Dad Says Welcome

The Mom went to her hometown with the first born leaving the Dad with the second born with explicit instructions, "Take care of this other boy. He's very sensitive at his age." So what does the Dad do? He goes to Blogger and types the welcome message for Mom Says Dad Says Blog. Quite irresponsible many will suppose. But this is one of the major dilemmas of parenting in the new millenium: How to take care of the kids when new technology like Blogger has turned everyone into kids.

In the early 80's, Voltes V captured the imagination of my generation. Nobody, not even our moms, could take us away from the television on Friday's 6:00 pm at Channel 7. We would sing a long the opening song (Ta ran tan tan ta ran. tn tn Voltes V! ta ran tan tan ta ran tn tn). Watch as each episode unfolds. Agonize as Voltes V gets beaten black and blue by the Boazanian robot of the week. Then jump with glee as Voltes V unleashes the laser sword and splits his adversary with the patented V cut. We begged our parents to buy every Voltes V merchandize -- stickers, book markers, magazines, lunch boxes, pens, pencils, t-shirts, toys-- on sale. We talked about Steve Big Bert Mark Little John and Jaime. We made up stories on how the series will end. How Steve will win Jaime over Mark. It was a real craze.

That will not be replaced until the internet will come to the Philippines in the late 90's. You know how it is. First, we thought the internet was meant to help us prudes get free porn. Of course, we checked celebritynudes and company until we were bored with porn we couldn't distinguish it with bread. Then, we discovered chatting -- a way to be somebody you've always wanted to be but because of reality could not possible be. We were the hunk who played like a pro on the basketball court. We were the yuppie about to get a promotion. We were the high school professor who was sensitive to people. Yeah- right. Slowly, we learned about newspapers and magazines on the web. We thought we could save on subsriptions. Hey, I'm the only guy in the Philippines who reads the New York Times daily. (Big deal) I read the review of Man in Full by Tom Wolfe before I bought my copy. (Of course, I couldn't go beyond the first chapter without guidance) Then we learned we could build our homepages. We studied Photoshop and Dreamweaver and uploaded our first homepage. It was very tricky. Fonts and text alignments are not the same with different browsers. We also have to think about speed of downloading because we are still running 28kbps down here. Then updating the homepage is like having to do the entire thing again. The homepage could not be updated without any protest from the rest of the pages. Whew! Then we discovered Blogger. It so easy. Now all we have to think about is the content. It is now the craze of web junkies. I don't know about my batchmates here in the Philippines but once they learn about this I bet you Blogger will become bigger than Voltes V.

So how do we balance parenting and the web? Mind you, I am also a lawyer and lawyering pays for the rent and the internet connection. I don't know. It's nice to be a Dad and and a kid at the same time. But there are pitfalls along the way. I could lose my job for too much blogging. My wife has threatened to annul our marriage if I don't get off the web (on the ground of psychological incapacity). Tough, huh? Tough, indeed. Let's play it by ear. Who knows?