Twitterpated

I have always been a little leery of the internet.  I mean, sure, the internet is full of wonderful things like shopping, research, shopping, and streaming television.  But it is also home to YouTube, where just about any doofus with a digital camera can post horribly edited videos of their cat falling off of the ceiling fan.  I mean, any website which is instrumental in enabling a song like "What does the Fox Say" to go viral is clearly insidious.  No amount of online shoe sales will change that. 

Way back when I was in law school, I used the internet for specific purposes.  I occasionally used it to send e-mails, and I used it when I was doing legal research.  But, for me, 'surfing the net' was a terrifying concept. I never just went on a browser and looked around; I didn't feel safe.   The internet was there, lurking behind the computer screen, mocking me for not having the courage to just go on and see where my various clicks would take me. I pictured the internet as some sort of Tron-like alternate universe, and if I clicked on one too many links to random jokes or poorly designed seizure-inducing websites I would be sucked into the monitor and wind up having to defend myself against an evil computer overlord with an electronic Frisbee. 

Then came Facebook.  I skipped over the whole MySpace thing because I wasn't an angst-ridden teenager who just wanted to have their music discovered.  Nope, I went straight to Facebook, because on Facebook I can keep up with my friends who live far away.  On Facebook I can post pictures of my family and my observations of the world.  On Facebook I can sit back and chuckle while reading political posts which induce random people who have never met to begin foaming at the mouth and accuse each other of either being a homophobic racist who hates women and the poor, or a communist who hates America and anyone with a paying job.  

Also, for a while at least, Facebook allowed me to electronically stalk my teenager.  Maggie could hardly wait until her thirteenth birthday so she could get a Facebook account.  Now, teenagers are flocking away from Facebook like movie offers flock from Lindsay Lohan.  These days it's all about Twitter and Instagram. Instagram is harmless.  Any doofus with a smart phone can take random pictures of their own eyeball, apply special effects to the photo to make it appear that the picture was taken in 1973, and then post their new work of art for the world to see.  But Twitter is another thing altogether.  I don't think I'm cut out for Twitter. Twitter is an oozing cesspool of hormone-induced passive-agressive wars between teenagers and whoever Alec Baldwin is ranting at right now.  Every time I log onto Twitter, I instantly feel my I.Q. declining and my age increasing.  Also, I can't handle the character limit.  

I am proud to say that I have recently started to understand the hash tag.  Originally I thought it was a way for teenagers to encode their cell phone numbers, which actually makes no sense because no one calls anybody anymore anyway.  It turns out it is some sort of massive filing system.  What's more, every time someone puts a hash tag in front of something, they create another file in the Twitterverse.  For example, if you have a need to find out what random snotty teenagers are thinking, you just need to search for #ihatemylife or #myparentssuck and you will be instantly transported to a vast repository of tweets about the horrors of being a deprived teenager which were posted via their $500 smartphones.   

I think I have figured out the teenage Twitter rules.  I have gleaned this information by spending hour after mind-numbing hour reading the tweets of  local teenagers.    I will post them here so that if any of you parents decide to cyber-stalk your teenager by creating a fake Twitter profile (which I haven't done because I can't figure out how)  you will be able to blend right in from the get-go.  Are you ready?  

Rule number one:  Never spell anything correctly.  Using correct spelling will instantly identify you as a parent.  As far as I can tell, no one on Twitter knows the difference between your, you're and yore and the word clothes is never spelled with an 'e'.  NEVER.  As a subset of rule one, it is important to mock the misspellings of others via your own ironically misspelled tweets.  For example, if Jane tweets "wow your cloths are ugly #goshopping" you should tweet back something like " @jane learn how to speel #yoursodumb."

Rule number two:  Post as if adults will never read any of your tweets. Teenagers clearly assume that no one over the age of twenty has even heard of Twitter, because the language they use would embarrass even the most profane sailor on the planet and/or Alec Baldwin.  The F-bomb is dropped approximately fifty times per second on Twitter, and that's just from the 13-16 set.  It's as if they believe that the more cursing they do, the smarter they sound.  Their spelling certainly isn't helping.  So if you want to blend in, be sure to curse.  A lot.  If you can misspell the curse words you'll be a Twitter god.  

Rule Three:  Never, EVER directly address anyone.  For example, if you are really angry that Jane is talking about one of your friends behind her back on Twitter, you should NEVER tweet "@Jane please don't talk about Sue behind her back #beagoodfrend."  Instead, you should tweet "@Sue I wish she would just shut up  #cantevenspeel #herclothssuck."  This will ensure that no one will know who you are tweeting about, no one will change their behavior, and everyone at school will begin to inquire, via Twitter of course, who you are tweeting about and what cloths...I mean clothes...they were wearing that day.  

So, go forth and stalk, parents.  I wish you luck.  I hope your I.Q. doesn't drop by thirty points every time you log on and read the innermost thoughts of your daughter's best friend's former boyfriend.  Me, I'm sticking with properly-spelled, grammatically-correct posts on Facebook.  

If you're smarter than a fifth grader, can you help The Boy with his math???

I have always firmly believed that adults were lying to kids about math.  Specifically,  teachers and parents were all lying when they said that math was important because I would use it in my everyday life.  Yes, it is true that some math is important, mainly so you can make sure that the clerk at the 7-11 doesn't short your change after you purchase a Slurpee.    Fractions are good because they help you when you are arguing with your sister about whether she got more cake than you did.  And then there are multiplication and division, which are mostly helpful when trying to figure out how much you are supposed to tip your waiter.

It is NOT true that you will use trigonometry someday, unless you are an engineer or physicist.  And, based upon the television viewing choices of most of America I am betting that will not be the case for 99.999% of you.  You certainly will never need to use geometric "proofs" in your daily life, unless you are a geometry teacher, in which case I am so, so sorry for you.  I, for one, have attempted to block out most of my junior year of high school because I had geometry with Mr. Nakagawa, who inflicted proofs upon us in class on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, most of the class was paying more attention to the spreading sweat-stains under his arms and the odd part in his hair, which began approximately a half an inch above his left ear, resulting in a strange, helmet-like hairstyle.  Also, there was the time he fell out of his chair for no apparent reason, but that is a story for a later time.  What is important is that I could no more prove (nor would I ever need to) that the area of a trapezoid is the average of the two parallel bases times the height than I could prove that The Boy was actually the one who spilled chicken soup all over my kitchen floor and got the dog to lick it up.  I have my suspicions, though. 

But, because I now have three children in three math levels, I am forced to admit that you will, in fact, use math in your everyday life.  At least you will if you have children.  Now, I must attempt daily to remember all of the math that I have forgotten in order to make space for helpful information like my children's dates of birth and where I put the remote control.  There's nothing like helping your child with math homework to make you feel like a complete imbecile.

You see, way back in the days when I was studying math in school (1976-1989), we learned math the old fashioned way:  it was beat into us using flash cards, mind-numbing story problems and worksheets of extreme length.  If you wanted to divide something, you used long-division, dammit.  Now, our children are being taught to to find the quotient WITHOUT ACTUALLY DIVIDING ANYTHING.   I discovered this recently while trying to help The Boy with his math.  Here's how it went down:

The Boy:  Mom, I need help with this division.
Me:  Well, here's how you do it.  620 divided by 5.   How many times does five go into 62?
The Boy:  What are you doing?
Me:  Division.
The Boy:  I don't know what you're doing.
Me:  I'm dividing.
The Boy:  That's not how my teacher showed me.
Me:  How did your teacher show you?
The Boy:  I don't really remember.

So, that was helpful.  I approached his teacher the next day after school because I wanted to find out how to do the problems the way they were learning them in school.

Me:  I tried to show The Boy long division, but he didn't know what I was talking about.
Teacher:  We are working on other ways to find the answer.

This is where I should have run from the building, but I stayed and asked:

Me:  Could you show me how?
Teacher:  Sure.  What you do is blah blah blah blah quotient blah blah divisor blah blah add up the guesses blah blah then you have the answer.
Me:  So he's supposed to guess?
Teacher:  Not exactly.  What they are really doing is blah blah blah blah educated estimate blah blah blah.
Me:  (blank stare)
Teacher:  Understand?
Me:  So he's supposed to guess?

So, as you can see, I never really figured out the method, other than I think it involves some sort of telepathy.   I am not comfortable with this situation, because I was taught that there was only one right answer and one way to find it and this warm and fuzzy new method is messing with my world view.  On the upside, The Boy's teacher e-mailed me a couple of days ago and told me that he was now having trouble with LONG DIVISION.  Hallelujah!  No more telepathy!

I am no more capable of helping Maggie with her math homework than I am with helping The Boy, even though it was not quite so long ago that I learned algebra.  I decided to re-take algebra in college because I felt like I really didn't do an adequate job in high school and would benefit from starting over.  So, really, it's only been 24 years or so.  How much could have changed since then?

A lot, apparently.  When Maggie says, "Mom, could you help me with this math problem?" I want to run from the room, screaming, or perhaps hide behind a large piece of furniture.  Every time I help her with a problem, she looks at me like I have a third eyeball in the middle of my forehead and says, "that's not how we are supposed to do it."  It LOOKS like the same algebra, but it is clearly not the same algebra.   In comparison, my algebra was Mr. Rogers algebra, while this algebra was designed by Stephen Hawking.

The only time I feel smart is when I am helping Ella, but that won't last long because she is starting to learn her multiplication tables.  I still don't know my multiplication tables, even though at one point I must have convinced someone I did because I was accepted into college.

My ultimate point is that children already think they are smarter than their parents, so I am begging all of the people involved in developing math curriculum to just please for the love of God stop already with the new math.  Can't we just go back to the glory days (1976-1989) of flashcards and long division and fighting the Cold War and only using one way to find the answer? Please?  If we don't stop the madness now, pretty soon all of the children are going to think they are more capable than adults at things like  running the government., which they probably are, but we don't need to tell them that.

Holiday Happenings

I am a mom.  I love being a mom.  The problem is, I also have serious guilt.  My mother knows the hour at which my brother and I were born, our weights and lengths, the weather conditions in the days leading up to each birth,  both our blood types and our social security numbers.  She even kept all of our baby teeth.  Ok, that last one is a little weird.  I still wonder to this day why she did that.  Was she going to make jewelry? Perform voodoo?  I have no idea.

I, on the other hand, struggle to remember the children's names when I AM LOOKING DIRECTLY AT THEM.  Also, I have to refer back to the baby books I created to find out how much each child weighed at birth, which means that Ella is screwed because I haven't started her baby book yet.  She is nine.  By the time I finish her baby book we will probably have established some new sort of system of weights and measures and it will be irrelevant anyway.  Their blood types?  I have no freaking idea.  I can't even find Ella's birth certificate.  I'm pretty sure she's mine.

It's November.  Halloween has passed and, according to the displays at Wal-Mart, we have skipped over Thanksgiving and are now smack in the middle of  "The Holiday Season".  I may as well rename it "The Shortcomings Season" because it is during this time of year that all of my shortcomings are on display for all to see, kind of like Miley Cyrus' undergarments anytime she goes out in public.  I am trying to let go of the guilt.  I am trying to embrace my shortcomings.  I no longer beat myself up for not baking Christmas cookies.  I got the nine year-old a cookie press so that she could take care of that tedious task for me.  She's probably a better baker than I am, anyway.  I have totally given up on ever sending another Christmas card again.  Making fudge?  You've got to be kidding me.  It's all I can do to locate suitably itchy clothes for Ella and The Boy on the day of the kid's "Winter Program," thus guaranteeing that they will appear  like two young tweakers who haven't had their fix yet as they sing some inane song about wanting a hippopotamus for Christmas.

And don't get me started on Christmas shopping.  I would love to be one of those moms who makes a list with extremely thoughtful gifts for each child, ranked from highest to lowest priority, and then spends the months before Christmas searching out sales on each gift so that I can spend the last couple of weeks prior relaxing and enjoying some holiday nog in front of the fire.  In reality, I generally look at the calendar, notice it's already the middle of December, and then feverishly hunt down random items on the internet.  Maggie is easy, as she sends me an itemized list complete with pictures via text message.  She's so efficient.

I'm sure that, around December 15, Amazon.com receives a notification from their sales department that reminds them I will be going online soon to purchase presents, so they begin to send me targeted advertisements for whatever obnoxious toy is hot that year.  Unfortunately, The Boy never seems to want any of these items.  "I know, I'll get him Legos!"  I declare, as time ticks away and I gulp down what has at that point become medicinal nog.  Despite the fact that The Boy has enough Lego pieces to build a life-size space shuttle, in my desperation I am reduced to buying them anyway, because I'm sure as hell not buying him the other thing that he wants, which is an iPhone.  He only wants the phone so he can record irritating videos and post them on YouTube, and I just can't bring myself to subject the world to several hundred videos of him playing Minecraft on the Xbox.

I have yet to find the perfect present for Ella.  Every year she chooses something, puts it on her comically misspelled letter to Santa, and then promptly changes her mind about thirty seconds after I have purchased whatever gift she asked for.  Last year, for instance, she declared she wanted an American Girl doll, which as every parent of a girl knows, is an extremely expensive doll who's clothes cost significantly more than actual adult clothes.  I took out a third mortgage, ordered the doll and then drank some medicinal nog as she informed me that she decided she would rather have a Lego set like her brother.  In the end, when she opened up her present on Christmas morning, she was pretty happy.  Of course, when I noticed a couple of days later that she didn't seem to be playing with her doll at all, and in fact had removed it from her room entirely, I asked her why she didn't like her doll anymore.  It turns out that her brother had convinced her that her doll could come alive like "Chucky" and was going to kill her in her sleep.  Merry Christmas, Ella!

Despite all of my shortcomings, I am still looking forward to the holidays this year.  And, I think I have figured out the whole gift thing, too.  This year I will get all of the children necklaces with their birth weight and blood type engraved on them.  I wonder if I can find them on Amazon.

A clean, close shave

The kids and I just spent a long weekend up in Portland visiting my parents and participating in several summer fun activities, including taking a four mile walk while sampling food at the farmer’s market, and spending a day at the Oregon Zoo.  We had a wonderful time, and it was nice to be in the warm summer sun for a few days.  We don’t get warm summer sun here in Coos Bay, because the wind never stops blowing long enough to let the temperature rise above 62 degrees.  Of course, warm weather means that my usual summer wardrobe of a cardigan sweater and rolled-up jeans which only expose three inches of leg is not ideal.  Which, naturally, leads me to the topic of the Gillette corporation.

In my usual fashion, when I packed for my trip to Portland I forgot several items, such as my glasses, pajamas, contact solution, clothing, and my trusty Gillette Venus Embrace razor, with its seven layers of moisturizers, five blades, blade guards and non-slip ergonomic handle, which guarantee that even a klutz like me can shave my legs without severing an artery.  I was planning on wearing shorts to the zoo so that the backs of my legs might actually get some sun (right now I look like someone sprayed the fronts of my legs with self tanner and then, before they got to the backside, had a very important phone call to take and never returned with the airbrush).  So, in preparation for my day I searched my parent’s home for a razor that I could use. 

I found a brand-new Gillette disposable single-blade model in the bathroom drawer.  “How bad could it be?”  I thought.  “I’ve been shaving my legs for almost 30 years now.   Five blades is over-kill.  I don’t need those moisturizers.  I just need to use some lather and I’ll be good to go.”

After my shower I attempted to exit the tub but I was dizzy from the blood loss.   It looked like the scene from Psycho where Janet Leigh bleeds to death in the bottom of the tub.  Clearly, I had grabbed not a razor for shaving legs, but a razor that a doctor would use to remove skin in large sheets for the purposes of skin-grafting.  I couldn’t use my mother’s pristine white bath sheets to dry myself until I had stopped the bleeding.  So, I got out of the tub and deployed the tried and true “little tiny bits of tissue” method to stop the blood loss.  Once I had covered all of my wounds I looked like I had developed some form of skin condition which causes one to be covered with hundreds of tiny little white polka dots. 

Once the bleeding had stopped, I attempted to remove the little pieces of tissue but they were now firmly adhered to my legs.  So, naturally, I used a wet wash cloth to wipe them off, which re-commenced the bleeding.  I thought of just giving up, wrapping both of my legs in toilet paper and putting on rolled-up jeans, but of course I forgot those when I was packing for my trip.  So, I had no other option than to just sit there in the bathroom and hope that I still had enough energy to dress myself once the bleeding stopped on its own. 

All of that time in the bathroom I thought about the geniuses at Gillette.  I mean, each and every time I go to purchase my replacement Venus cartridges I curse the Gillette Corporation because the only reason a three pack of razor cartridges should cost $14.00 is if they are constructed using precious metals and they come with a personal assistant to do your shaving for you.  But, after using one of their sub-par razors, it occurred to me that they can charge just about anything they want for Venus razors because no one in their right mind would use the torture device I had just used unless they had no other choice.  As a matter of fact, it would not surprise me in the least if they intentionally manufacture all of their other razor brands to cut you so that you will be compelled to immediately run to the nearest store after using one and begin hoarding Venus cartridges like those “Preppers” hoard freeze-dried food and ammunition.  Smart store owners would be well advised to track when they sell the inferior models, so that they can temporarily raise the price of a three-pack to $500.00 in preparation for the inevitable rush of desperate customers with tiny bits of paper attached to their bleeding legs.   

Thankfully, I am home now and I have finally stopped bleeding.  And, the last time I was at Costco I purchased Venus cartridges in bulk so that I would never be caught unprepared.  Unless of course I forget to pack them again, which is always a distinct possibility.