You give me fever

We've been a bit poorly around here. Hudson awakened with his first ever fever Wednesday morning, which, even though I'll grudgingly admit it's epidemiologically impossible, I've been secretly blaming on the little girl from the museum.
Harper has been practicing a new word today:
"Hudson is chasing me FOREVER!"
"Hudson is touching my hand FOREVER!"
It's not, as you might think, some exalted understanding of the eternal. I don't think she even means it to relate to the length of time he's doing something. She uses it for emphasis, and it is emphatically not a good thing that Hudson is doing, as far as she is concerned. Hudson is the gadfly and she is Socrates. Or maybe she is the ass. I can't remember the story exactly. Oh, wait. I think Socrates was the gadfly and society was the ass. Yes, I believe that's it.
Which makes for an effective segue. Tuesday night on PBS I caught part of a Frontline that dealt with kids and the cyberworld. It was terrifying, but not in the way you might think. The kids are mostly savvy to the on-line predators who have gotten most of the media attention when it comes to this issue. The thing that I found most shocking was the massive amounts of time the kids being profiled spent on-line or texting or playing video games. I think one of the most effective scenes showed these girls, all high school freshmen, who, as soon as the bell rang at the end of the school day, huddled together and, instead of having conversations, whipped out their phones and Blackberries and started feverishly texting. They then went home and, among other disturbing things, took suggestive pictures of themselves to post on their MySpace page. The parents were, for the most part, completely oblivious to what their kids were doing with all of the technology they had themselves provided. There was one mother who, you could tell, was really trying to reign it in. They had their only computer in the kitchen where she could, ostensibly, monitor what the kids were doing on-line. But through interviews with her kids (she had 4 teenagers) it was revealed that they were dodging and deceiving equally as much as the kids whose parents weren't so conscientious. So. What now? Do we aspire to live off the land and simplify? I definitely like the idea of kids who are too busy milking cows to care about their MySpace page. We'll explore that in another post. On another note, it is SO annoying to me when people in academia (who tend to hold center stage on anything PBS produces) become Experts on things like "teen behavior." They approach it like it's some sort of academic exercise where if they just learn the lingo and the patterns, they can make all of these sweeping proclamations and generalizations. You can just picture them doing their dissertation research so they can get their PhD. in Sociology or something and they think it's all very Important and Groundbreaking to spend hours interviewing teenage girls about things like Why They Are Wearing Trampy Clothes Even After Women's Lib Has Set Them Free. AND they always find a way to place primary blame on the government or corporations--NEVER on the kids themselves or their parents. Certainly never on the innate sinfulness of man. Whew. That's officially a rant.
Let's end on a lighter note. I watched "Once" last night. It fit right into my Month of Irish Melancholy. But there was something ebullient as well. I enjoyed myself. I even watched the extra stuff on the dvd and I rarely do that.