Something more to worry about.

I’m late on this one but need to update everyone on the world – and share my biggest failure to date.

In the outside world, oil hit -$37.63 a barrel. That’s insane. Utterly insane. It means you want a barrel of oil, someone needs to pay for you to take it!!!

Now, at first, I thought, great, free gas, but sadly, the price needs to rebound, or entire sectors of the economy will go bust, and that will be very, very bad indeed.

In Canada, a gunman killed 19 people (maybe more) yesterday. I mean, FFS, if we’re not dealing with enough crap.

In BC, the Celebration of Lights (fireworks), and Canada Day celebrations at Canada Place have both been canceled. *sigh* I’m thinking pretty much everything will be canceled, even breathing at some point.

Here, I had a brilliant idea, and like most brilliant ideas, it failed.

I thought, hey boys, let’s do up a time capsule. The first response was, “Isn’t that what you’re doing with the blog?” To which I responded, “Well, yes, but only for me. This will be for you guys so that when you’re 55, and your robotic implant is malfunctioning, you can go back and read what it was like for you.”

Neither boy seemed impressed with my logic. And I get that. At their age, I should have been writing a diary or making time capsules because now I have such a hard time remembering what it was like back in the day – like what it was ‘really like,’ not my reimagined version where I was a high school superstar and yet had to walk 20 miles to school knee-deep in cherry blossom petals.

But maybe if my parents had forced me….

So I downloaded a neat time capsule (here for adults) or (here for kids), printed it out, and got both boys to sit down with pens in their hands. My first mistake became immediately apparent. I’d read through the printout, and the questions were pretty good, but I never thought that the number of pages would matter.

Well, they did, because suddenly this seemed like homework, and not the fun kind like playing the drums for an hour until my ears throb in pain.

But after some grumbling, they began. And then, I realized my second mistake. Teenagers, at least ours, seem oblivious to the world around them. One had no idea how much milk cost, the other only wrote ‘no school’ for every question, including ‘what’s your name?”

Being me, and needing a history to be created (since we’re in a historic time!), I sat with them and went through the questions, suggesting possible avenues of thought.

Question: What’s your favorite song?

Answer: Favourite song??? (yes, with 3 outraged question marks.) How am I supposed to choose a favourite? That’s impossible! Who has a FAVOURITE song? Who?”

My Suggestion: What about a song you like right now. Doesn’t have to be a favourite, just include one that’s in your life right now.”

Answer: Can I put down 10 songs?

My Suggestion: Hell to the yes.

Now considering there were, like 1000 questions. I needed to push them a little with all of them, especially ones like ‘how are you feeling?’ because teenage boys don’t have feelings they can express in words (oh, they can express them with gloomy looks, loud music, sleeping 23 of 24 hours a day or ‘forgetting’ to do chores.)

However, after about 10 hours, we finished the sheets. Ok, maybe not 10 hours, but I think it felt like that for all 3 of us. In actual fact, it took about 40 min. Still too long, IMHO, and the answers were sometimes kinda vague despite my prompting (write a letter to your future self – ok, dear self, don’t do stuff like this), but we got it done.

Now, 40 years from now, they will have a small history of themselves and will likely look at what they wrote and think, damn, why didn’t I do more?

Which is why I’m writing this blog. This is our history, right now, a time we will remember for our entire lives, so I’ll continue to write about what’s going on, hopefully, find something funny to report, and connect with people who are going through similar experiences.

In the meantime, be safe, be healthy, and respect this new world.

(time capsule from Long Creations!)

A Canadian made one for adults and kids.