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.