Entries

Germany for 3 Weeks

Young couple overheard on the sidewalk:

Man No, I can’t go to Germany for three weeks.

Woman (with German accent) Yes! Yes, you can!

Man No!

Woman Have you asked?

Man Well, no. But not for three weeks. You don’t understand the way companies here work.

Woman If you asked, I’m sure they would say of course you can.

Man Honey, listen. My company is about to lay off a hundred people. This would be a bad time, okay?

Paul and I were waiting in an interminable line filled with parents and children. While he read, I crocheted. The woman behind me pointed to my hands and asked, “What, there, what is?”

I turned towards her. “Oh, it’s going to be a bag. Like, for your keys and things?”

“Very nice, very nice.”

“Thank you!”

“You have any, finished?”

I showed her a hat I’d recently completed. We chatted for awhile about crocheting, then she nodded towards Paul and said, “Not in school today?”

“He’s homeschooled.”

She looked horrified.

“I teach him? At home?”

“You teach?”

“Yup! And, you know, there are lots of people who also homeschool their kids, so we get together with them all the time.”

There was a very long silence, then she said, “Why?” in the way you might go to George W. Bush and cock your head in a confused way and gesture to everything that’s happened since November of 2000 and say, “WHYYYYY?”

I ran through my stock answers (I don’t think socializing means exposing my child to bullies, classes are far too big to be effective, I want my child to love learning instead of dreading it, etc.) and settled for what in retrospect was probably the most alienating thing I could have come up with: “He’s so far ahead of the other second graders that he’d be really bored in class.”

Then she didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

Yesterday we attended a Science Centre presentation called “Meet QRIO”.

The robots are coming! See the Canadian debut of Sony’s QRIO robots – watch them walk, dance and talk during special performances. See the latest in advanced recognition, motion control, communications, information technology and artificial intelligence.

I wasn’t expecting much. I thought we’d see a robot march across the stage with stiff legs and blinking lights, clap, and go home.

Instead, these little bumbly round creatures were set on a high table, where they proceeded to walk around as naturally as human beings, kick a ball, dance, perform tai-chi and even get up after being pushed down. (At which point the entire audience cooed, “Awwwww.” The things had character. I mean, Shrek has character, but there’s a human being behind the animation.) If they’d been just a little bit bigger I’d have sincerely suspected Sony of faking the entire thing with humans inside a plastic costume.

Throughout the entire performance a toddler screamed his head off in a panicked way, pointing and staring, horrified, at the stage.

I thought, “You know, if this were a Ray Bradbury story that little kid would be the only one in the audience to see the true terror behind the adorable robot faces, the only one to see the future in which QRIOs rule the world and make humankind their slaves.”