The Magic of...You Tube

Until last week I could count the number of times I watched a video on YouTube on my fingers. Occasionally someone would send me a link that looked interesting enough to chance it, but I have always had a preference for text over video, especially for news. With a few exceptions, I find that text news reports are more in-depth than video, plus, I can read faster than people talk, so watching videos was just a waste of my time.

Rowan has shown me a whole new world. Imagine you are 3 going on 4. Your favorite thing in the world is trains and the tracks they roll around on...but your parents only have enough room in their house for one set of tracks (let's be honest, we don't even have room for that.) You are still too young to grasp the connection between the trackball and the monitor so your previous attempts to use the computer could be classified as watching while Mom plays the game for you.

Enter the touch screen tablet, in this case an i-pad, but an android tablet would be just as good. Now that you can touch the screen directly, the connection between the pictures on the screen and your hand suddenly becomes obvious. You keep begging for Mom to open up one of those games and play it "with" you, but Mom is trying to work so, out of desperation, Mom opens YouTube on her i-pad and searches for Thomas the Train.

Bingo! Several hundred videos appear, most of which are people who are just as obsessed with trains as you are. They have set up their track and recorded themselves playing with their collections. You want to see it again, play it again? You want to see something similar? wait until it ends and try one of their suggested videos. You want to go back to that awesome one where the 6 year old boy narrated the story in German, touch the history button. Once the initial search has been put in, you don't even need your mom, except to bring you food and remind you to go potty. Who wants to go potty anyway when you have this marvelous machine? All you want to do is use the "Play Pad" and laugh and learn German, like the little boy in the video.

I'm afraid that I may have created a monster. Either that, or another Steven Spielberg. I guess we will just have to wait and see....

Real friends are rare...

When I was about 14 I thought it would be great to be popular. I went out of my way to be nice to everyone, even people I have very little in common with. Eventually I had lots of friends, but still wasn't very popular. For some reason, the popular girls were mean, and I could never figure out how that worked.

After I graduated, most of those friends just faded away. We were bound by the school we went to , when we stopped going to school, what little we had in common wan't enough to hold us together. Sure, there were exceptions. Actually, only one. There is only one person from high school that I care enough to talk to today. There are a few more people whose names I remember, if I came across them somewhere it would probably be a pleasant trip down memory lane, but they were never in my heart.

Today I have a very short list of friends. A few of them have become closer to me than family. Sometimes I wonder why it is so hard to make new friends, but then I remember all the "friends" I had in high school and I am just glad to have a few good friends that I can really rely on as an adult.

This weekend one of my friends rescued me. My car seemed fine a few weeks ago, then the motor mounts went and suddenly the drive shaft was about to break. He spent most of his weekend fixing my car for me, and for a pittance compared to what I would have paid someone else. I know he hates working on cars these days too, he has made the career shift into electronics and would rather stay there.

Here's to real friends...if we get one or two in a lifetime, we are blessed.

Occupy Martin Luther King day

This weekend we celebrated Martin Luther King Day by following his example. We attended the 12th weekly Occupy Kingman assembly at Locomotive Park. Luckily for us, Rowan absolutely loves trains and he is just old enough to run around playing on the train while we hold up signs and take turns watching out for him.

Over the last year or so I have really begun to feel hopeless about the political situation in our country. I was raised to be patriotic. My family has participated in every major war in this country since before the revolution. But the wars today do not resemble World War 2, they look more like Vietnam. They are poorly planned and unwinnable, mostly because we refuse to fight for the one thing that could win the hearts of the Iraqi and Afghan people--democracy and self-determination.

Occupy Kingman has become a forum for people like me that can see how the institutions that serve us have failed and must be rebuilt instead of simply reformed. Over the past few weeks we have finally sat down and talked about some concrete ideas for how to proceed, both within and without the Occupy Kingman movement. The weekly meetings have given me a feeling of hope again, even knowing that we are not likely to make any national progress, we can come together as individuals in partnerships that can change our communities for the better.

I have decided to search out others in Dolan Springs who support the Occupy movement and try to form and Occupy Dolans Springs group.