First Grade

-
“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
Post a Comment

Rage Against Emoticon

-
This is essentially a rant. People are forgetting how to interact with one another.
The other day, I wrote a message to a friend on Facebook. I was hoping we could talk about it; her response was a thumbs-up sticker and a smiley face. Because that just says it all.

Ever have dinner with your family only to look up and realize that, though everyone you care for is sitting at one table, they're all staring at their phones like zombies and talking (or texting, or IMing or tweeting, etc.) to someone else? And you know what? I bet that when they finally meet up with those other people, they'll spend the whole time staring at a message screen.

I believe the capability for human emotion is seriously regressing, and this is scary. We are losing the ability to relate to one another, even to understand the depths of our own emotions. It's like we've become characters in a video game. Martha waves hello. You can either:

A: Smile
B: Frown

Perhaps you're in a very sophisticated game with options C and D as well.

Most people think through words. Words are thus a valuable medium for self-expression; at the same time, one's capacity to express can be limited by the words they know, or the words they don't. Perhaps you're experiencing something you just can't put a name to--or don't even know you're missing--because you've just never heard the word that describes it. Well, people are coming to feel in terms of emoticons. What we are capable of feeling is now horribly limited, confined to predetermined (and quite basic) expressions. In the sense of feeling, these minimal cartoon glyphs are our only words.

And when we're confronted with one of those rare people who still knows how to interact, we don't even know what to do anymore. There's no emoticon for this! System overload!

Let's go back to Martha, because she just got engaged.

Martha: You wouldn't believe it! Joey proposed to me last night, in the very restaurant where he we had our first date.
Jill: That's so romantic!
Martha: But there's so much to do before the wedding! The venue, the band, all those invitations...
Jill: And all the food! Don't forget the food!

Now, here's how that conversation would look today.

Martha: 
Jill: 
Martha: 
Jill: 

In time, I really do believe people will stop looking for anything more, perhaps not knowing how to find it. Perhaps not even knowing there is something greater.

Technology is a great thing to utilize in life. It is not a means through which to live.

Take advantage of the PEOPLE that are with you now, in the present, face to face.
Else we might as well be machines ourselves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breathing Fire

-
Breathing Fire Recently acquired skill sets:             Living from a suitcase. (Three suitcases.) Making myself quite at home in other people’s homes. Parallel parking. On the sidewalk. In the snow. I drank a shot of bourbon and heard that living feels like fire. I know what you mean about feeling fire. There is so much fire burning inside you that you don’t know how to channel. Like you’d breathe fire if you could. He had the knife to his wrist. To his throat. Look into my eyes. If you’re looking into my eyes, I want to believe you won’t do it. Why have you chosen this picturesque city, so different from the sprawling freedom of Texas? (The rest of you all have such logical reasons, I pinned a map to the dartboard and shot north of Houston.) Why? Is it enough to say that I chose something different? Rational friends beg practicalities. Was he dressed to go out? Did he have shoes on? You’re asking the wrong questions. I d...
Read more

Perhaps

-
I burnt my coffee this morning and it tastes like travel. Truly. This is the flavor of a flight made by 15 seconds. Of boutique cafés and getting lost at the train station. Of breakfast right out on the fire escape overlooking San Francisco. For the past three days, I have refused to write this. I refused to write about other burning things. What would I say. That I suddenly need herbs to help me sleep. That I let my mind sit in such a web of impatience that it burnt my skin. That I found myself scrubbing the floors clean at one in the morning, on my hands and knees, because there was absolutely no other reasonable thing to do at that hour. They smashed the windows on the avenue where we built a community. (I know home is the people, more than any place.) Dare I complain about the floors, when humans just around the corner are sweeping glass from shattered storefronts where we once shared ice creams, and gathering their livelihoods from the potholes in the streets? Dear Gd, but I see h...
Read more

But in My Heart I'm Jewish

-
I’ll tell you a story. It’s one of those deeper, family stories, but somehow I’ve always wanted to share it with you. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, because her face was bitten by a German Shepherd as a child. Because there was a nurse, Marie, who told her parents that they couldn’t hide harboring a little girl. My mother tells her story best. But I knew my grandma differently. I knew the woman who loved theatre and chocolates and beautiful dresses. I knew that when she passed away, and we drove to New York like we had throughout my childhood, her Manhattan apartment at the heart and height of everything suddenly felt too small to contain even the memories of us. I knew that when I let myself into her bathroom after the funeral to try on one of the abandoned garments, the dress was too small also and the laces snapped, and the hair tie I had braided so meticulously earlier that morning snapped in half a moment later, and I knew she watching. I knew the woman who sat on my bed...
Read more