We're Not Gonna Grow Through the iTunes Playlist

Who's ready for a long, disjointed preamble to this post?  You are?  Excellent.  All others can skip to 3:21 in the video and continue from there.*

Fridays are scheduled to be posts about Family.  Which is cool and all, particularly since I'm the one who made the schedule, but it's sort of problematic.  

When I wrote Blog 1.0, the kids were young and, while vocal, didn't present very reasoned arguments for anything, so writing about them on the internet didn't keep me up at night with ethical and moral qualms.  Plus, that whole blog got lost in the sub-etha so it doesn't matter now anyway; ain't nobody gonna google one of my kids' names and read a post I wrote back in '07 about how s/he was found eating ceiling spackle like pudding and the resulting (hilarious) poison control call.**

But now.  Well, now is different.  And while I hope Ken*** and I have raised kids that would find it charming and quirky to have their internet footprint attached to a droll and lighthearted story such as the above, it's probably not my place anymore to share quite so freely about their lives.

So that means on Friday Mandatory Fun Family Day, I have to tread...differently than I would have 10 years ago.  Meh.  I hate different.

Then I found $20****

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Things like this:

are stupid, and I'll tell you why.  No.  Scratch that.  Let Fr. Schmitz tell you.  He's better at it and it's only 9 minutes long.  I'm sure you've spent more than 9 minutes today scrolling through your feed and liking cat memes. 

Even if you're not religious, or if you are, but still refuse to listen to the good Father for nine minutes,  here's the Cliff Notes- no matter how close the friendship is, it will never have the same baggage and gravity and perception as family.  And that isn't a bad thing.  Those demands that family place on us fly in the face of our immediate gratification, everyone is the curator of their own perfect reality lives.  Family is the whole album.  "Friends are the family you choose for yourself" is the iTunes playlist that you've spent 3 months adding to and swapping out as your whims dictate.

Maybe the point of life isn't to have everything subject to our whims.  Maybe we're so scared of the concept of permanence that we're willing to devalue the distinct roles of family and friendship by pretending the two can be equally interchanged.

Anyway, with the holidays coming up, even holidays as coronajacked as this year's are shaping up to be, I'm sure we're all thinking about family a little more than usual.  I don't know if I'll be brave enough and humble enough to take Fr. Schmitz's advice and ask my family to reveal areas that I need to work on, but I know for sure that any responses I would get from them would be 100% more perceptive and accurate than any I would ever get from a friend.  

And then I found $20*****

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* That's a joke, this isn't a video.  Also, because you'll pry the footnotes from my cold, dead hands, if I can't post a link to an aside, Imma footnote it.  Buckle up.

** Bonus points if you remember this episode and name the child

***Ken's my husband, for new readers' sake.  Nobody's googling his name for anything

**** A cousin of mine was once engaged to a man who gave me the single greatest piece of storytelling advice I've ever received.  "When you're telling a story," he said, while eating cheese next to a pool at a house my uncle rented for the entire family to stay at Destin, Florida, "and you realize that you've gone on too long and that your audience has lost interest and there's no possible way of salvaging things, just end the story with 'And then I found $20' and everyone's ears will perk up and they'll all go 'What?  No way!  That's awesome!' and you'll have a good reaction at the end of your story, and they won't have to feel guilty about not listening."  See?  The best storytelling device ever.

***** I can't promise that I won't end all my blog posts this way, but I'll try not to