Nora Evelyn

I wandered away from the computer earlier and, while I was gone, Nora took the opportunity to send my good friend Markus Nee her first ever Instant Message. I asked her if I could reproduce it here and she smiled and bounced up and down; I must assume this was assent.

]=l.l[i.

I'll note only a few things about her precocious mastery of the medium:

• already she is using emoticons: ]= but I wonder what she’s sad about.
• the second emoticon is somewhat more cheery: |.| I believe this is a person cheering (arms held triumphantly above the head).
• leaving the cryptic: [i. She is somehow setting herself apart from these two previous emoticons; indicating, perhaps, that she is neither sad nor jubilant but instead exists in an offset, declarative space. suggesting a zen like calm belied by the singing and arm swinging with which this brief missive was typed.
• she has chosen to eschew upper case, even in the first person singular pronoun. A common enough decision for instant messaging, but still a striking choice for a pre-toddler.

I can only assume that she was trying to communicate to Markus that her parents have been a mixture of glum and jubilant of late. Depressed that the summer is ending and the normal grind of the school year returns but invigorated by the perennial opportunity for personal growth, meeting new students, exploring new ideas, helping to shape young minds. Meanwhile she remains aloof — undisturbed by such parental vicissitudes. Mommy and Daddy may be frantically preparing her world for the coming semester, but the bean just is.

She is, as ever, truly insightful. Also? teeth 7 and 8 are in. She might be chatting about that. One hopes Squires will offer an interpretation.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under firsts, teeth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.