Monday 29 January 2007

Three Steps Behind the Times

I have always been several steps behind the trend-setters.

As a kid, I didn't have a Barbie doll until all the other girls had lost interest in theirs, and even then my Barbie was a hand-me-down who came with a shabby secondhand wardrobe, including a few ill-fitting outfits that were obviously homemade. I learned how to play jacks only after the other girls had moved on to skip tape and I only managed the basic rudiments of jump-roping. As a teen, I watched mystified as my peers went into hysterics over the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (I preferred classical music and bluegrass, though wild horses wouldn't have dragged that from me). In high school, nobody invited me to the senior prom. In retrospect, this probably saved me a lot of confusion and humiliation; to be honest, I wasn't ready for senior proms until I was over the age of twenty and it was too late for me to go to them.

My tardy development has followed me right through life. I didn't get married and have kids until I was well into my thirties, and at PTA meetings, I'm resigned to being the only one in the room with an active memory of things like the Cold War, Neil Armstrong's moon landing, and hula hoops. Having spent years working in a company with no internet connection, I have only recently learned how to do things like Googling, surfing the net and sending e-mails. Last year, I finally got my driver's license, many decades after others my age learned to drive.

So it will probably come as little surprise that I only found out what a blog was a few months ago. And now, here I am with my very own, writing my first post.

In a way, being a late bloomer has made my life a lot more interesting. Those of us who are slow at catching on to trends or learning how to do things others take for granted tend to be more excited when we finally take the plunge and do what everyone else has been doing for ages. Having kids has been a real blast. Driving to the store is, for me, a Big Deal; I might as well be Columbus off to find the New World. The first time I sent an email to a friend and got one back almost immediately, I actually cheered. Technology, I have learned, is actually a lot of fun.

So is having my own blog.

I wonder: is anyone else out there a late bloomer?

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