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Although admittedly a bit late to the party, we actually picked up a Wii a month or so ago. I had given up my Playstation and my Xbox when I finally realized that having a child made it a little difficult to sit uninterrupted for four or five hours trying to solve Ninja Gaiden, so a Wii seemed like a good choice for the entire family. So far it’s worked out pretty well. My daughter has created her own Mii, a hulking East German woman named Giddy who wears a permanent diabolical frown and too much blue eye shadow, and she uses her quite effectively to crush me in tennis and golf.
But having a Wii in our household has brought two interesting observations to my attention. The first is that the warning screen that the Wii displays upon startup that states “Make sure objects and other people are out of your range of movement or arm motion to prevent damage or injury” should not be laughed at after all, as a half-empty beer rocketed into the wall during a heated game of bowling only five short inches short of the TV screen will leave a dent in the drywall.
The second is how comfortable my daughter is with all things computerized and electronic. As I watched her navigate through windows, X out of menus, select, deselect, and so on, I was suddenly slapped in the face by a harsh reality. I am no longer the “young generation.” Until very recently, I have always thought of myself as a member of the technologically-advanced elite, and laughed uncontrollably at the thought of how primitively my parents were forced to live. I mean, their cars had cranks on them. Then, however, as I watched my daughter interactively purchase 10,000 Wii Points and began to download a new massively-multiplayer online role playing game, I began to think about what she would think of my own generation. I started running down a list of things I take for granted of which she would have no working knowledge:
Manual car windows
LP’s, 45’s, 8-tracks, cassettes and, probably CD’s
Pong
Optional seat belts
Smoking being cool
Coiled and tangled avacado-colored telephone cords
Dot-matrix
Rooftop TV antennas
35mm slides
The list just grew and grew in my head until I finally had to stop thinking about it all together. My generation, so smart and oh so avant garde, has been replaced. We are old-fashioned and out-of-date. Our day in the sun has passed. There will come a day when, in passing my daughter talking to friends on the telephone, I will overhear:
“No, dude. They only had THIRTEEN channels. Oh my god I know, right? What? NO dude, a KNOB! Yeah, hahah! Totally. Mmmhmm. By hand. All the way across the room. Soooooooooo lame.”
I cried softly.
Later that evening, after I had put her down to bed, I trudged to the TV room, head hung low in defeat, and did the only thing I knew to do. I put on an episode of The Golden Girls and had a laugh with Rose, Blanche and the gang, subscribed to the AARP newsletter and went to bed at 8:30.
-Matt
At least I’m young enough to know how to create a link to our online baby boutique, RedSparks. Click it, why don’t ya.
April 19th, 2009 at 4:29 am
My kids don’t believe me when I tell them we actually had to get up to change the tv channel, and yes, we only had 3 channels…count ‘em! And NO VCRs, DVDs, or CDs. And they had the gall to ask me what a typewriter was, and how it worked. Brats.
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April 19th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
You are sooo sensitive, Matt. This is the second time in 3 posts you have shared your tears. My middle-aged-bottom that you will survive this, too.
Someone somewhere puts out a list like this every year – things that entering college freshman will have no knowledge of. Stark reminder of the development of technology, but also of human adaptation.
However, some things are finite – time and space; biological processes that dictate brain growth. While the number of tv channels grows exponentially, people must still eat and sleep. Rest well, Friend, no matter what time you go to bed – for little brother to Frankie will need to eat and have no concept of time of day or night.
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April 20th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Dude. I’ve hit MYSELF in the face with the Wii controller. Do I really even need to say more?
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May 3rd, 2009 at 8:59 am
Ha ha You are too funny! my high school age brother (18 yrs younger than me) has no working knowledge of most of your list! So count yourself lucky you’ve managed to believe in your youth this long–I’ve felt 104 since my brother hit elementary school, who know what I’ll feel when my 2 year old acquires a working knowledge of new stuff!!!!
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