yes please(65)

4.My phone wants to show me things I shouldn’t see.

I read in a book once the three things that shorten your life are smoking, artificial sweetener, and violent images. I believe this to be true. Violent images are not new, but the immediacy with which we see them is faster than ever. During the horrific Boston bombings, I reached out to my family in Watertown and prayed for those injured. I also went to news websites and was met with pictures of a man with his legs blown off. I was not ready for that. Who ever would be? Certainly not that man, who must now live with the pain and struggle of losing his legs, and also live with the pain and struggle of his image being disseminated in perpetuity. Sure, these sorts of visuals have been around a long time. I saw the R-rated movies on HBO. War photographers documented horrors and published them in magazines and books. But one used to have to go to the library or one’s personal book collection to see Nick Ut’s photograph of the naked South Vietnamese girl running after being severely burned. That picture was accompanied by text. It had context. It was surrounded by other moving pictures that told a similar story. Now we can look at the grotesque while we wait in line at the bank.

Porn is everywhere. I am a fan of porn. It can be a very nice accompaniment to an evening of self-pleasure. It’s as important as a good wine pairing. Lest you think I am using fancy language to avoid revealing intimate porn preferences, please know that I prefer straight porn with occasional threesome scenarios that preferably don’t end in facials. I also like men who seem to like women, and women who seem to be on the top of their porn game. I basically like my porn like my comedy, done by professionals. But I am a forty-three-year-old woman, and so I can handle some of the images and feelings that porn conveys. I had a friend whose seven-year-old kid Googled the word “naked” once. The first picture he saw was a woman with asparagus in her vagina and up her butt. That’s just too much to handle. How are we going to get him to eat his vegetables now?

The Dalai Lama has said that Hollywood is “very bad for [his] eyes and a waste of time.” I understand. Most of what my phone shows me is bad for my eyes. My eyes need a rest, spiritually and literally. My eyes hurt from staring at my phone. But of course they do. My phone wants to kill me.

5.My phone wants me to love it more than my children.

Last summer I was sitting next to my youngest son, Abel, on the edge of a swimming pool. He slipped and went under. I jumped in and pulled him out right away. We were both a little scared but thankfully everyone was fine. My phone had been in my back pocket, and my first thought was total triumph that I had chosen my child over my phone. My second thought was complete devastation that my phone had been submerged. I couldn’t Google what to do with a wet phone because my phone was wet, and so I quickly ripped it open and started to dry it with a hair dryer. I used my laptop to get on the Internet, where most sites told me to shove my wet phone in a bag of rice. I had just pulled my little guy out of a pool and I was sweating in my kitchen as I poured rice into a Ziploc bag. I spent the day without my phone, even though I had two other gadgets that allowed me to constantly check my e-mail and texts. I paced around hoping the rice would soak up the water. (It didn’t.) I realized I might have to go out that night without a cell phone. I put my iPad in my purse just in case. I spent the entire dinner reaching for a phantom phone that I didn’t have with me. This is the behavior of a crazy person. Don’t you see what the phone is doing?

6.People text and drive and die. People check their e-mails and get hit by trucks. People fall into shopping mall fountains while texting and the security footage is passed around on the Internet and that person dies of embarrassment.

Enough said.

7.My phone won’t let me go.

It used to be that when we lost our phones we really did lose them. We had to rebuild our contacts list. We had to send out e-mails telling everyone to send us their contact information again. We didn’t have everything saved and backed up. This gave us all a chance to reset. I am a firm believer that every few years one needs to shake one’s life through a sieve, like a miner in the Yukon. The gold nuggets remain. The rest falls through like the soft earth it is. Losing your contacts was a chance to shake the sieve.

Now everything is backed up on the cloud and you can find your phone if you lose it in a taxi. Don’t you realize it’s only a matter of time before our phones can FIND US?

Our phones have somehow convinced us that they aren’t trying to kill us; rather, they’re trying to protect us. You are a ridiculous person if you are not reachable by phone or e-mail. As a parent you are expected to be constantly available at all times. You are encouraged to provide your children with their own devices. You are expected to monitor those devices, keep up with your children’s technology, and have proper age-appropriate conversations about sexting and trolling, all while the super-nerds create apps that allow you to send a picture that disappears within seconds.

My phone has even gotten its grubby, technological hands on this book. This book is expected to have a big e-book presence. People don’t buy books anymore, they buy e-books. Or maybe they buy both? Either way, it’s very important that this sell as an electronic book. I am supposed to be excited about this. Gone are the days when you sat on your couch and turned pages with Dorito-stained fingers. Gone are the days when you took Henry James on the train and read it in front of cute guys to impress them. Gone are the books stuffed with pressed flowers and handwritten notes and hotel room receipts. For a minute, I wanted this book to be stuffed with things that fell out when you opened it, but my editors said no.