52 days to go

My sister and I took my 16 year-old cousin Sam shopping today. I remember exactly what it was like to be 16, how much I cared about the jeans I wore, the shirts, the shoes, and so on. I am still in love with clothes and shoes but it doesn't have the same urgency. I wondered today if my thirties and fourties would be decades of increasing carelessness of one's appearance. I mean I see this with parents you see at Walmart or the malls, walking around with strollers or their kids, and not caring about the way they look, its one of my least favourite things about looking at the future. I hope that I keep ensuring that I care about what I wear, but I do wonder how these people lost that about themselves.

We spoke with my cousin about some of the choices he has to make soon, like university. Its interesting, he doesn't know a world without the internet. I remember when the internet started becoming popular. I was about 12 or 13 when I had my first email account and used Netscape. Then in university at about 18 years of age I had a Hotmail account, which at the time was the be-all and end-all of emails. We started having course websites and using the internet for research and now its a part of each and every day. Until the ninetees the internet was just not a part of everyday life and now to Sam, its a part of life. Not only the internet, but pagers, then cell phones, now smart phones, 3G, 4G, GPS, bluetooth, infrared technology, and so on are part of every day language.

I remember computer games in the eightees, we had a triathlon or was it a decathlon game on our first computer? You had to press the Y and T keys really fast with two of your fingers to make the guy run and jump over the hurdles. One of my other cousins spent his days asking his parents for an Atari. Computing, engineering, and robotics have seen amazing advances in the past three decades, amazing things have happened.