Post Category → Humor

I am getting text messages from my mother.

My recent foray into the world of smart phones has been luminous – the kind of experience that has been so formative, it may be the entire narrative arch of my forthcoming semi-biographical* coming of age novel (which, I have concluded, is to be titled “Choosing Laundry Over Sex:  A Lifetime of Counterintuitive Productivity”).  I am certain that the story of my flip phone losing functionality in 75% of its buttons will rival Holden Caulfield’s, inciting just as many hipsters to stroke their tiny handle-bar mustaches as they contemplate the abject existence of (wo)mynkind and apply to graduate school in Art History.

My smart phone has been imperative to my being, a Maslow-ian need.  Like water, food, air, sex, and shelter that will protect me from rabid beavers in Northern Virginia, I often contemplate how I functioned without this device – a device that has allowed me realize my full potential in being an Asian taking pictures of other Asians who are taking pictures of food only to share said pictures with other Asians taking pictures of food.  How did I ever truly live without the ability to ignore people in public as I satiate my need to simultaneously watch the opening credits to the Ghostwriter series, the trailer of the 1995 adaptation of Ann M. Martin’s seminal novel The Baby Sitters Club, and videos of baby sloths getting dressed in pajamas?  OMG.

Most of all, my smart phone has allowed me to forge stronger, nearly impenetrable connections with my friends and family.  It has especially allowed my mother to inundate me with text messages, reinforcing with each neon green iChat bubble that no matter what I do, no matter how much education I get, no matter how much I accomplish, you didn’t survive the Vietnam War like I did, bitches.  You’re studying English?  Don’t you speak it already?

My inferiority complex via text messages from my mother is split into six different categories, outlined below:

Category 1:  Stop spending money.

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 Category 2:  Baby, I am too busy to talk to you.

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 Category 3:  Update your technology, you Neanderthal.

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Category 4:  I am not impressed.

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 Category 5:  I birthed you from my loins without the use of drugs.  What did you do today?

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Category 6:  OMG, LOOK AT YOUR BROTHER.

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*Editor’s Note:  By Semi-Biographical, I mean completely thinly veiled fiction that is completely autobiographical.

I am getting a smart phone.

Nothing represents the desecration of human society more than a smart phone. I see only peril in hand-held machines that can communicate, give directions in vague British accents, and allow us to become merry cartoon whales that fly atop rainbows without the aid of recreational drugs. They embody the beginnings of a cruel dystopian world where smart phones evolve into hyper intelligent phones and, eventually, into pretentious, liberal arts educated phones in New Hampshire that pontificate about whether a box of dinosaur shaped cereal featured in a Francois Truffaut film represents the extinction of meaning and feelings.

All of this being said, I am getting a smart phone. It is a decision that I made with scrupulous consideration – and by scrupulous consideration, I mean desperation and hypocrisy.

Why, you ask, has it taken an inordinate amount of time to transition to a smart phone like the rest ofSub-Saharan Africa? I have been in possession of a simple flip phone for over a year – generously lent to me after I literally washed my previous device and failed to revive it even after frantically shaking it in a bag of brown rice.* Like most things that generally suck, I managed to find proverbial and literal silver linings such as:

  • Never having anxiety about anyone stealing my phone – and feeling either greatly humored or worried about the status of mankind at the prospect of its theft.

Alas, endless discussions about pseudo Middle-Triassic reptiles have been significantly outweighed by:

  • Eliciting laughter from someone in a bar after taking out my phone – a kind of laughter I have not heard since I was a little, puffy, otter-like adolescent changing for 7th grade PE.
  • Having my co-workers hear every single letter I punch into the phone when I send a text message.
  • Being forced to put a moratorium on the phrase, “That’s so 2008. And you’re so 2000 and late.”
  • Wanting to express, via T-9, that something, someone, or some situation is “cool” only to send “book.”
  • Not reaching a significant benchmark at the age of 25 – and that is hearing Ah-ha’s “Take On Me” in the morning as my alarm ringtone.
  • Making the following flow-chart documenting the process that I must go through since losing the function of three buttons on my phone:

I am an adult solving pseudo-algebraic equations.

In January, I reached a milestone that, for many, is a cause for elation, despair, and the production of semi-racist television shows: I turned 25. Of course, on the day that I turned 25, my comprehension of the day’s significance was rather minimal – except that I had turned an age that was a multiple of five and, as we all know as fact, any number that is a multiple of five is vastly superior to multiples of two, three, or four.

Alas, I felt such a benchmark to be so trivial that I began to notate occasions that would justify the magnitude of this well-documented, important age. I have come up with five such occasions (this is intentional because, as we all know as fact, multiples of five are quite excellent) and have put them in very simple mathematical equations. The following are inequalities that prove that I have “come of age” – moments so poignant that they indicate my rise in maturation’s cruel, cruel echelon:

  • Using the last five dollars in your possession to purchase beer. < Using the last five dollars in your possession to purchase tampons.
  • Sleeping on a bed with pillow cases of a solid color – a deep, almost brooding violet that supposedly* reflects my disposition on life. > Sleeping on a bed with pillow cases containing cartoon monkeys swinging through a vaguely Hawaiian backdrop as they clutch coconuts – a pattern that supposedly reflects my penchant for…cartoon monkeys swinging through a vaguely Hawaiian backdrop as they clutch coconuts.
  • Wearing a prom dress to a wedding you are attending. < Wearing a Bridesmaid dress from a wedding to a prom that you are chaperoning.
  • Sipping a “Natural” Light in the basement of a dilapidated row house that smells distinctly of urine, marijuana, and assorted Kraft products as I ironically berate over-privileged, private college educated students. < Sipping a Tecate at a dive bar that smells distinctly of urine, marijuana, and locally, organically grown onions as I ironically berate hipsters in a pair of jeans that are, like, really, really (dangerously) tight.

*Editor’s Note: ”Supposedly” means “absolutely not”.