School dances, iPods, and me in the middle

It wasn’t exactly synchronicity as much as coincidence that landed me early last month with the two duties on the same weekend: chaperoning my first middle school dance for my 12-year-old son and his peers, and teaching my 71-year-old mother to use her new iPod.

“Which one will be more likely to make me run screaming from the room?” I mused on Facebook. And this, to my husband: “If I wake up Monday morning with a head of gray hair, you’ll know it was one or the other: either the dance or the iPod tutorial session.”

The staff member from the recreation department who provided an orientation to the chaperones fifteen minutes before the dance began made it clear that our main duty was to make our presence known. We wouldn’t be administering breathalyzer tests or peering under stall doors in the bathrooms, he assured us: any potential trouble of the sort that these particular middle schoolers are likely to get into tends to dissipate instantly when they see an adult approaching. “If you see kids scatter when you walk up, you’re doing your job right,” he advised us.

He also noted we had been wise to choose a winter month to fulfill our yearly chaperoning obligation. In the warmer months, he said, chaperones have to monitor the exterior doors because kids tend to try to slip in and out of the building during the dance, which is against the rules; but on a January night with temperatures in the teens, he didn’t expect this to be a problem. And as soon as the kids started arriving, I could see why he was so sure of this: boys and girls alike were dressed as if they were headed to the beach, with t-shirts, tank tops, camisoles and spaghetti straps. Had any succumbed to the temptation to slip outside, the punishment would have been dealt by Mother Nature, not by a chaperone, in the form of probable frostbite.

One significant difference between dances when I was their age and now is the recognition that kids who don’t feel comfortable dancing should still have a reason to go. So now, two activity rooms are open side-by-side: one for dancing and the other for games of basketball, ping-pong and Wii. In addition, there are tables in the hallway for chess players. Chess at a school dance? Something for everyone, indeed.

But in the course of the evening, I also discovered that this particular setup gives a whole new raison d’etre to middle school dances. Far more than any time spent dancing in Room A or playing basketball in Room B, the majority of the kids spent their time trotting up and down the hallway to see what was going on wherever they currently were not. Back and forth, from one room to the other, with the occasional bathroom stop for the girls (in groups of no fewer than five or six, naturally): the main activity of the night could most accurately be summed up as Seeing Who Is Where. No doubt it’s clear at that age that whichever of the two rooms you’re in, there’s always the strong possibility that you’re missing out on something much more interesting in the opposite room.

The next morning, my ears still buzzing slightly, I headed to my parents’ house to give my mother the first of what would eventually become a dozen or more (and counting) lessons in using her iPod.

I give her credit for effort. I imagine it can’t be easy to learn this kind of technology when you’re in your 70’s. So far, we’ve gotten as far as turning on the iPod and switching from one album to the next. Yes we still have a lot of ground to cover, but Mom is sticking with it, and she turned out to be better than I am at navigating the iTunes store.

I’m proud of my son for having the self-assurance to dance within view of his chaperoning mom, and I’m proud of my mother for approaching new technology with verve, if not a whole lot of comprehension. I like to think these experiences make me part of a sandwich generation. From dances for pre-teens to iPods for senior citizens, we all – myself included – seem to be reaching new stages every day, and I feel lucky to be in the middle, assigned the challenging and ever-intriguing role of facilitator.

Oh, the empowerment: serving as my own helpdesk

Being able to ask for help when you need it is a vital life skill in itself, but being able to manage on your own sometimes feels great too, as I discovered this week.

I am not a technical person. I rely on my husband to set up and maintain my computer system, my printer, my e-mail. When there’s a problem, I plead for help, but sometimes I’m like the shoemaker’s child who goes barefoot. Sometimes my husband is just too busy with the two factions whose tech support problems receive higher priority than mine – his clients and my parents – to help me in a timely fashion.

As this week began, I had reached the end of my rope with two ongoing technical problems: one with my iPod Nano and one with my Microsoft Outlook. Refreshed after a nearly work-free weekend, I launched into the new week resolved to solve these two glitches.

I attacked the iPod issue first. The problem was that I like to listen to podcasts while running. Every week I download about a dozen new podcasts from NPR, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. But I couldn’t get them to play sequentially. I’d set one podcast to play as I started my run, and when that one ended, a new one wouldn’t start without me manually selecting and clicking on it. The reason selecting and clicking was undesirable was that any buttons I press on my iPod while I’m running will interfere with the function of my NikePlus, which measures my distance, mileage and speed.

Yes, it’s complicated, arcane and frivolous as complaints go, but runners get set in their ways, and I want both: a complete mileage readout and the ability to listen to more than one podcast if the first one happened to end while I was still out running. I knew the answer was to put the podcasts in a playlist, and I’d gotten that far, but the playlist wouldn’t copy from my iTunes library into my iPod.

I tried to think outside the box. (Thinking outside the box is always preferable to being on hold with tech support.) Was I doing something wrong in making my playlist, or was the problem putting podcasts on a playlist? As a control, I realized, I had to try to make a playlist without podcasts, a conventional playlist of music.

I don’t keep any music at all on my iPod; I use it only for podcasts, but my daughter had downloaded all her favorite American Idol tunes onto my computer, so I randomly chose three songs to put in my playlist and synched. It worked – the playlist copied. Then I tried adding podcasts into the playlist and synched. Again, success. I took the three songs out and left the podcasts in. Synched. Nothing. The playlist was gone from my iPod. I put one song back in with the six podcasta and synched. It returned, a fully functioning playlist.

So – there was my answer. It takes a village to raise a child; it takes a song to make a playlist. I don’t know why, but with as little as one song, a playlist can include any number of podcasts; with no songs, a playlist won’t work. So all I had to do was be willing to include one American Idol tune in my cerebral mix, which is why my playlist now comprises Terry Gross interviewing an economist from the Bush administration, Susan Orlean discussing her latest New Yorker article, the podcast of the New York Times book review and Adam Lambert covering Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild. The combination made for a seamless half-hour of running this afternoon. I was thrilled with my proactivity in finally taking the time to think through the problem, figure out a solution, and test the results.

Which left the second problem I was determined to solve: my Microsoft Outlook. For some reason, for the past week I’ve been able to receive mail through Outlook but not send it. On the one hand, this seemed symbolic: it was like a cosmic message that I needed to listen more and talk less. But there were some messages I really did need to send, and they kept getting stuck in my outbox. If I wanted to send e-mails, I had to go through the website version of my email each time, which within the incredibly cosseted world of e-mail seemed like a big extra hassle, though I kept reminding myself that fifteen years ago, when I was still using a dial-up connection that generally reached a busy signal, it wouldn’t have seemed so difficult.

For the first two days of the week, I exchanged emails with our domain provider. Their tech support staff was helpful, but in the end they couldn’t solve it; they said it was a problem on our internet service provider’s end. I took it up this morning with our ISP. I started with their website: found the internet section, found the e-mail section, and to my surprise, found myself staring at a link that stated my problem exactly: can’t send mail through Outlook. I clicked and discovered a whole page of text dedicated to my problem. It turned out this wasn’t mysterious at all: my ISP knew it was happening and knew why it was happening. More important, they knew how to fix it – and how to explain the fix to someone as nontechnical as me. One step at a time, I followed the directions, repaired my Outlook, and could once again send e-mail.

So with the week only halfway done, I had reached two goals, solved two frustrating problems, and done it myself, which hardly ever happens with technical concerns. I hadn’t done any significant writing or published any articles this week, but I’d gone to bat for myself as my own tech support, and I was psyched. Problem solved. Empowerment achieved. What a great feeling.