Increasingly my children characterize my husband and I as the supporting idiots in their lives. Intellectually, I get it.
But it’s hard to transition from the gods they once thought us to be, into these obsolete fools they need us to become in order to fully become themselves. So senseless are we that we must be tolerated and – more often – corrected.
Recently my husband upgraded the operating system on his iPhone. I’d rather iron socks, but to him this passes for an enjoyable Sunday afternoon. The task inspired him to extol The Cloud any chance he got.
- “This cloud thing is the way everything’s going. Pretty soon everything will be on the cloud.”
- “You can see how this cloud is a good idea. It completely eliminates the need for all these system updates.”
- “If that essay were on the cloud, you could access it from your laptop right here.”
The children soon tired of his incessant cloud talk, but they humored him – to a point. My husband sealed his fate at dinner when he inadvertently gestured up and toward the window while referencing the cloud.
“Dad,” my son said, “you do realize it’s not an actual cloud, right?”
Because we are that stupid.
The next weekend we attended a Quiz Bowl tournament. We sat in the back of the room, feeling like idiots during questions of grammar, geography, and trigonometry. However, we struggled against the urge to blurt out the answers when our children couldn’t answer simple questions about modern history, literature, and finance. Not to mention questions with answers like Peter Gabriel and Blondie. Sweet redemption.
While we may not be stupid, we are certainly aging into a comfortable un-hipness. And in the language of teenagers, this is synonymous with stupid. Now, if I could just motivate myself to update the phone operating system.
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