Thanksgiving: A Surreal Experience

Thanksgiving is one of those weird times when I am surrounded with family — people I have all sorts of blood and marriage relationships with — and none of them has the faintest idea what I do, or reads anything I write. Such a surreal experience. A kind of dislocation from my sense of self. I often retreat into a sort of bemused reverie, in between the times when people want me to debug their cameras, cell phones, or PCs. I am a known techie, so of course I become a technician.

“So, Stowe… What is it that you do again?” “How do you make money from blogging?” “What did you do in Tel Aviv, again?”

Strangest of all is talking to relatives working in high tech — programmers, even — who have never heard of Facebook, or Twitter, or the Kindle. Too busy watching television and arguing about sports to know about the social revolution.