I visited with my parents briefly this afternoon. Anyone who knows my father knows that he is a hot-headed, extraordinarily opinionated, smart Italian man who occasionally has a penchant for conspiracy theories. Today he was spouting off about his theory that the Internet will, in fact, kill the English language. I hate to say it, but he could be on to something - though I would blame said death far more on texting (I have yet to adapt to seeing "u" for "you" in business emails - WTF???) than the Internet.
How we came to this conversation? Oh please, must you ask. I believe it started with a discussion about my son's current reading interests - "The Hobbit" and the CS Lewis collection - and how that teeters on the edge of "literature". (Well, if you ask Gregg, not only is The Hobbit "literature", it's the be-all, end-all. LOL) This digressed into the pros and cons of teaching high school students works like Homer's "Iliad", Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", anything by Shakespeare, etc. We actually arrived to the same conclusion - largely useless. This is not to denegrate the importance of these works whatsoever. It's just at 16 or 17, you simply don't get it, don't see it, and frankly, don't give a shit. I was 16 going on 35 and I wanted to scream over enduring that crap (to my high school friends - really, did McSweeney have to make any effort to teach that class. Church paper? check. Canterbury Tales? check. Shakespeare for the rest of the year? check.)
This coming from a high school teacher - well retired and disgruntled but someone with 32+ years of educating the pubescent under his belt. I get it. I've got it. As he put it "I read Shakespeare again at the end of college - and laughed my ass off. 5 years after I was forced to endure it, not only did I finally LIKE it, I GOT it." True dat.
Needless to say, this somehow provided a segue for him into postulating about the demise of the English language. I should say - my parents, who are not particularly old (nearly 62 and 59), are HUGE technophobes. There is some great irony in this considering their oldest child (me) learned to program at 9 (on the TI that they made me get instead of an Atari, citing it was "more educational") and was a slightly failed CS minor in college and then spent the first nearly 9 years of her career as a developer. They hate computers and are Internet-phobic. It's actually sort of amusing.
So he thinks we are killing the English language. Like I said, he could be on to something. I see text-speak creeping into business emails. This is a relatively new work-phenomenon, and seems to be mostly by people under 26 or so, but it's somewhat aggravating.
THAT SAID - You bet your ass I use text-speak when texting (I'm lazy and generally multi-tasking) and I love me some Internet acronyms - in fact, since I enjoy dropping f-bombs whenever possible, WTF is my favorite, following closely by LMFAO.
HA HA HA HA.
G and I braved the cold today to go skating with his cousin and a whole gang of folks at my sister-in-law's (ok, future - someday - we think...) cousin's house. It was GREAT!
Check that. It was great until I stopped. 2.5 hours of skating makes you pretty sweaty. 10 minutes of resting makes you ASS COLD. OMG. I went from pleasantly cool with a light sheen of sweat to so fucking cold I thought my face was going to fall off.
At that point, I began the joyous task of extricating my child from his skating nirvana. The kid has been skating 5 times (as of today) in his life. He's not bad - not great but not bad - and FEARLESS. Today he played hockey - aside from his cousin, he was the youngest kid out there. He spent a good chunk of time sprawled on the ice "But I got the puck on my own once Mom!"
Kudos for him and his enthusiasm. To be nearly 8 again and have the world ahead of you. I am patently jealous at times.
I was also jealous when, after our fabulous "lupper" of chicken divan (UHM YUM!) prepared by my mom, he passed out about 6 minutes into our travels home. At 6pm. Again - to be nearly 8 again.
It's amazing how simultaneously young and ancient having a child can cause you to feel at times.
And now it's Sunday night - "Man Versus Food" is on in the background, Gregg is reading on his BookReader and probably plotting his bike purchase (prematurely - as usual - one of these days I really WILL change the locks when he spends some inordinate amount of money on his hair-brained and now injury-inducing ideas). G is in bed, passed out.
And I have Sunday dread.
We have a new guy starting tomorrow. Good, right? I am getting my ass handed to me on a daily basis and he's here to help. Yet I have to try to squeeze in training him AND continue to babysit our temp (who, by the way, is not a temp in the traditional sense of the work, but instead a BA with a LARGE number of years experience, whom I have known since 1996, and who should NOT REQUIRE BABYSITTING OR HAND-HOLDING!!!).
And that's not all. Did I mention it's the sales conference this week, which means our desktop support guys will be in short supply (and we only have 3 anyway!!) - which is going to lead to me covering phones because our other BAs are otherwise occupied.
OMG. I need to go give myself a mani/pedi in an effort to relax. It's either that or a cranberry martini, and the latter will make me feel like crap tomorrow. ;-)
** Side note. It's been (good grief) 19 years since I spent a large chunk of the fall of my senior year of high school memorizing the intro to "Canterbury Tales" in MIDDLE English. What a useless endeavor especially when I got stage fright and forgot the fucking thing on line 12 or so. Unfortunately, that hunk of crap still resides in my brain. Seriously? I can't remember last names of people I went to college with but I can recite that crap? UGH!!
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