to re-print here, and couldn't (because of copyright).
so, read the book.

i want to write this down before i forget

i want to document a feeling that children have, which i am rapidly forgetting and must not. it is the feeling of being undermined by what the grown-ups consider important-things like renovations and grocery shopping and tax returns-things that i could not comprehend and so they seemed pointless to me. i would show a grown-up a drawing that i had done, and they would gasp with totally fake admiration, which i saw right through, and then turn to the nearest adult and murmur something about verizon wireless or third cousins. it's a frustrating feeling, the feeling that your accomplishments are only minuscule acts and do not REALLY matter. what makes it even more confounding is that your parents' achievements and dilemmas and arguments seem just as unimportant and uninteresting to you. you have learned to draw a five-point star, who cares about invisible money? i am not saying that either children or adults are better, they are just very different-and forced to interact very intimately. neither really takes the other seriously, although they can love and admire each other. i am currently at an even more frustrating point where i know much of the stuff grown-ups know, and i am still not taken seriously. someday *i* will not take children seriously-and i am already beginning to. it is infuriating.

sometimes i just want to throw up my hands and yell at everyone

today is the first anniversary of al gores challenge to the united states of amewika to run on entirely clean energy in ten years. so far, we have done nothing.

wisdom of the children

i have a very young brother and (as many of you who have contact with young boys could guess) he is obsessed with violence and killing. so i asked him today, in light of my rather political past week (i went to DC), how he felt about gun control.
"do you think people having guns should be illegal?"
"yeah, yeah. i think they should take them away and put them in the museums."
and a spark of hope lit up in my eyes...