Parenting & Family Quote by Catherine Bell

Catherine Bell’s charm here is that she refuses the high-minded justification adults are trained to perform. She doesn’t dress up consumer desire as “innovation” or “productivity”; she calls it what it is: toys. That blunt word collapses the usual hierarchy between “serious” adult tech and childish play, and the line lands because it’s both disarming and quietly strategic. If you’re a public-facing model in the late-’90s/early-2000s gadget boom, the safest way to sound enthusiastic about status objects is to pretend you’re not chasing status at all. You’re just having fun.

The list she rattles off is a cultural timestamp: motorcycles and race cars (masculine-coded adrenaline), then computers, then the Palm Pilot and “the world’s smallest phone” (the era’s fetish for miniaturization). She’s narrating a moment when tech was becoming jewelry - pocketable, show-and-tell-friendly, designed as much for identity performance as for function. Dropping brand-adjacent specifics (“Palm Pilot”) works like a wink: she’s inside the new cool, but she’s presenting it as innocent curiosity.

The subtext is gendered, too. By framing powerful machines as “toys,” she gives herself permission to like them without having to claim expertise or compete in a male-dominated language of specs and mastery. “Big little kid” is self-deprecation with teeth: it’s a way to keep the audience relaxed while she asserts a right to pleasure, novelty, and ownership. The quote doesn’t moralize consumption; it normalizes it as play, which is exactly why it feels so culturally fluent.