Cuts will be made. Your mom and dad will no longer be so-called DINKs (double-income, no kids), and will begin transmorphing into what your dad can only presume to be SIOKs (single-income, one kid). Which is a thoroughly unpronounceable acronym (sea ox?), but not a completely unmanageable concept.
The first cut is your dad's iPhone. By the time you're old enough to carry around a mobile phone (or whatever they think of next), iPhones will only be a fondly-remembered paragraph in the annals of telecommunications. Much like pagers are today. A land line is in order.
The next cut is the 2009 Toyota Corolla. This leaves them with your mom's 1992 Honda Civic hatchback, faded to a tomato red, but still humming with a vitality that escapes more modern vehicular constructs. When that Civic had first rolled off the assembly line, your dad was still tossing twenty-sided dice with the Band Hall Freaks and Theater Geeks. Your dad's circle of school chums had commandeered a table in the school library every lunch period and had dubbed themselves the Junior Mafia. Your dad had drawn symbols for each member. At that same time, some six-hundred miles away, your mom was on a children's theater stage yelling, "It is a puppet with no strings!" in front of a thousand other kids.
A tall stack of magazine subscriptions will be cut next. Real Simple, with its gorgeously-plated recipes and elaborate gift-wrapping ideas. The Week, with its clean-cut conglomeration of news snippets. PC Gamer, with its defensive Letters from the Editor, ever the apologists for a gaming platform that requires no apology. Details, with its challenging of masculine stereotypes and regrettable loss of both Augusten Borroughs and Michael Chabon from its payroll. Game Informer, with its embarassingly copy-pasted reviews and cowardly second opinions.
The membership to GameStop in the mall will be canceled. Your dad won't be paying for an Xbox Live membership in order to participate in multiplayer games that he wasn't playing anyway. And the meaty Combo Movie/Game Pass from Blockbuster will be reduced to the cheapest rent-by-mail option. That and evenings with your mom and dad reaching into a tile-filled Carcassonne bag, placing boardgame pieces on the dining room table.
The annual membership to Barnes & Noble has gone away and has already been replaced by a library card. There were four design choices for your mom and dad to ponder. Your mom chose the Shakespearean theme, all sepia tones and inkwell fonts. Your dad chose a pink-haired anime character, the imperitive "Imagine" printed in comic-book lettering across the card's equator.
But the Napster account stays. Your dad insists he would dry up, curl into a tiny, caterpillar-sized ball, and simply wither under a circle of vultures if he's denied access to new music every week.
More cuts to come for your mom and dad. This was only the Entertainment column of their life (barring the Toyota, of course). Better living through leaner means.
