The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Quick! Happy Birthday!

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Quick! Happy Birthday!

On Monday, August 25, Emma turned ten. It's not a vast age, but while I was all excited about a trip to Toys R Us, she looked at me with her (then) nine year old patience, and announced, "Mom, I want a new computer, not toys. It's not like I'm five."

Right. She's not five, but she is only ten, and already her friends have laptops, cell phones and separate phones to text. One of her closest friends has a Blackberry.
She's ten and a half. I can't imagine what she enters on it: "Suite Life of Zach and Cody Saturday morn" or maybe just the week's spelling words.

In fairness, these are the kids who grew up with the Internet. None of them can remember a time when there weren't computers in the house, or when pictures took up to a week to get back from the developers. A few parents we know assist their children with blogs (remember diaries?) Their homework is online, they take keyboarding in second grade, and they are computer savvy by about the third grade.
Each year, along with nutritional guidelines, bus rules and field trip permissions, the Internet safety code comes home. Emma learned how to use a mouse and how to click on icons in kindergarten. She has only seen her teachers take attendance on computers that are now built in to teachers' desks.

So she got her laptop. She didn't want a party, just a family trip. For Christmas, she wants a cell phone, but she does think her friend's Blackberry is silly.

I can't imagine her opening a copy of Little Women or Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and understanding that time. I look at most tween books, and I wonder if she will understand how life used to so much less immediate, so much less global.

Today, I answered my own question. Since she can only go on the Internet with someone present in the room (someone = older than 13), I have been watching her navigation. So far she has watched:

-a man claiming he can count to infinity

- a fashion show for dogs

- kittens (and more kittens, and yet more kittens)

- several episodes of a show involving a castle,a princess, and a witch

- music videos of bands she likes

When I asked her this morning what she liked best about her birthday, she replied,
"Two things: the wipeout (which is a water park slide) and the cake."

I don't think kids change; just their toys do. When I asked her about the laptop, she replied, "Oh, that's really just for homework so I don't have to borrow one of the boys."

5 comments:

TerriRainer said...: SHE IS TOOOO CUTE! Hope she had a great birthday.

But just wait...boys are NEXT. My oldest started High School this fall...she's in 9th grade, but has Spanish class w/ Seniors, and Juniors, and Sophmores....SCARY!

The football players all surround her in class, like she is to be protected (she's in Pom) from the others in the class....but who is going to protect her from THEM?

Aye yi yi!

JUST WAIT...Tiffany's had the cell phone/pda and laptop for a few years now, and I thought that was bad....not so much now.

:) Terri; Thursday, 28 August, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Remember that first line, "When you think about it, boys are like frogs"? -- Emma actually said that. So far, she can't stand boys and her Dad and I feel 37 is a reasonable age to begin dating.

Her fourth grade friend put numbers in my cell phone memory; I used to program my mom's VCR. It will probably always be like that.

Sorry, don't know what Pom is...; Thursday, 28 August, 2008
TerriRainer said...: Hmmmm, Pom Pon (yes, it's w/ an "N")? It's like the cheerleaders, only they have pom poms and dance, instead of throwing each other up in the air!

The High School here has BOTH.

Oh, and I wouldn't get too comfortable with the number 37!

:) Terri; Friday, 29 August, 2008
Marcia said...: "Cell phones and separate phones to text"? Tell me they DON'T have 2 phones.

I wonder if she will understand how life used to so much less immediate

I love this observation. I seriously think "life being so immediate" has affected my writing, not for the good. It makes me live more on the surface, whereas a writer I need time and space to go deep.

It's with some relief that I read her favorite parts of her birthday were the waterslide and the cake. To me that does affirm that kids are still the same. And I think her opening remarks are typical, too. I remember being nine when my little sister was five. I practically considered myself an adult compared to her.; Saturday, 30 August, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Ohh, gotcha, Terri. We had boosters and cheerleaders at my high school, so I remember that.

And, yes, Marcia, some of the kids have two devices with them at school. Usually, one is like a trac phone of some kind (the Juke is really popular with the younger kids), and the other is a "real" cell phone.

I keep wondering if they really want this stuff or if they just see older kids with it. And how much does our use of PDA's and cell phones influence them?; Sunday, 31 August, 2008

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***