Saturday, June 30, 2007
Aye! Tunes
By the time Peter arrived nearly three years ago, Dave had made his own Linux-based DVR (affectionately dubbed the DiVO). Peter has no concept that shows air at a certain time. He watches whatever he wants, whenever he wants. I have no idea what the current PBS line-up is, because he is an all-Scooby-all-the-time guy. And with the DiVO, it’s “No problem – Scooby coming right up!” He begs to watch “the baseball guys” with me in the afternoons and I have to explain to him that there’s no game on right now because the Mariners don’t play till seven. He doesn’t understand why I don’t DVR the games.
We’re not early technology adopters. Not because we don’t like gadgets and geekiness (we do! we do!). It’s because we’re cheap. Well, my husband is cheap, and I’m learning how to be cheap too. It’s quite good for things like “the bottom line”, “living debt-free”, and “possibly being able to retire before we’re 75”. Since we’re tech-savvy-but-cheap, we drool a lot and think about all the great 2007 technology we can buy in 2010 when it’s all out-dated and therefore finally within our price range. [Ok, here’s my big technology-doofus secret: I just don’t get the whole “texting” thing. I’m pretty sure that if I were stuck in quicksand and my life depended on it, I would die before I could num-key out the letters “h-e-l-p-m-e” on my phone. I’ve sent 5 texts in my entire life, and one of them took 30 minutes to compose.]
Anyway - for Christmas, I got an iPod nano (thanks, Sweetie!). It’s cute, it's pink, and I use it all the time. I even took the giant step of downloading music for Peter onto it. With Henry, I bought train-themed CDs to play in the car. With Peter, I decided to buy some pirate-y songs off of iTunes to keep us company on our daily travels. We started with the theme song from “The Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. (We had been singing “Yo ho! Yo ho! A pirate’s life for me!” and figured there must be more words to that song. We discovered that no, actually - there aren’t too many more words, and what additional words there are, are quite banally forgettable. Is the song stuck in your head now? You’re welcome! …But I digress). To upload the songs, etc. I have iTunes on my computer. Now every morning, Peter begs to listen to his pirate songs on my "punkyewter" while I take a shower. I snapped a photo of him doing it because I was so struck by the picture of technology.
Back when I was a kid, my brother and I played LPs of Cinderella, Robin Hood and Peter Pan – first on our red Fisher Price kids’(!) phonograph, and later on the gigantic console stereo that Mom and Dad moved to the basement. I vividly remember the Christmas my grandmother gave us CASSETTE PLAYERS!
I love technology, but sometimes am wistful for “the way things were”. I think it’s more a manifestation of how Complicated and Real life gets over time. It’s not that my iPod is that much more advanced and complex than my red phonograph, it’s that my life is more complicated and complex now. I have more responsibilities and am more aware of what’s going on around me.
I hope when my children are older, they will sometimes be wistful for the old-fashioned technology of iTunes, DVRs and text messaging. That remembering listening to pirate songs or watching Scooby Doo on demand will bring them back to the feeling where the world was simpler, things were easier, and they had fewer cares. That’s part of my job as a mom, to let them have a simple childhood that they can look back on and remember that feeling of being completely provided for and loved.
Who am I?