Velvet Verbosity

What did people get addicted to before the internet?

Never mind. The more important question is, what did I like to do before my Macbook Pro and the internet sucked me into their firm grasps? Meditate, run, exercise, bike, read, write, see live music, photography, videography, make art, cook, have dinner with friends, listen to music, find new music, visit old bookstores, sit in cafes and write about the people I saw, volunteer, get involved, bury treasure, climb mountains, drink chai, write letters, learn guitar, LIVE.

Not that blogging isn’t some form of a lot of the above, but really, I was beginning to feel like I was sinking deeper and deeper into the pixels on my screen and I wasn’t liking the way it felt. I was never one of those people that got deeply sucked into television except for my yearly January binges of Law and Order while I was an undergrad (at 32) at Smith. I would get bored long before I felt entertained. I always liked to be doing rather than watching.

When I was about 10, the first versions of cable were hitting my neighborhood. I honestly don’t even remember if it was satellite dishes or cable that came first. I just didn’t care. So when my neighbors, the short hair twins, got more channels through whatever mechanism it was, they stopped coming out to play after school. Then they stayed in later and later on Saturday mornings. I would go over, knock on the door, and one or the other of them would run to the door, distractedly looking back over their shoulder as they quickly and breathlessly told me they “couldn’t come out right now because Tom and Jerry was playing on the television”.

“Well, when?” I would ask.

“After this are two more cartoons. We got all the channels!”

Then she, whichever “she” she was, would run back into the living room, leaving me with treasure to bury by myself. I just didn’t get it. Many a friend got taken by the television monster that year. Other than not having my usual minions to construct my elaborate fantasy world, I was perfectly fine with it. I was a pretty solitary kid and didn’t like most other kids anyway. Mostly because no matter how clean, kids always smelled funny to me. And they were every bit as mean as they were stupid. Kids were always being mean to one another and my gawd it was always a drama.

I did watch some television, of course. At night, when I couldn’t be outside anymore, and when there were cool shows on like Grizzly Adams. Man I wanted to be that guy. Not marry him. I wanted to be him. He was the shit! I wanted that life of false accusations forcing me into the mountainous wilderness where my best friend would become a Grizzly Bear and together we would live out our lives in industrious dignity.

Most importantly, I’d have to figure out all those animals and all those plants and back when I was 10 that was as good as life could get.

So tonight, I reclaimed a bit of myself. I wrote, I meditated, I rolled up two balls of yarn for a knitting project while I listened to This American Life.

Then, when it was time for lights out, my daughter came into my room, laid down beside me with her face just inches from mine, and she talked to me. My teenage daughter talked to me for 20 whole minutes all in a row. I learned a lot in those 20 minutes. I learned that a boy at her school was tripping out on acid and played chicken with a tractor trailer and he lost. I learned that the students were deeply hurt when the school didn’t think on their own to hold a moment of silence for this boy. I learned that her best friend’s sister ran away after the boy’s funeral. I learned that my daughter forgot that she was 15 and started rubbing her friend’s hair between her fingers like she used to do to me when she was very little.

Since I had this unexpected gift of openness, I figured it was as good a time as any to bring up the birds and the bees. I learned that it is true that she knows girls who “service” boys that they have no connection to, and they get nothing in return. I learned (thank God) that she can’t understand this behavior or why a girl would do this to herself, particularly when there is nothing in it for the girl except a bad reputation. I learned that she feels it is partly fueled by boys’ expectations and the girls’ desire to be liked for any reason.

I learned that we can still talk when we remove the electronic distractions that make it much easier to walk away then to talk. I learned that she still likes to have her hands massaged.

When my children were young, I purposefully kept television out of their lives for a long time. As they got older, all those things crept in, one by one, until we were all holed up in our sections of the house, chattering with everyone but each other. Our conversations were reserved for the rare dinner together when our schedules didn’t conflict, or car rides.

I’m going to turn off the internet and cable more often!