Today Lydia stepped quietly into my awareness from some mystical place over my right shoulder. I was sitting at my desk and pondering life, and the world had kind of drifted out of focus except for a small sphere containing myself and a chair, and now a pink blur materialized next to me, and I smiled, blinked twice, and then looked down at her.

She had a question in her eye, so I waited as it flickered and smoldered for a moment before finally taking light. “Did you ever record YouTube shows when you were my age?” she asked.

I shook my head slowly. “No. That wasn’t possible back then. There wasn’t such a thing as YouTube.”

Her eyebrows shot up and she frowned, “So, it wasn’t invented yet or something?”

“Right.” I nodded. “And there wasn’t anything to invent it on. When I was your age there wasn’t even an internet.”

She gasped and nearly fell down. “You didn’t have computers?”

“No… No, I was older than you are now when we first got a computer. But it wasn’t something you would have recognized as a computer. It was a lot… different.”

She tilted her head, “But… But how did you,” she sputtered. “How did you do…” she looked at the ceiling and sorted a list of activities in her mind, “How did you do ANYTHING?”

I laughed. “ANYTHING?” I put my arms around her shoulders. “Little girl we did EVERYTHING! We did all of the everything that little girls like you don’t even know about, because you are too busy doing ANYTHING, like dreaming about recording YouTube shows.”

She turned and suddenly ran back up the stairs, and I was once again left pondering life, and the absurdity of the chaos we have created.