It took me a couple moments to get what I was seeing — the girl with the “Star Wars” tattoo. They’ve become so commonplace, tattoos. So expected and ubiquitous that we hardly notice them anymore. Unless one is different, unexpected and on some level connects with us. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone with a character from “Star Wars” permanently etched on their body. This was a battle droid, and I must say … different, unexpected, and totally connected with me.
The wiggle of the little kid tooth
The “wiggle” has arrived at my house. You know … the wiggle. The toothquake. The shimmy-shimmy in the mouth. The flapping, shaking, waving dance of the first tooth about to sprout wings and fly. My daughter, 5 years old, has her first loose tooth. It’s flapping about like a little rocking chair, and I’m quaking a bit myself. It was quite a discovery. She mentioned it while climbing into bed one night. My wife, dubious, had to investigate. It seemed perfectly outrageous and entirely impossible. Not our child. Not this soon. Not a chance. No way. And then … “AHHHHHH!”
Skyping away those childhood dreams
There I was, sitting at the computer having a video conference across Skype with a guy in Nicaragua. He’s the designer on the college magazine I edit, a former college professor who picked up and moved to Central America because the surfing’s good and it gets him farther away from me. We Skype a lot. If you don’t know, Skype isn’t a kind of fish, but a program that lets two people video chat across the Internet. It’s almost as good as being in the same room, only I can’t reach across the desk, grab his shirt and scream, “Where are my pages?” (I miss that part.) So there we were, chatting it up like I’ve done dozens of times before when the grandest of revelations occurred to me: “Holy time machines, I’m in the future!”