I've been gone a while! Just got back from an amazing 23-day trip around the Americas. Seattle, San Fran, Carmel, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, New York, LA and Hawaii... like I said, amazing!!

And now back to real life. I was reading the news thismorning and saw this article about a new craze in the US called "sexting", whereby teens send each other pics of themselves semi-naked or topless, etc. Apparently, everyone's doing it; a study found that around 1 in 5 students "sext". When I was in high school, we used to pass around hand-written notes. How quaint, right?!

So what scares me is that these kids don't fully grasp the consequences of what they're doing. What if you're sending these naked pics around to your mates and cute boys, and they somehow wind up online. And the next year you graduate, and you're applying for a job at a childcare centre or an internship at a serious news magazine, and they do what future employers do: they google you. Some lawyers even say employers are negligent if they don't google you! So they view your saucy pics, and your application is stone-walled.

(Unless you live in Finland. There, they've banned employers from googling potential applicants. How do they monitor that?!)

But that's not even considering the legal side of a 15 year old sending naked pics to a 17 year old guy. He's of legal age; she's not. WTF happens then?!

Too confusing. I'm so glad I grew up in the 80s. It was outrageous. Truly, truly, truly outrageous.