Let me start by saying we had a really good time. This is the third time we've done this and it was by far the easiest and most pleasant. Still, spending that much concentrated time with an adult kid you don't see very often can be kind of intense.
I'm lucky to work in a school and be around young people all the time. I'm not completely clueless about what being younger is all about. But there were generational differences that I just find fascinating.
The biggest small thing that I noticed was turning the radio. We had a car with satellite radio, and it displayed the title and artist of every song. My daughter, somehow, can you give the dial quick twist and see every song that flashes by and pick one out. I'm a smart guy and my mind works really fast, but there's something about the skill of picking out information from these flashes that I think is a young person thing. I don't think there's anything I could do to acquire that, at least not at this stage of my life.
Not that I want to. Momentary focus, if you can call it that, is part of the whole multitasking thing that I'm still not sure is good for you. And I don't think that flashing on information without engaging with it, which I think is what's happening here, is always a good thing either. It does come in handy for picking a good song.
The other, bigger thing, is the two close, too much family thing. Parent – child relationships are inherently manipulative. The kid manipulates the parent to get what they want, a natural survival skill. And the parents manipulate the kids to get them to act in a certain way. So even though nothing bad really happened during the entire trip, by a the last day we were pretty sick of each other. We somehow managed to get in the near-argument over nothing at all.
So we decided, as we parted, that we probably would make this trip again, but that we would schedule some solo time.
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