So I had an interesting conversation with the grandparents.
My brother was in town for the holidays, he's been living in Australia for two years. After he had gotten settled in, staying with the parrents, and after giving him enough time to visit a bit (as well as get properly decompressed to the Evangelical reality that was responsible for his moving so far away in the first place), I pick him up and we drive out of town to a party at a friends house. Crash over night, then it's off to an other friend's house to play drunken Rockband, SmashBros, and Shadowrun (pen&paper game, not the Xbox heresy, don't get me started) for a few days. We don't come back till Christmas dinner, and we're actually about a half hour late for that.
I didn't hear this at the time, but apparently the grandmother had asked him, "Did you have a good time?"
Let me stop you right there.
It should be noted that I'm well aware of the chronic and debilitating level of my grandparents' affliction of what Alvin Tofler refers to as Future Shock. If you're not familiar with the concept, it is very much like culture shock, where by when you go to a foreign culture, you're bombarded by strange queues, by visual, aural, etc, and other inputs, that may be different from the ones in your own culture that may be difficult or impossible for you to understand. Some people can become deeply disoriented and upset; this is what anthropologists refer to as culture shock. What happens if a new environment comes to you, where you are, and comes to you rapidly so that you don't understand its inputs and queues? Alvin Tofler's answer is that if you can experience culture shock by relocating to an other location in space, you could have Future Shock by relocating in time. A future comes to you that you don't understand.
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