rap music is reverse racism and vehemently comments as much on every Kendrick Lamar video you share. There’s no mute button for the woman at the grocery store who won’t stop asking you where the shampoo is, even though you’re pushing your own cart while wearing both sunglasses and a coat. But you know who you can mute? Everyone you hate on the Internet! Yes, everyone is annoying and also Extremely Online, the state of the public discourse is robust as ever, and the incredible thing about it is if you aren’t into it you can just log right off. Imagine if real life had an off switch!
Apple put this new Screen Time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug they won’t stop peddling to me. Every time I get that notice, I take it as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone. Only one hour and thirty-seven minutes of Social Networking yesterday, you say? Let me put down this informative book I was reading and try to top that.
So here’s to love and loving your portable handheld telecommunication device. Stay inside where it’s temperature-controlled and there are no bugs and spend some time celebrating your beloved today. Make a delicious homemade casserole (look up the recipe on your phone), dip out to pick up a fancy bottle of wine (request a Lyft from your phone), sit next to a cozy fire (YouTube a fireplace video on your phone), sing along to your favorite jams (find it on Spotify on your phone), listen to your favorite book (open Audible on your phone), watch some cheesy movies (did you know you can get Netflix on your phone?!), send an update to the family members you haven’t seen in a while (use e-mail from your phone), order some Indian takeout (Grubhub dot com on your phone), text your homegirl some juicy gossip from your phone, and since you’re playing around on it anyway, why not do a little shopping on your phone? Is it holiday time? If so, maybe you could stop being a huge grinch for a change and just buy everyone in your circle the one thing we’ve been conditioned to constantly want: A NEW PHONE.
late-1900s time capsule
I keep every CD I’ve ever bought, since high school, in black Case Logic binders hidden in the closet in the sunroom of this house I didn’t grow up in and don’t have a real attachment to. Also in that same closet there’s the ever-growing, tangled wad of plastic bags intended for reuse that will most certainly outlive me, a couple cans of bug spray that are all clogged and nonfunctional, the seltzer cans I keep meaning to return for cash, a gooey tube of superglue, several non-matching batteries rolling around the bottom of a deteriorating plastic cup, backup gardening gloves—I mean, why do we even have these?—and an original and heavily scratched copy of Sneaker Pimps’ Becoming X purchased from a Blockbuster Music in downtown Evanston in 1996.
The closer I creep toward the precipice of forty, the more time I spend listening to the same songs I listened to in high school and combing through surprisingly vivid memories of my time there, which is wild, because I did not actually have a good time being young! Why can’t I bear to part with the copy of Sheryl Crow’s 1996 self-titled album Sheryl Crow that I last listened to in a battered Sony Discman I got as a hand-me-down from a friend? “Home” has lyrics I could neither understand nor relate to at the time of its release, because they’re about a grown-ass woman and her disappointing relationship with some useless bonehead she’s desperate to cheat on. But when I was sixteen, I used to put it on repeat as the melancholy soundtrack for my brooding walk to school.
Mixtapes were the love language of my youth. If you got one from me, that shit was as serious as a marriage proposal. Maybe because they were so time-consuming to make? I had a painstaking process I went through before I put a mix together. First of all, I would figure out what mood I was trying to create: How cool did I want the recipient to think I was? Is this a person who would understand