My mom thinks I am the Palo Alto Institute of Technology

The last time my father was here in the U. S. and A., the week of Big Game (I made him come watch me in one of my last performances on the field since he had never done so), he also brought along a laptop that he bought for my mother. I checked it out for them and it's a very impressive piece of hardware - FAR more powerful than anything my mother will ever need: 4GB RAM, 120GB HD, four USB 2.0 ports, Windows Vista, Bluetooth integrated, pretty good graphics card/accelerator, all that jazz...except that it's an Acer laptop, which means it will probably break within a year and she will freak out and call me for tech support and I won't be able to help her.

(Also, my father claimed that he got it for a jaw-dropping $450 USD. Either I was raised by a liar or he's in cahoots with some very dangerous people in Taiwan.)

The other important thing my father purchased along with this brand spankin' new machine is a Chinese freehand writing accessory. You can input Chinese characters by writing on this little pad with a stylus; he bought it so my mother can write emails in Chinese.

Unfortunately, therein lay the root of the problem. She didn't know how to use email. Or a mouse, for that matter.

So yesterday I gave my first in a series of one-on-one lectures on the basics of computing. Lesson One: The Mouse took a solid fifteen minutes, and in the end, my mother decided that she simply won't mess with Right Click. She spent a solid 45 seconds moving the mouse back and forth over a site link so that it kept turning from an arrow to "the little cute finger" and vice versa. Forty-five seconds that I could have spent doing something far more valuable, like eating a cheeseburger or scratching the inside of my ear deeply with a rusty knife to keep myself sane.


Source giantbomb

Lesson Two: Firefox Basics actually took ME a little bit longer to figure out because she wanted the Chinese version installed, and since I have the Chinese reading competency level of a fifth grader, I had to grab the Chinese-English dictionary to figure out what the hell was going on. But eventually I helped my mother set up some bookmarks so that she could quickly and easily visit some of her favorite sites: SinaNet (a Chinese news portal), Gmail, and, much to my surprise, YouTube.

You know those little lessons that life teaches you but you don't really want to learn? This was one of them. Much in the very same manner that I use YouTube to kill time and watch mind-numbingly entertaining videos of cats chasing laser points or babies getting kicked in the face, my mother uses YouTube to watch Korean and Chinese soaps. NONSTOP. This is all thanks to my sister who introduced the wonderful technorogy of YouTube to my mom, a bored housewife in her mid-60's who spends most of her day alone, so that she would have something to do in her spare time instead of bugging my sister while she's at work. Two birds with one stone in her eyes, I guess.

I wonder if this is a gateway for my mom to eventually start watching videos of retarded cats chasing laser points or babies getting kicked in the face, like me. (Answer: probably not. I feel like she's more of a retarded-babies-chasing-laser-points or kitties-getting-kicked-in-face videos type.)

And finally, Lesson Three: The Greatest Inventions in the History of the Universe Part I, cross-listed under Gmail Basics (Part II is Internet Pornography, a class that I'm 98% sure my mom isn't too interested in). I showed her the basics and let her try sending a test email, all on her own. And she did it without blowing anything up! My baby's all grown up and off to save the world.

Moral of the story: my mom needs to stay away from technology. And I need to stay away from my mom.

GO BEARS BEAT THUG U