Enter the Smartphone

Okay! Here I am confessing: I must be one of the last people in the US to switch to a smartphone. On a trip to Atlanta to see a stellar grand-girl graduate High School, I was overwhelmed by family--both kids and grandkids--demanding that I get a better phone. So—I caved at last, regaled with all the storied delights that awaited me once I owned such a device. I returned home with said phone tucked inside a pair of socks. We had been too busy with visiting back and forth, hanging out, and attending various graduation festivities to go searching for a case through Atlanta’s daunting traffic.   I figured this would be a good time to make the big change, as I’d have two sons, two DILs and a grand girl to instruct me in at least some of the major arcana.

I was once considered a tech savvy person, but those days are loooong gone. There’s a certain inverted pride in still using a bona fide IBM keyboard from the 80’s, hitched to an early 2004’s computer. It is, however, getting to be more difficult to lag behind than to “get with the program,” as software, and hardware too, endlessly morph. IMHO, (as I learned to say on USENET) I suspect that all the “updating” is simply an excuse to wring more $$ from hapless consumers. One of my friends has a fantasy about MS65, a program geared to seniors, which would be guaranteed to run without chronic episodes of silicon insanity (could I perhaps be alluding to MS 10??) and also guaranteed not to change or alter in any way for a decade. That’s about the right amount of time for many of us cotton-tops to learn a software program these days, I fear. 

Of course, stability/continuity is not what software developers are into these days—the more things fail to work as promised, I guess, the better it is for business, or something. Anyway, while I’m griping, what’s with their penchant for hiding the most commonly used operations three or four—or five--pull downs deep? Is it so we have to humiliate ourselves and buy the latest copy of “…For Dummies”? And what’s with that “Search” that leads you into Alice in Wonderland conversations with   ?? Couldn’t "search" just continue to do what the word indicates that it does?

This morning, I awoke to the sound of chimes—my new phone, of course. I’d set the alarm, hitched it to the wall socket and left it wakeful. Now, I leapt out of bed, and attempted to turn the alarm off without first putting on my glasses. Next thing I knew, I’d taken four blurry pictures of myself. It took a few more minutes of struggle before I managed to figure out how to put the camera back to sleep and find the clock + alarm again. 

How did I, whose first and foremost mental image of “phone” remains the graceful black candlestick apparatus in my grandparent’s living room, enter a world where a small slim box in my hand can deposit checks, take pictures, tell time, and connect me to the internet and thence to untold wonders of consumption? As Charlie Brown so often said, "It boggles the mind."

~~Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS

http://bwlauthors.blogspot.com/

http://yesterrdayrevisitedhere.blogspot.com/

Cooties

(Okay folks! I'm back again and will attempt to Dishin' it Out a la Ginger, our fearless founder!

I write historical novels. Some are romances, some fantasies, some straight out bio-fic, like A Master Passion, which is about Alexander Hamilton and his Betsy. The settings I work in range from the Middle Ages to the American Revolution to 1870's Pennsylvania, just after the Civil War, so sometimes I'll talk writing and sometimes history. Seems my own childhood has lately become "historic" too, so sometimes I'll reminisce and/or grumble  about "nowadays."   :)

Lizzie helping me write

http://amzn.to/1UDoLAi    Books by JW at Amazon

Remember when we were little girls, and boys had “cooties?”

Now, I wasn’t a prissy child. I played with frogs, pollywogs, and worms. I did outdoor tasks, such as pulling weeds and mowing, and I knew the correct flip of the wrist to toss dog poop into the acre of weeds which surrounded our house. In summer, when I was little, I made “roads” and built little towns and set my plastic cowboys in the gravel of the driveway and then flooded them with the hose to create a flash-flood disaster upon those dusty plains, like the budding writer I was. Whatever, the point is I was no stranger to grub, grit, and sweat.

But little boys were definitely a level-up gross. They smelled funny, like members of some other tribe—which, of course, they were, especially in the 50's. Hair was cut short in those days, so their big heads and pink scalp was always in view. Lots of them picked their noses. They sneezed and burped and farted—and then laughed about it. Their ears might be full of wax. (A girl’s ears might be full of wax, too, but she at least had hair to hide it.) Boys were rough and loud, likely to start pushing and shoving when they were asked to line up, instead of just stand and wait for the bell sensibly like the girls did.   

Then, the inevitable change. Suddenly those scalped boys—some still not as tall as we were—became, for the first time ever, extremely thought-provoking. Friends started to-- “like” was the euphemism--some of these boys. High School Romances began. The participants traded each other like cards, one by one, entering the lists of drama & heartbreak. Sometimes a girl was popular and sometimes she was not, mostly depending, back in those days, upon how dreamy/eligible her boyfriend was or whether she was a cheerleader. Boys became men and girls became women. The mating game began in earnest, with all those triumphs, tragedies, ecstasies, and Nymph-and-Satyr-Aphrodite-in-her-Nightie lusts and longings.

I’m sure you remember all that—some good, some bad, some bleeeh--so I’ll fast forward, because it’s easy to forget now, too, here in my Crone age. Maybe, in my case, it’s because all the organic bits that made the other sex desirable have been chopped out, for one pretty good reason or another, by surgeons.

Many older women, I know, do not share this experience of aging, but frankly, I'm back to square one. I have looked in the mirror and what I see reflected there is no longer any sort of goddess. The same holds true for my male age mates. Testosterone burns (and burn-out) have scarred these long ago super-cool, motorcycle ridin', guitar pickin', greased-lightning heart-throbs.  

 

I have one of these senior gentlemen at home, who, despite 50+ years of marriage--Purple Hearts all around--and despite pleading and wiles, has remained steadfastly impervious to domestication. I'm still living with a “Bear with furniture.” I have to sneak his outer clothes, those vests, jackets, and gym clothes into the wash, because little matter that these garments are about to achieve sentience and walk on their own, they "aren't dirty yet."  

His principal lair is a special chair in the living room, around which I may not clean because I’m can't return it to the exact spot. Daily, there are certain paths that he walks, this old caged bear, TV breaks to the fridge, or into his sanctum sanctorum of a workroom filled with sawdust, tools and firearms, and or to his computer, or to the liquor cabinet for a late afternoon libation said to be in honor of a certain deceased uncle of mine who introduced him to this venerable Celtic practice.

Male and female have never been reading from the same instruction manual, particularly when we attempt to express our feelings to one another. Books have been written on the subject of communication between male and female. Even so, on top of the ordinary Mars/Venus thing, for me, the old otherness is back again. We're in hitch--we're used to it--but we're just by nature a tad alien to one another. 

Doesn't mean we can't get along and work together, though, which, I guess, is the change from childhood. Sort of like this amazing old photo:

Kenya, 1929

~~ Juliet Waldron

http://amzn.to/1UDoLAi    Books by JW at Amazon

Sisters Series, #2, Pretty German girl hopes to find herself a nice Pennsylvania husband...

http://amzn.to/2gvXVxl  Butterfly Bride    B01MEENIRA