TEENAGER MOMENT
12:35 p.m. on April 21, 2006


Having 2 teenagers visit is exhausting, even if they are intelligent, well-behaved and interesting individuals. My 17 year old niece, K, and my 14 year old nephew, E visited us over Spring Break. On their way here, the flight was delayed 4 hours, so they spent a total of 6 hours sitting in the Oakland airport and then a 2 hour flight. They arrived at about Midnight and then we stayed up until about 2 am in a sugar-fueled chat fest. They are not brother & sister, but actually cousins, so they got along really well.

We tried filling their time with things that would hopefully be interesting to teenagers, like going to the EMP, the music museum located in the weird shaped Frank Gehry building:

At one point we split up and Sasha took E to gameworks to play arcade video games and I took K to go shopping for a dress for her senior prom. We found a lovely number similar (but more classy) to this one:

We played a lot of games. Dice games, card games, interactive DVD games and poker. E also logged about 100 hours playing on the X-box. It being Easter weekend, we also dyed eggs and ate a truckload of chocolate. Instead of Easter baskets, I presented them with Easter Tote bags filled with cool toys (like band aids in the shape of bacon strips and fried eggs and playing cards with images of different karate poses) and more candy.

These are good kids who never caused their parents a lick of trouble (this is annoying because my brother was a hell raiser & deserves some payback). I was going to try and corrupt them, but then decided that corrupting them while they are staying in my house is not good timing.

I went to work one day to let them have an unsupervised day. I gave them the keys to my old, beat up car and then tried not to imagine them crashing into a telephone poll or meeting up with some stranger they met on Myspace.com.

On the last day, I took them to some cool shops to buy some hipster clothes. This was the first moment I felt really old and that I might actually be an embarrassment to them like my parents always mortified me in my younger years. I let them have their teenager moment & kept a safe distant while E bought his 100th knit cap with a small bill that protrudes cockeyed from his head.

All in all it was a good visit, although every bone in my body aches from saying the word �cool� 8 billion times.





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