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Aug. 9th, 2004 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI stopped in at my grandma's on the way to work (she's 92) and dropped off three perfectly-ripe peaches and a smallish jar of peach preserves. She doesn't get out much, so fresh, perfectly-ripe peaches are as much of a treat as my shining face. Peach preserves... she likes them and can take them to her table at breakfast for a spot of "my family cares more about me than all ya'll's families care about you". High drama in the old folks' home, I guess.
Anyway, in the course of making conversation, I tried to explain to her about my recent adventures in video piracy. The operative word here is 'tried'. Grandma has a fairly vague idea of what 'anime' is. I think she's got "cartoons from Japan" but she hasn't figured out that, say, Yu-Gi-Oh is the same as anime even though it's in English and on TV in the U.S. I am not sure she has a grip on a 'music video', either. I'm damn sure that she wasn't following the part where I talked about lossy vs. lossless codecs or the part where I discussed interlacing and why it was important to deinterlace source prior to editing. She didn't get why I thought the macrovision checkbox thing was so hilarious, either. (Macrovision was pitched as this big copyprotection thing for the dvd-to-vcr copying market. It's largely academic at this point, and there's a minor checkbox on an option sub-screen in one of my softwares that says "disable Macrovision". It's checked by default. I find this amusing as hell.)
*sigh* I'm starting to think that one of the horrors of getting old is that the world makes less and less sense.
I know that my grandma's personal horror for *being* old is suddenly losing it, like my cousin Josh's wife's grandma. She was fine last summer, fine at this past Christmas, and then all of a sudden, she was a drooling idiot who didn't know her own children. Grandma mentioned this as a frightening thing while I was rambling on about video editing with virtualdub. I didn't know what to say. She also mentioned it happened with one of the people at her current home, and they took him away to Donahoe (the local nursing home for the more-nearly-vegetative). Again, I didn't know what to say.
We aren't allowed to put people down when they don't know themselves or their children anymore. We are supposed to cherish and value all human life, even that which drools and shakes and doesn't know who we are anymore. What am I to tell my grandma when she says she doesn't want to be like that? Sorry, grandma, I'd kill you if I could, but the law is that we aren't allowed to do that. No, I didn't think so. Even I know that's not very reassuring.
Anyway, in the course of making conversation, I tried to explain to her about my recent adventures in video piracy. The operative word here is 'tried'. Grandma has a fairly vague idea of what 'anime' is. I think she's got "cartoons from Japan" but she hasn't figured out that, say, Yu-Gi-Oh is the same as anime even though it's in English and on TV in the U.S. I am not sure she has a grip on a 'music video', either. I'm damn sure that she wasn't following the part where I talked about lossy vs. lossless codecs or the part where I discussed interlacing and why it was important to deinterlace source prior to editing. She didn't get why I thought the macrovision checkbox thing was so hilarious, either. (Macrovision was pitched as this big copyprotection thing for the dvd-to-vcr copying market. It's largely academic at this point, and there's a minor checkbox on an option sub-screen in one of my softwares that says "disable Macrovision". It's checked by default. I find this amusing as hell.)
*sigh* I'm starting to think that one of the horrors of getting old is that the world makes less and less sense.
I know that my grandma's personal horror for *being* old is suddenly losing it, like my cousin Josh's wife's grandma. She was fine last summer, fine at this past Christmas, and then all of a sudden, she was a drooling idiot who didn't know her own children. Grandma mentioned this as a frightening thing while I was rambling on about video editing with virtualdub. I didn't know what to say. She also mentioned it happened with one of the people at her current home, and they took him away to Donahoe (the local nursing home for the more-nearly-vegetative). Again, I didn't know what to say.
We aren't allowed to put people down when they don't know themselves or their children anymore. We are supposed to cherish and value all human life, even that which drools and shakes and doesn't know who we are anymore. What am I to tell my grandma when she says she doesn't want to be like that? Sorry, grandma, I'd kill you if I could, but the law is that we aren't allowed to do that. No, I didn't think so. Even I know that's not very reassuring.
