MindSpinner

Cell phones are for mature folk who can manage their time and who pay attention to what things cost - minutes, ring tones, downloads, etc.

On the other hand, cell phones are trouble for immature teens who think that conversations are more important than getting homework done or getting enough sleep. (Precociously mature teenagers do, of course, exist, thirty-five year olds masquerading as fifteen year olds. I’ve met them in my classes. I am not biologically related to them.)

There are now kiddie phones (the Firefly, the Tic Talk) for children and tweens that are somewhat too limited and juvenile for teenagers. Fact is, there needs to be a phone somewhere between the phone you give your ten-year-old and the phone you buy yourself when you pay the bills.

This is what it looks like:

• The programming of the phone is handled through a secure Web site accessed only by the adults in the household. This Web site has an easy-to-use interface and set-up wizards.
• The time on the phone is set by satellite, not the user.
• The location of this GPS phone can be tracked.
• The phone can be programmed by parents with a basic set of emergency numbers and family contacts. This basic set of family/emergence numbers is always enabled and minutes are unlimited.
• Teens can program additional numbers into the phone and parents can set an “allowance” of “friends minutes,” enabling teens to make calls to and receive calls from phones other than the family/emergency numbers.
• Parents determine at what times of day “friends minutes” can be used – not during school time, not in the middle of the night. At those designated times, the phone cannot make or receive calls except those to and from designated family/emergency numbers. No more cute girls calling at 1:00 a.m. on school nights.
• Parents may further limit the functionality of the phone to the family/emergency numbers for incoming and outgoing calls as the need arises such that “friends minutes” are construed as a privilege to be earned (and a privilege that can be lost).
• At the Web site, parents set family/emergency numbers, phone use schedules, an allowance of friends minutes (to which reward minutes may be added), and phone features available to the user.
• Three phone use configurations would be useful: standard, reward (additional minutes, expanded call times, & other privileges, as selected) and grounded. When the grounded configuration is in effect, the teen is limited to family/emergency numbers, of course.

Somebody build this, and we parents will buy. Oh, and it has to look cool (never childish) and come with face plates and maybe play MP3s.

After a thirty year haitus in general barefootedness, I would like to report that snow under bare feet is, as expected, bracingly icy - pleasantly stimulating like a cold pop can against your cheek - but also feathery soft. I had forgotten about feathery soft.

I just got back at 10:40 p.m. from a few hours’ work at school. (Progress reports are to be printed in the morning.)

The eMac was not blaring songs that amount to screaming accompanied by a beat that makes the whole house throb. Its screen was dark and quiet. The TVs were off. The animals were hungry and ready to be fed, but the teenagers were nowhere to be found - not in the living room, not in the kitchen foraging for food, not on the phone.

Indeed, they were both already in bed, lights out. Really. I checked to be sure they were actually there.

Utterly bizarre.

It could be a plague.

We will only ever experience joy to the degree that we are willing to risk pain. When I was a girl, I began to think of this principle of living as walking through life barefoot. I walked barefoot then as much as I could, and that was a conscious philosophical choice. The grass under the oaks was cool and soft; the pavement of the road was too hot to bear in summer - except on the white line - even if I ran or hopped. I knew the softness of the cool grass because I also knew the gravel that littered the driveway and how to walk gingerly there, but never gingerly enough. I knew, from painful experience, to stay away from the chestnut trees that grew along the edge of the garden. I knew the squish of mud between my toes down at the lake, and, yes, my feet got very dirty. Sometimes I even ran barefoot across a snowy yard to the mail box and back again in winter so I’d know what that felt like, too.

It’s snowing out today. Flakes fall, swirling, outside the cresent window. I haven’t run barefooted in snow to the mailbox and back in some 30 years. Might be about time. Just because. But, oh, I do have cold feet these days. I’ll just … um … run a hot bath first.

I prefer George W. Bush as a text file rather than a voice and a face, if I must attend to him at all (and I must). Given a busy week, I’m just now getting around to rereading the State of the Union address carefully. Having found a transcript at the Washington Post on Wednesday, I make one more adjustment for this journey into Dubya-speak. The text is punctuated with the notation (APPLAUSE). Having copied the speech into a Word document, I do a quick “Find” and replace 66 occurrences of (APPLAUSE) with nothing at all. Maybe I’ll add some audience response of my own - i.e. (GAG) - according to the inspiration of the moment. I rue the fact that I have no time to get a t-shirt printed especially for this reading. It would be emblazoned with a score sheet of senseless American deaths. The 911 terrorists would be a few hundred ahead at 2752 American deaths incurred on September 11, 2001, but George Bush, with 2249 American deaths to date in his wrong-headed Iraq war, will no doubt close the gap in 2006 (DEEP SADNESS). I’d have one humongous caveat to offer about the t-shirt, though, and that is this: Iraqi lives matter, too.

I need to know more than I know about the insurgency in Iraq. Any answers to the conundrum of conflict have to lie in understanding the people whose anger and agenda drive them to violence. I do know that it’s not one insurgency or three; acts of resistance and of terrorism are committed by differently motivated people and factions. I need to know which elements of the insurgency see a satisfactory resolution forthcoming when American soldiers leave Iraq to govern itself, and which elements (of what strength) would see an opportunity, upon our withdrawal, of seizing power where power can be seized and directing the resources of a nation with the potential for considerable wealth, against their enemies.

In a Salon.com op-ed piece entitled “Only One Option, ” Joe Conason anatomizes the resistance in Iraq and the part we might play in defusing it if we had leadership wiser than we do. The whole is worth reading, but I’ll excerpt here the section regarding little publicized, ongoing talks with insurgent groups.

The U.S. media has devoted little space to those talks, but the Washington Post and the British press have occasionally reported on them. Last summer, the Sunday Times of London revealed that American officers had participated in two meetings with insurgent leaders in a villa north of Baghdad. Among those in attendance were representatives of the Ansar al-Sunna army, the group responsible for the atrocious mess hall bombing at the U.S. base near Mosul, Iraq, in December 2004. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid both confirmed that those talks had taken place — and that many more meetings had occurred in hopes of “splitting” the insurgency.

This week, news of peace talks with the insurgents surfaced again. The United Nations news service, IRIN, reported that Sunni politicians claimed to be making progress in discussions with insurgent leaders, while confronting an obstacle that remains beyond their control. “For the last month we’ve been trying to convince militias to put down their guns until they see whether or not the new government can bring positive results,” said Adnan al-Dulaimi, one of the leaders of the Iraqi Accord Front, a Sunni Islamist coalition that supports participation in the political process. According to him, the weekly meetings between his party and the insurgents have encouraged hope for an eventual cease-fire.

“We’ve made good progress,” he said. “But the presence of foreign troops could cause this accord to fail at any time.” That is hardly surprising, since recent polls indicate that about 80 percent of Iraqis want Washington and Baghdad to set a date for when the occupation will end.

The IRIN article quoted a man known as Abu Omar, identified as a leader of the insurgent Muhammad army in Anbar province. He confirmed that his group and several others had approved a possible cease-fire, but vowed: “We will quit fighting only if the U.S. military gives us a date for its withdrawal.”

On our present course, we generate enemies faster than we can contain them. If it’s peace we’re after and an independent Iraq, we’ll weigh our alternatives with an eye toward timely withdrawal. If it’s long-term control of Iraqi oil we’re after, then we are assuredly stuck.

With all this muddling about in my head, I’m back to the speech, wearing my imaginary t-shirt and fortified with my morning caffeine in the form of a Coke.