Smile!

It is so easy to take things for granted reeeeally quickly. It’s only been in the last five years or so when just about everyone has a mobile phone. Ten years ago 99% of people had no clue what email or the internet was. Twenty years ago personal computers were just beginning to become required equipment in offices and homes (remember 5-1/4” floppy disks?). Cordless phones, automatic icemakers, test tube babies, contact lenses, crockpots, self-serve gas stations (NJ is still in the dark ages with this one), cable TV, vinyl to 8-track to cassette to compact disc… and these are things just since I’ve been alive. What about pre-Darren stuff like rock-n-roll, television, radio, indoor plumbing, jazz, the phonograph, airplanes, basketball, automobiles, railroads, baseball, telephones, electricity, eating utensils, the wheel, and fire? Goodness knows, without fire we’d all be living in Guadalajara so as to avoid temps below 70, without the wheel cruising the strip would be decidedly less cool, and without eating utensils we’d all look like my 10-month-old’s face at the end of each meal. I’m not even going to start about the world without baseball or indoor plumbing… just unfathomable. Basically, if you’re reading this, you have it pretty good. Actually, you have it GREAT. So smile! Smiling was among the very first discoveries: Adam invented the smile the minute Eve appeared.