Keeping up with change

We were scheduled to meet at what was once the Fayetteville Mall, now the Towne Center.

There are so many of these shopping mall changes to remember, I get them all confused.

I’m still working on remembering the changes in the names of countries.

You know, Burma is now Myanmar and Ceylon is ShriLanka, etc.

By the way did you know that British Honduras has been Belize for quite some time now?

My friend who was meeting me at the Towne Center is one of those who is up on just about everything.

How she does it mystifies me. And today, changes is so rapid, so often that minute to minute you have to be erasing old knowledge and replacing it with new.

For many of us there is a new category of anxiety that emanates from this rapidity of change…FOMO … or fear of missing out.

Did you know that flash mobs are becoming passé? That’s what I’ve heard.

And how do you keep up?

If you have an adolescent in your house, that person will ake sure that you are marginally current, utilizing such things as the teen eye roll and various and sundry exasperation sounds that will let you know that you are out of date, which phrase seems to be applied to anything that was in three months ago.

Those of us without a teen at home can use the internet, but even here, knowing which of the url’s we should know about is a problem.

Take for instance something called instagram. I looked it up on Google.

I found out that it’s a picture sharing application but in the process I also found that one could use it to post on something called TUMBLR. So, I looked that up, also on Google and well, I’m not sure what TUMBLR is.

I do know that I have to join and create a user name and password, that lots of people have done this and posted all kinds of stuff there.

Is there an appropriate pronoun? I’m not sure.

I would have read further but the requirement to come up with yet another user name and password is far too daunting for me.

Security experts tell us that each site should have its own unique name and password and I’ve run out of unique, let alone a reasonable method of remembering what the user name and password is for any particular site.

Take my email program, AOL.  I’ve changed my password a lot because my account keeps getting hacked.

Every time I change my password on AOL, I have to change it on my Kindle and my phone because I chose to get email on each of them. Today my phone told me that I didn’t know my email password, which AOL on my computer and Kindle accept.

The more I try to keep up, the more I seem to become passe.

I work hard at finding out what is “trending”…whatever that means, but have become weary of all the work it takes to read what’s up on so many sites, especially when I can’t remember who I told the site I am or what password I have designated.