Not All Who Wander Are Lost

A Snore In The Darkness; An Echo In The Bloggiverse

Without You, I'm Nothing

Settled Willow in for a while at Darcie's parents house and finally saw Harry Potter II this afternoon. Not bad. A lot longer than we'd assumed, which meant more anxiety about leaving Willow for so long. I had forgotten my Nicorette; the lack of it heightened the anxiety and left a kind of dry metallic feeling in my mouth and eyes. Some guy at the other end of the row behind us snored really loudly during some of the quieter scenes; several murmured comments about it, but although the place was pretty busy no one had the heart to wake him.

By the time we left the theatre my blood was buzzing. Willow was very happy to see us, especially Mama. Backstory was that her behavior had been somewhere between not easy and a cranky disaster for much of the afternoon, but Patty and Neil seemed cheerful enough about it all. God bless Willow's grandparents, every one of four, for all past and future experiences, with us and our child.

When we got home, there was a message from my mother on the answering machine, whose basic content was your father checked your blog and saw that you were going to the movies; we're going away overnight; I thought I'd leave a message; call me.

Huh. They couldn't find me, but my cyberlife offered clues to my real life activity. Here we've been watching the skies, worrying all along about implanted chips and mass databases invading our privacy, when we should have been watching ourselves evolve. Paranoia of others is a concern made moot when, in the end, we choose a life in which we freely and voluminiously disseminate every detail of our lives.

Well, it's like I teach and Neil Postman says:

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions".

Mom called back later, once she figured the movie was over; she and Dad are on their way to the Berkshires tonight, and hoped to stop by with Chinese Food tomorrow night on their way back to Boston (we're all for that). Plan so far beyond tomorrow is that we'll follow them in after New Years, stay for a few days, come back to Northfield with my Brother on the 4th. Looking forward to all of it.

Ginny came by late from a dinner and sledding party; we're thinking about doing the radio show tomorrow even though the vast majority of our listeners are far out of range, subjects, all, of the temporary diaspora of the prep school holiday break. We watched the tube for a while; now she's crashed out on the couch with the dog. I don't have the heart to wake her.