This morning, I woke while the light was still grey and the air crisp, to catch my little niece before her bedtime. She’s still pink and plump like a raw chicken, and has huge eyes that miss nothing.
Technology is truly amazing today, although I think we can no longer be amazed. The sky is the limit. I am just happy because I see it as a bridge that lets me into her life halfway across the world, so I can see her little milky oversized face, that’s a fabulous melange of my brother and my sister-in-law, reaching for me on the screen. 
We rely on technology so much these days it’s hard to imagine our lives without the blessings and curses of the gadgets that dot our lives. In America especially, laptops, digital cameras, unlimited high speed wifi, and ipods are so affordable, we have intermeshed our lives to fit between these buttons and keyboards. The fast food of this generation. We’ve hardly noticed we’ve all but disappeared from the stage. And personalities have dissipated too, with stories of Facebook breakups, text mishaps, and the 1 hour email turnaround. The family that used to crowd around the nightly news together is now holed up in different rooms, each glowing with the LCD of a computer screen, streaming tomorrow’s TV show realtime.
I’m going to date myself for a second…I remember learning computers in school once a week for 45 minutes, and it was DOS. Yip, black screen, green letters and numbers, lots of these >…< Commands I hated and couldn’t remember. Talk about learning something we never used! When we printed, it was on that paper that made that robot beeping sound, and the pages would come out in reams with tear off ends on either side. I recall the day our first PC arrived at home. It took up the entire dining room. I didn’t see it again for a year, as my brother laid claims on it immediately. Together with his friends, they teased one another by hiding icons under windows (thanks Bill Gates), and shooting assailants in grim, grimy buildings that went on forever, in games that lasted weeks. When I was 17 and living in Holland, we mailed letters still, and planned backpacking trips from different continents, all on paper with a pen. Hotmail was my first email account, although we only used private email to fight with our boyfriends while at work. They had those damn storage limits which meant you either deleted emails you wish you had kept today, or you had multiple accounts. There was lucindal@hotmail, lucl@hotmail, and lucl21@hotmail. Keeping it all straight was as tricky as saving a document you’d worked on for hours. Ah, the big unsaved document dump of that day must be an interesting place to visit. I thought my boyfriend was ridiculous and showy for wanting a cellphone when we were at varsity and told him outright so. We were resistant, untrusting and old-fashioned. We definitely had more time for ourselves, and connected less with everybody. Now I can but only wonder what it would be like to still have all those childhood emails that were never written, texts not sent. Sophie is going to grow up in a digital world where she’ll laugh at our archaic communication of the 1900′s. She’ll have a cellphone before she finishes school if they still exist, and will probably hunt for my diaries to pour over the blog of that era. But for now, I’m just putting all that energy into stealing time with a 1 year old that bangs the keyboard not the keys, and can only say “goldy goldy” to nobody in particular.
