Or whatever. I didn’t buy this thing because the cool TikTok kids have them. And I didn’t buy it because of the coronavirus and I’m not sure how it would protect me from that anyway. I bought it because my MacBook lives in the Landfill Chitchen. It hasn’t taken a drink in a while but no matter how hard I try to keep the keyboard clean, food particles and other detritus get onto it. The color is actually more turquoise/teal to match my chitchen backsplash tile of courserous.

Apparently the cool TikTok kids *do* have them though. I know this because Amazon Woman has a tween – a sixth grader at good old Slauson middle school. So I caught that AW had lime green keys on her work laptop. We have Dells and they are black including the keyboard.

I am not a TikTok or even a Snapchat user and I don’t ever expect to be although anything can change and, like my mother, I will be at least trying to keep up with technology until my last breath. If there’s ever a good reason for me to use TikTok or Snapchat or whatever is next, I will be ON IT! But now I am remembering the journey the beach urchins took as they grew up with increasingly sophisticated tech communications.

Prodigy. Who remembers Prodigy. We were using a dial-up modem in those days. Lizard Breath was like five or so and she made a friend on Prodigy, not that the friendship lasted very long. And once a WOMAN approached the GG as a possible romantic interest (no photos then!). She backed off and was warmly friendly when he told her about his wife and two daughters.

Family email addresses. In the beginning, most families (including ours) had ONE email address. Online communication technology was so new then that I doubt most of us were thinking too hard about privacy issues. But it was so fun (not) to read a whole long email chain between your tween and her friend (on *that* family’s email account) sending forwarded jokes to each other or whatever 🐽

Then there was instant messenger. The beach urchins had friends all over the city and I loved vegging out on the couch in the back room after a YAG rehearsal while they used the family computer to I/M their friends. When the older beach urchin first went to college I thought I would be cool and use I/M to talk to harass her. After a couple of months I came to my senses and realized that this was not a NORMAL way to communicate with a fledged adult child.

Of course she had her own personal computer by then. It was expensive for everyone in the fam to have their own computer but that’s where were were heading at that point.

Twitter and Facebook? I don’t think most people my beach urchins’ age use either as a main communication method any more. Twitter is my main news source and Facebook has been taken over by its originally intended demographic by their parents and grandparents and all of their political crapola.

That’s as far as it goes for me because that is the end of my social media technology for now. Although I think I have actually encountered Snapchat. Like the time C*Q*L was flipping through filters with us both in the pic and there we were with huge pink eyelashes or aminal ears or whatever. What fun!

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