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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2i4Joah:
So I come from a big immediate family, but not much of an extended family. I was just discussing this at work– my deskmate is an only child, but his grandfather was a notable local businessman, who had 10 siblings and several children of his own, and so people with my coworker’s mother’s maiden name pop up all over the place and indeed own half of the part of town he grew up in.
But me, my grandparents were all from small families, so I just don’t have the forest of second cousins and third cousins that my deskmate has. (He doesn’t know most of them; the conversation started because a customer on the phone went to spell out his name and my coworker laughed and said “I know how to spell it.”) We contrast our very different family situations a lot; it’s really affected each of our experiences of life, I think, and it’s fascinating to examine.
Because me, I have a small handful of first cousins on one side, and none on the other. But I have three sisters, to whom I am very close. (For new folks, hi new followers, I refer to them, in order, as Army Sister or Older Sister, who lives in Baltimore and is a Lt. Col in the National Guard and has three kids, then I’m next in the birth order, then Middle-Little Sister who lives in a cute apartment in downtown Troy, then Farmsister, the baby of the family, who has a daughter [Farmbaby] and a lovely husband and a farm.) (I don’t know if people not from large families rely so much on birth order to keep themselves organized. But my sisters and I all keep track of ourselves and each other in that order.)
That’s manageable enough that we just have one family text group message now, which is the bulk of how information gets relayed. (Behind the cut is an entertaining but pointless personal rumination on family dynamics and mostly what a hilarious weirdo my mother is via text.)
It’s only this past year that our father (who just turned 73) got a phone of his own instead of communicating secondhand via our mother. He has taken to it readily, and sends a lot of pictures with wry commentary. The one who’s worst with it is actually my older sister, who’ll turn 40 this year– in those formative years when most Americans were getting addicted to texting, she was overseas in the Army without access to cellphones, so she just hasn’t caught up with the fashion of it, and now with three kids and a full-time job and a house she’s fixing, she just doesn’t look at her phone very often. [It’s not a universal Army thing, it’s just her; the last time I visited her, she answered her house phone to a call from her commanding officer asking her what she thought about The X Situation, was caught totally off-guard, and went to find a dozen texts on her phone from her subordinates about The X Situation, whereupon she had to make some phone calls and explain, kids, I don’t look at my phone that much, if it’s time-sensitive you gotta actually make the phone ring so I look at it.]
So it makes for an entertaining group family message, everyone’s very different texting styles. Older sister tends to reply to everything in as few messages as possible, with a businesslike but cheerful email kind of style. Mom sometimes sends texts that are more like a whole email, but most often sends cryptic single words. Middle-Little sister compulsively replies individually to each sent text, often with one word or with dumb phrases like “lol that’s great!”. Farmsister uses a lot of emojis because Farmbaby is at prime phone-stealing age but can’t quite read, so she loves them. If you get a whole block of emojis you know it was Farmbaby. I try to reply economically and occasionally troll everyone with photos of my cat when I feel too outnumbered by all the kid pictures.
Anyway this is a long pointless story, but I use Tumblr like a journal so sometimes I tell them.
Yesterday Mom sent one of her email-style texts. It was a long explanation of a busy day with interjections– best buy should go out of business, no customer service– craft show– only my mother never bothers with em-dashes. She actually wrote this sentence: “Shop and save- they don’t sell lim-a beans, the only thing I needed.” and finished with “Dad is resourceful but being a helpless sick male today.” [No, I don’t know what a lim-a bean is nor why it would be punctuated thus, but now I know Shop and Save doesn’t carry them. And I am thoroughly familiar with the “helpless sick male” phenomenon. I feel like men in general get sick less often than the women I know, but cope far less well with it. My father’s no exception; he’s healthy as a horse for the most part but when he’s feeling poorly, well, you know it. In his defense, it’s usually pretty serious. The last time asthma slowed him down, when they finally did a pulmonary function test he was at twenty percent.]
And this morning, Army Sister sent a photo of her three kids making an assembly-line-style production of those little paper fortune tellers. You know the kind that were so popular when us 80s kids were in middle school? I guess they’re the new hotness, at least in the tiny corner of culture her kids are experiencing. (They’ve just moved to Baltimore from Savannah, so they’re discovering winter right now. Sister sensibly decided not to buy winter gear for them until she sees what the locals wear, because fashion influences those things so much for kids.)
I said that I don’t think I ever learned how to make those.
Dad’s phone replied, “This is Mom- I used those to teach future tense!”
(She was a high school Spanish teacher for thirty years.)
Now I’m trying to remember if I even know future tense in Spanish. (I didn’t go to the school where she taught, so she didn’t teach me!) If you know how to use a paper fortune-teller to teach future tense I’m all ears, Internet.
(Your picture was not posted)
So I come from a big immediate family, but not much of an extended family. I was just discussing this at work– my deskmate is an only child, but his grandfather was a notable local businessman, who had 10 siblings and several children of his own, and so people with my coworker’s mother’s maiden name pop up all over the place and indeed own half of the part of town he grew up in.
But me, my grandparents were all from small families, so I just don’t have the forest of second cousins and third cousins that my deskmate has. (He doesn’t know most of them; the conversation started because a customer on the phone went to spell out his name and my coworker laughed and said “I know how to spell it.”) We contrast our very different family situations a lot; it’s really affected each of our experiences of life, I think, and it’s fascinating to examine.
Because me, I have a small handful of first cousins on one side, and none on the other. But I have three sisters, to whom I am very close. (For new folks, hi new followers, I refer to them, in order, as Army Sister or Older Sister, who lives in Baltimore and is a Lt. Col in the National Guard and has three kids, then I’m next in the birth order, then Middle-Little Sister who lives in a cute apartment in downtown Troy, then Farmsister, the baby of the family, who has a daughter [Farmbaby] and a lovely husband and a farm.) (I don’t know if people not from large families rely so much on birth order to keep themselves organized. But my sisters and I all keep track of ourselves and each other in that order.)
That’s manageable enough that we just have one family text group message now, which is the bulk of how information gets relayed. (Behind the cut is an entertaining but pointless personal rumination on family dynamics and mostly what a hilarious weirdo my mother is via text.)
It’s only this past year that our father (who just turned 73) got a phone of his own instead of communicating secondhand via our mother. He has taken to it readily, and sends a lot of pictures with wry commentary. The one who’s worst with it is actually my older sister, who’ll turn 40 this year– in those formative years when most Americans were getting addicted to texting, she was overseas in the Army without access to cellphones, so she just hasn’t caught up with the fashion of it, and now with three kids and a full-time job and a house she’s fixing, she just doesn’t look at her phone very often. [It’s not a universal Army thing, it’s just her; the last time I visited her, she answered her house phone to a call from her commanding officer asking her what she thought about The X Situation, was caught totally off-guard, and went to find a dozen texts on her phone from her subordinates about The X Situation, whereupon she had to make some phone calls and explain, kids, I don’t look at my phone that much, if it’s time-sensitive you gotta actually make the phone ring so I look at it.]
So it makes for an entertaining group family message, everyone’s very different texting styles. Older sister tends to reply to everything in as few messages as possible, with a businesslike but cheerful email kind of style. Mom sometimes sends texts that are more like a whole email, but most often sends cryptic single words. Middle-Little sister compulsively replies individually to each sent text, often with one word or with dumb phrases like “lol that’s great!”. Farmsister uses a lot of emojis because Farmbaby is at prime phone-stealing age but can’t quite read, so she loves them. If you get a whole block of emojis you know it was Farmbaby. I try to reply economically and occasionally troll everyone with photos of my cat when I feel too outnumbered by all the kid pictures.
Anyway this is a long pointless story, but I use Tumblr like a journal so sometimes I tell them.
Yesterday Mom sent one of her email-style texts. It was a long explanation of a busy day with interjections– best buy should go out of business, no customer service– craft show– only my mother never bothers with em-dashes. She actually wrote this sentence: “Shop and save- they don’t sell lim-a beans, the only thing I needed.” and finished with “Dad is resourceful but being a helpless sick male today.” [No, I don’t know what a lim-a bean is nor why it would be punctuated thus, but now I know Shop and Save doesn’t carry them. And I am thoroughly familiar with the “helpless sick male” phenomenon. I feel like men in general get sick less often than the women I know, but cope far less well with it. My father’s no exception; he’s healthy as a horse for the most part but when he’s feeling poorly, well, you know it. In his defense, it’s usually pretty serious. The last time asthma slowed him down, when they finally did a pulmonary function test he was at twenty percent.]
And this morning, Army Sister sent a photo of her three kids making an assembly-line-style production of those little paper fortune tellers. You know the kind that were so popular when us 80s kids were in middle school? I guess they’re the new hotness, at least in the tiny corner of culture her kids are experiencing. (They’ve just moved to Baltimore from Savannah, so they’re discovering winter right now. Sister sensibly decided not to buy winter gear for them until she sees what the locals wear, because fashion influences those things so much for kids.)
I said that I don’t think I ever learned how to make those.
Dad’s phone replied, “This is Mom- I used those to teach future tense!”
(She was a high school Spanish teacher for thirty years.)
Now I’m trying to remember if I even know future tense in Spanish. (I didn’t go to the school where she taught, so she didn’t teach me!) If you know how to use a paper fortune-teller to teach future tense I’m all ears, Internet.
(Your picture was not posted)
