3rd Street and Race Avenue, Phili. The bakery is called Pastry Studio. It’s light, airy, has 6 tables, all of them empty except for mine. On the largest table, where the teachers traded student gossip an hour ago, is a small pyramid of the Sunday Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Behind the counter, the bakers, four of them. They’re all facing each other, huddled ceremoniously around a constantly manipulated mass of flour, eggs, cream, and sugar. Through the speakers, James Taylor, Elliot Smith, Billie Holiday, and some Led Zeppelin.

The man with the freshly made whipped cream in his hands is in his forties, but with the youthfulness of an unhurried bachelor. Surely he is the owner, with the tranquility of someone who turns a profit, who makes just enough. Pastries are his medium. He could have been a sculptor, a painter, a jeweler or welder.

The other three, one man, two women, are in their twenties. They are young and they are beautiful. Already they’ve let go of their angst. They wink with a smile when their uncles, aunts, and parents’ friends ask what they want to do with their lives.

The four talk like others instant message: with broken, convoluted vignettes about life, music and customers. Long stretches of silence don’t derail the theme of the conversation, or the lack thereof.

I look at them, study them, constantly, and can’t help but be reminded of Matisse’s dancers.

If you’ve pictured them at all, you have probably guessed their ethnicities. You would probably be mistaken.

I try to rationalize my envy, try to find comfort in my place as the observer of their perfect harmony. Someone must be the observer no? Does beauty even exist if it’s not appreciated?

My sister, the high school graduate. At the ceremony, held in a historic organ pavilion I run by every morning, the speaker talked passionately, if not pompously, about the difference her generation had made on America. “During the 60’s,” she started, “we didn’t get everything right, but we did get the ball rolling in the right direction and it’s up to you, your generation, to decide what the future will become.” I was sitting next to my mother, clearly moved by the speaker. She identifies herself as part of the flowerpower generation (though she was 13 during the tumultuous year of ‘68). My dad was also somewhere in the audience; the closest they had physically been since their divorce, an event which must have taken place while I was out of the country because I have no recollection of it.

While my mother sat up straight with the posture and attentiveness of a Vietnam vet at a Memorial Day parade, I was slouched with typical cynicism, interlocked fingers resting on my lap. Why do they invent these concepts, these arbitrary “generations” and “inherited responsibilities” and “stages of our lives”? I wonder what the hell they talked about at my graduation. I’m lucky they even let me walk. I wonder if we celebrated with any herbal inhalation. I wonder if my sister is … I sorta hope she is …

And then I conveniently remembered that I had forgotten something. I left the boring ceremony half way through and drove to the nearest store. But as I was driving up Park Blvd, the grass green, the sky a deep gray, I felt the faintest of pressures in the inner-corners of my eyes. My throat contracted ever slightly. What?! What is going on here? It was time for me to have a very serious talk with my biology. Listen homes, there is no crying that’s gonna happen. It’s Thursday, like any other Thursday, nothing has changed, Booger hasn’t changed … she’s just like she was yesterday, will be tomorrow. But my tear ducts were not so easily convinced as they worked hard to produce a single dew drop of moisture. This must be how patriots feel when they hear national anthems.

Of course nothing had changed in a single day and maybe that’s just it. Maybe that’s why we need these rituals and demarcations, the graduation ceremonies, the so-called generations, the weddings, anniversaries, and holidays. Otherwise, we might never wake up to the fact that things change at all, that they change so much, so quickly.

As the ceremony was applauded to a close, both camps of family descended on Booger, hugging her, congratulating her, and snapping photos like mad. Mother and father maintained a delicate distance of 5 to 10 feet, which was trespassed only once with the handover of gifts.

First through the lens of my camera, and then with my very own pupils, I saw a little sister who was no longer little at all. She responded to the familiar awkwardness with the grace of a grown woman. I managed to take a picture of her with both mom and dad in the background, the first such picture in years. One thing stands out for me more than anything else: the wisdom, the emotional intelligence in her eyes is far greater than that of both her mother and father put together.

The reason I sought out this bakery in the first place was to finish a post I had started about Friday’s conference on the internet and hyperlinks. The post is in Spanish, which hasn’t been an obstacle, but my waning interest has been. I don’t know how these people do it, how they are able to discuss the role of the internet on society day in and day out. I read article after article about the consequences, good and bad, of the internet on society. And all I see is repetition, the same five or so arguments brought up over and over and over again. Mostly it has to do with people saying that the internet makes us shallower thinkers or, as one person put it on Friday, that we “mindlessly hydroplane from link to link.” Those are the critics. Then there are the righteous defenders of the net like Jeff Jarvis who also have their four or five arguments that they bring up over and over and over and over again. In fact, I think that I could do a wonderful Jeff Jarvis impersonation by now. Of course, both “camps” are “right,” a point which at least another couple thousand people have written about. And so I wonder, is there reason for me to be number 2,001? Or would both I and everyone stumbling around the internet be better off if I left the future of the media debate to those who so love debating it?