This has led to a fairly consuming bemusement about all the ways people communicate these days - and THAT has led to the revelation (late I'm sure) that breaking up is wayyyyyyyyyyy harder to do now than it was 15 or 20 years ago.
If all you had back in yesteryear was a phone number (of a communal phone) and an address, all you had to do was:
1) Forget a 10 digit number (or a seven digit number if you live in Rhode Island). This is easily accomplished via excessive alcohol, a baseball bat smacking of negative reinforcement, and a new 10 digit number to memorize. We only have room for 1, you know. 1 number and 50 million memories - so choose wisely. And
2) Always go out of your way to avoid a certain bar, street, street corner, restaurant, grocery store, school, business, re-bound, movie theater, strip club or section of town.
That seems EASY compared to what it takes to break up in this gilded age of integrated technology and hurried, incessant communication.
For amusement and therapy (mostly amusement, therapy would involve an opinion other than my own...): How do we communicate these days and what kind of measures would one have to go through to STOP communicating (ie, break up)? It's not as easy as it sounds!!!!
Like chatter and silence there is:
1) Gchat and the 'block and burn' (blocking them as a contact and searching your inbox and deleting all to/from emails/gchats).
2) Facebook/myspace/OkCupid/Twitter/Gaming Forums and the ultimate 'de-friending'.
3) Blackberry messenger and the 'remove contact' functionality. (parallel feature for iphone would be... non-existent? What a simple life, you lucky bastards!)
4) Phones in general and deleting whole contact entries. (choke)
5) AIM/Yahoo/GoogleTalk instant messaging and the thwarting thereof.
6) Shared email account/Google-calendar/Pandora de-privilege-ing.
7) Virtual business cards in Outlook and the recycle bin.
8) Family members/spouses/mutual (but really not-so-mutual) friend removal from all aforementioned communication avenues.
9) Pictures you've saved off facebook/myspace/google stalks and, again, the recycle bin.
10) EMPTYING YOUR RECYCLE BIN.
11) No. Really. EMPTY YOUR FUCKING RECYCLING BIN. (Do this via cmd for bonus points.)
12) Blogs/websites and bookmark deleting (or, a more amusing alternative: changing bookmarks to link to sites you loathe - Perez, perhaps? - a negative association trick. You're welcome.)
13) The memory of them and investing in that flashy-light-thingy from Men In Black
14) The memory of them and, realistically, coaxing your best friend venture-capitalist to invest in that flashy-light-thingy from Men In Black.
15) And, finally, THE MEMORY OF THEM and performing an at-your-desk lobotomy for the following reasons:
a) To remove the images of them from the central viewing center of your brain so you don't flash through your own personal slide show every time you try to get some sleep (and fail).
b) To forget the smell of their skin (awwwwwww) and replace it with the smell of burning/cauterized flesh from the lobotomy. (yay!!!!!!)
c) To extract the set of neurons inducing that palpable excitement you get from new emails, new txt messages, new bbms, new instant messages, new gchats, new friend requests, new blog comments, and any/all carrier pigeon scrolls you may receive in the next 288 million seconds.
PHEW.
It seems pretty complicated compared to yesteryear and you have to wonder if we're really any better off with all this communication... Does 17 hundred million ways to communicate make for better relationships? Does it make for faster relationships as we burn through our work day pinging and bbming and txting and gchatting and emailing and *gasp* calling the person we're dating/loving/chasing/marrying? Are we getting to know people that much faster? Are we finding flaws sooner and before we've invested enough 'time' in them to appreciate them despite their flaws? Why do we measure 'time' in gregorian anymore!? Shouldn't "so how long have you been dating?" really be "So how many gigs of communication have you swapped so far?" And "So what's your daily communication frequency/mix look like?"
"Ohhh, wow, simultaneous facebook wall-posting and txt-jesting? The response time on the emails are approaching gchat speed? It must be serious!!"
If it's this hard to DATE/LOVE/CHASE/MARRY someone in this grand old age of FRENETICS, how can it not be exponentially harder to BREAK UP, too?!?!! A number? An ADDRESS? We're getting clocked on words-per-minute and turn around time while maintaining a witticism-quota and depth-despite-a-two-dimensional-screen expectation to boot - JUST TO BREAK UP!?!?! Just to spend HALF THE TIME you WERE pinging making sure you CAN'T PING or get PINGED?!?! WHAT A FUCKING CROCK OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY!!!!!!
(pant pant pant)
And then you remember the flashy-light-thingy. Your grandparents DEFINITELY didn't have the iron clad, hollywood promise of the flashy-light-thingy. Which is probably why you're around to read this blog today. Which, CLEARLY, is a good thing. (Yay!! modern technology!)
Unless, of course, you're NOT supposed to be reading this blog as per communication device disablement rule #12, to which I say... call me? (heart)
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1 comment:
Don't forget removing the hair from the shower hair catcher.
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