tweens and gigabytes

It is programmed, as soon as a girl hits puberty, the telephone becomes a lifeline and constant contact to friends a necessity. They can spend hours just hanging out on speaker phone. I remember watching whole movies on TV with my friend on the phone. I wonder a bit in retrospect, why exactly did my best friend and I spend 3 hours on the phone, if we spend virtually any moment together anyway? We met on the way to school, spent the day there (or not :) ) and then hung out in the afternoon, had dinner at one of the houses and very often slept over at each others houses. There is probably a closeness that one can never achieve with anybody again, this melting together of two lives. I can still remember our long lasting giggle fits as if they were yesterday, usually unprovoked and out of nowhere. Once we laughed so hard we broke down and sat down on the sidewalk of the busiest shopping street in our home town (imagine 5th ave in NYC) and holding our midsection in pain, tears streaming down our faces and people coming to our aid, worried we are victims of nerve gas assault or extreme food poisoning.

The next biggest thing was music and my tween seems to follow me right there. Today she received her iPod, she had saved enough money to buy a refurbished nano and I had to do the FedEx tracking constantly for about a week :). So she asked me to throw music onto it and her wishes were Beatles and ABBA. The fantastic thing about that is, that those two were my first big loves of pop music. So much for sameness (if that is a word actually), enter the difference: the digital age. Where I had records and needles, she has this tiny thing, not much bigger than a credit card and it can play 2000 songs or show a movie - bizarre. Both parental units have video iPods and they are huge next to that.

Selecting it though came with one interesting conundrum, the question: "what are gigabytes?". I was in 11th grade when I got introduced to the binary system, computers and all that comes with it. I understood it fast and within weeks I was teaching programming to my math class, since the teacher was absent every week for jury duty. But how do you explain it to a 4th grader who recently decided she hates math (she is about 250 hours behind on practicing math facts)? So we headed to our big black board - it is green - and attempted to explain the binary system, bits, bytes, megabytes and gigabytes, and we failed. So we proceeded to have our own discussion about a multi terabyte NAS RAID* for our house and lost them all together.

My daughter might have reached puberty, lives on the phone and walks around with a digital camera and an iPod, but she still comes to me for explanation and instruction. I will bask in my superiority regarding the digital life, knowing full well how short lived it will be and that there will be a time, when the tables are turned.

* Network Attached Storage - Redundant Array of Independent Disks