Skyping our way to closeness

One of the advantages to having a family spread out across the west coast is that it's easier to be fond of them. The memory of how irritating a relative is fades a lot when you know they can't reach you unless you decide to pick up the phone when it rings, or they show up unannounced at your front door -- and then you always have the option of not opening it, if you're willing to accept that the peppermint of guilt that your mother will spice her conversation with, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

The downside of this is that when there is something you want to share with them, your options are mostly limited to email and to phone. The written word is all well and good, but that assumes that both parties are literate in English to a certain baseline level, and that miscommunication will be limited to the eloquence of the sending party. Also that the recipient knows what email is. The phone, on the other hand, removes the alleviating impact of body language, which can remove the sting from particularly annoying comments, for example.

And you just can't communicate a person that way. You can't send a person's quirks, his personality, his facial expressions, and his growth across a phone line like that.

So Skype. We got a Logitech plug-in webcam that just arrived today, though my laptop has a perfectly functioning one itself -- thank you, Mac! -- but this one is better. My sister made the initial discovery that Skype allowed you to do video calls, though maybe "discover" isn't the proper word, since we were peripherally aware of it, but felt the enthusiasm about video conversation that crocodiles feel towards dentists, let's say. Having Hobbes has changed that. My mother and sister are in Seattle, and Hobbes is changing a lot, and quickly. He's the newest member of a very small, rapidly aging family, and as such gets all the awed worship of the old towards the young. We brought the laptop into the bathroom with us so Mom and Sako could watch him take his bath; he cooperated (as he had no choice) with perfect cordiality, barring a rather noisy objection when it came to taking him out of the water.

The Guy's relatives and best friend are in England, and we're working on getting the former hooked up as well. The latter has already made Hobbes's acquaintance over a carefully scheduled video conference that managed to catch the hero of the hour in a surprisingly good mood. One by one, bit by bit, long distance relationships are ending up parked in our living room -- or our bathroom, in my mother's case. The miles are shortening; the barriers are dropping.

It's fascinating to think of the things that Hobbes's generation will be taking for granted, and comparing that with the things that were fresh and new when I was young. My parents were the only poor Japanese people to cross the ocean, in the '70s and '80s; the television I grew up with barely had color, and was about the size of my head. Not my grown-up head, but my 3-year old one. It was wider than it was tall, and involved cathodes and tubes. Our telephones were dialed using actual dials, and nobody asked if you had a rotary phone because there wasn't any other type. My parents owned a polaroid camera that was the size of a small dachshund, and that was high tech.

Now look at what we can do.

I may not have expected to live in Tomorrow, with all its technological wonders, but damned if I won't enjoy taking advantage of it. Hobbes, poor boy, will live in the public eye, his bathtub splashings and cranky flailings broadcast willy-nilly for the entertainment of our friends and relatives across the world -- but that's his generation, and what they'll be used to.

And honestly. Look at that hair. What parent could pass up the chance to preemptively embarrass her son?