Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

Were you forced to read Mythologies in first year university? And by 'forced to read' what I mean is, was a bit of it on the reading list for one of your arts subjects, so you read that and then you went and got yourself a copy and hoovered it up so fast that you finished it then started again at the start before the bus got to your stop? I know that you did because it's a very important part of why we are friends: this capacity that you and I both have, not just to perform a semiotic reading of a cereal box as easily as breathing, but more importantly to take it entirely for granted that reading the semiotics of cereal boxes is a worthwhile, indeed necessary endeavour, core to human existence in its deepest, richest, truest form.
It's a long time now since I spent my days only with people with the same sort of education and assumptions as myself but I'm still not really used to the change. I was very startled to be asked, the other day, in the gentlest and most nonconfrontational manner imaginable, why I insist on overanalysing everything. I didn't have a good answer for that, in fact now I think about it the answer I provided probably just demonstrated the justice of the accusation. But a little later on I happened to see someone else's facebook post about nothing much, a daft bit of ephemera, but that person's friends had played so gracefully and funnily with that bit of ephemera that i thought, well, it's really ok, these are my people (they weren't actually people I knew but you see what I mean), there's nothing too wrong with them, or with me.