"Director Gadget"

One of the certainties of our current world is technology. There are always new gizmos and gadgets. There are iPods and laptops and DVDs and CDs and PSPs and mp3s and cell phones and plasma screens and...the list just continues to grow. In this world there are always new technologies. And the way we relate to them has a huge effect on the environment. I am possibly the least tech-savvy teen in North America. I literally can't turn on my brother's computer. Of course, that may be because my brother built the computer himself using parts from several salvaged computers with three separate operating systems--but still, I should at least be able to turn it on. I'm also one of those people who believes talking to technological devices will actually make them obey me. Mom: "Who are you talking to, Emma? It's six in the morning!" Me: "Er, the toaster." Yet even with my high level of incompetence, I still manage to have my guilty technological pleasures. My brother and I actually have a deal about certain mindless TV series that we like to borrow from the library. I won't make fun of his shows, and he won't make fun of mine. Moderation in everything, right? As long as it really is moderation. My latest technological "guilty pleasure" has been playing Spider solitaire on my computer. Random, I know. But because I spend so much time writing on the computer, I often feel as if I deserve a little break. And I spend most of those breaks playing this game. But I've realized recently that what I meant by "little" isn't actually so little. Let's do a bit of arithmetic. I usually let myself play two or three games of Spider after I finish a page of writing. Each game takes about ten minutes.

During summer vacation, I've been writing about five days a week--with a goal of writing seven pages a day. I have about 10 weeks when I'll be free to write this summer vacation. So that's 50 writing days times seven pages per day--350 pages. But if I play just two or three little games after every page, that's between 700 and 1,050 games of Spider solitaire. Multiply that by 10 minutes per game and divide by 60 minutes in each hour...Okay, if you've been zoning out until now, here's where you should focus back in again. Because the bottom line is that I'll play between 116.67 and 175 hours of a mindless computer game just this summer vacation. It's like I've spent a full week of my vacation--five to seven complete 24-hour days--doing nothing but playing this little game! Imagine what else I could do with that time. Maybe you don't play Spider, but you might be surprised how much of your life gets taken up by similar random things--and in our day, those things often involve staring at a video screen. Take TV commercials as an example. By the time the average American turns 20, he or she will have seen more than a million commercials. Most Americans spend a full year of their lives watching television ads. Not TV in general: just commercials. For some reason, a year of my life doesn't feel like a little time spent watching what advertisers tell me I need--it seems like a lot more time than I want to spend.

** Taken from "It's Easy Being Green" by Emma Sleeth, copyright 2008 Youth Specialties/Zondervan. Used by permission.