Test-Tube Tinto Shreds a Gnarly Half-Pipe

Citizens of the Global Village: prepare to meet your future!

For 12-year-old Tinto has been born and raised in the modern American southwest, the locale of much of the urban, business and economic growth of the last several decades, and the nexus of much of the nation’s population growth as well.

Also, Tinto is the blended polyglot product of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, frothy multi-cultural frappe. Tinto’s ‘birth mother’, an Irish Guatemalan immigrant and naturalized U. S. citizen, had the child via surrogacy, through an Hispano-Greek Stanford PhD candidate, using the donated sperm of a Native American triathlete psychoanalyst with 17 published treatises to his credit. The kid’s ‘birth father’ — a German Protestant of partial Swiss and partial Austrian heritage, converted to Judaism in his college years, but agreed early on, at his wife’s urging, to raise Tinto as a Shinto.

And, with godparents of Italian, Sri Lankan, Polish and Aboriginal descent, Tinto has been assured of a very well rounded view of race, culture, faith, nationality, ethnicity and language. In fact, educators believe it is Tinto’s exceptionally broad familiar heritage that has enabled the child to don new languages as quickly as a clean pair of jeans; at last count, Tinto had mastered at least 14 of them, including the exceedingly difficult tongues of Urdu, Ashanti, Mandarin, Portuguese and Serbo-Croatian.

Furthermore, Tinto arrived long after the development of ubiquitous computers, and after the birth and burgeoning of the internet. A child that googles, skypes, tweets, searches, GPSs, multitasks and messages as readily as you or I breathe, Tinto is assuredly a child of tomorrow.

But Tinto is truly indicative of our planet’s impending future in yet another dimension, for Tinto is also a GMO — that is, a genetically modified organism. (Please, do not ever refer to her as ‘genetically engineered’. That terminology is considered racist . . . . er, specist, I guess . . . denigrating and pejorative.) The various theorists, researchers, futurists, geneticists, embryologists, lab technicians and fertilization specialists involved in Tinto’s conception believe that the conditions of her remarkably unique inception have directly resulted in Tinto’s distinctive cranial conformation, as well as her Medusa-like dreads of teeming sentient tube-worms. Recent neuroanalysis, MRIs, CAT scans and psych tests suggest that these very features are key components of Tinto’s amazing mental skills and abilities.

Tinto is also a typical tweenager — rebellious and individualistic and headstrong. Despite her parents’ aspirations for her to become a future American Poet Laureate, Tinto is now leaning toward a career in materials science engineering or nanotechnology. Mom’s got her heart set on a future degree from Stanford; Tinto’s thinking it will more likely be from Harvard or Oxford (or both). And though her extended family certainly gleans great satisfaction from the young lady’s mastering of the odd Mozart concerto on piano, for example, Tinto finds her greatest joy airborne above the half-pipe, dreads flying and body horizontal.

So again I say: Citizens of the Global Village: prepare to meet your future: unpredictable and uncontrollable and at times unnerving, but certainly exciting!