Parents Are Accidentally Funny

I would like to take this opportunity to make fun of my parents and, potentially, many of their peers, as more than a few of my friends have voiced similar observations.

Josey and I were laughing the other day about our parents' very unusual "email etiquette." We surmise their strange online behavior is due to the fact that they didn't grow up with computers. Computers arrived at a time in their lives in which their learning curves were still low, however they fell short of being completely enculturated like their children.

We have noted a distinctly robotic, cold nature in their email communications, especially when we are profoundly far from home. The further away you are, the more brief the emails are. You're lucky if you get complete sentences. I am not exaggerating.

Josey noted a particular email during her extended stay in Uruguay, which is a classic example. She sent emails mentioning how miserable she was. She was plagued by illnesses and was terribly homesick.
Mom routinely replied with comforting emails like:

"Cleaned the carpet today. One spot we can't get out. Taking grandmother to beauty shop. See you in 11 months."

Or from my time here:

"Whoops! Fed the guinea pig some of that Salmonella-laced spinach that was recalled. We put the pieces together when we found her lying dead in her cage. That explained the convulsions!"

I am not making these up. These are almost verbatim (it would take a true comic genius to out-do my mother). Though they aren't terribly satisfying at the time and often alarming, they sure are funny later. I suppose a report of the day-to-day activities at home is comforting, even if it means imagining that spot that won't come out of the carpet or your beloved guinea pig convulsing.

Periodically I'll send dad emails asking questions and what not. After waiting patiently, in a few weeks, I will invariably get an email that contains a link to pictures, the only word written being "Hi." It's usually in quotation marks, as though it is someone else saying it for him. These are especially funny. My friend's dad takes brevity a step further by placing the entire content of the email in the subject line. That takes skill.

We have come up with several explanations to this unusual chilling behavior from parents who are otherwise loving, tender people. We think maybe because they weren't raised with computers, they don't understand that there is a human being - their own flesh and blood - on the other side of the computer screen. Because the email does not come hand-written, they forget that it is not a computer, but a real person writing those woeful words. They are tricked by the cold, impersonal font. We're pretty sure if we wrote a letter on paper and scanned it in, we would get better results.

Or, perhaps the brevity of their generation is due to a clarity of thought and wisdom that comes with age; if so, our parents are far ahead of their time.

I don't want them to change though. It makes the reunion from our extended travels in strange lands, sodden with tears, strange people, and traumatizing experiences, all the sweeter.