Straight from the Mr. Paul Maul YouTube channel comes this delightful and informative dating advice video. Everybody wants to indulge in the harmless but certainly dysfunctional pastime of seeking out an ex on the Internet. But sometimes, those little bastards don’t make it easy to find them. Watch as co-workers Travis and Alicia discuss a foolproof method for always being able to obsess about your former relationships! Oh, and it’s also on iTunes! (That’s why there’s another little video box at the bottom of the post. Not that you were panicking about it or anything.)
Listen up, you nut job. All I want is the information you are sending me in an email or some other form of electronic communication. I haven’t the slightest interest in the name of the wireless device from which you sent it. Eleven seconds on Google™ revealed thousands of links to easy ways one can change the default signature that comes with one’s phone, but so far, my impressionable and insecure friend, you have not availed yourself of this technology. I understand that consumers can quickly and somewhat frighteningly become rabid in their brand loyalties; why, since even before the time depicted on Mad Men manufacturers have had a monetary stake in their buyers having an emotional stake in their products.
But surely this is the 21st Century, and there are more than enough Internet forums for people who want to exchange giddy, near-sexualized commentary about handheld keyboard response or whatever gets their rocks off about the other object they spend most of their time clutching tightly in their palms. Why does so much of one’s identity need to be tied up into tagging every cyber note with some sort of declaration of awesomeness based on which provider is shooting off its contents?
I watched Oprah once, and I believe she said something about each of us being unique and individual, perfect just how we are. I also watched Dr. Phil once and he said the same thing except when the guest didn’t get it right away, he hit him with a meat-flattening mallet. (Now there’s a guy who’s not giving everyone in the audience a car anytime soon.) The point is, there are any number of motivational speakers out there who aren’t even as qualified as me providing a simple truth to their fans: that we are more than the material goods we purchase. Sure, after a particularly humiliating dinner experience during which you were told that the photo you posted on eHarmony® didn’t do justice to your unibrow, you might briefly sublimate your lack of self-worth by buying a gadget that, in the quick-fix moment, actually seems to complete you. But tomorrow is another day, and the rest of us do not have a lot of emotion invested in what contraption you are employing to let us know that the YouTube video of that wedding party doing their entrance dance to “Forever” was LOL.
And, just as an aside, another way we give our personal power over to the Internet is by letting our email providers tag all of our messages with hyperlinked advertisements. Why aren’t we getting a share of that revenue? After all, they are using our outgoing messages to sell something without our consent! I hope one of my readers will take up the charge and get some signatures on a petition about that. I would do it, but I’m too busy concerning myself with the minutiae that provides the inspiration for these blog posts.
In any case, the overarching message is that we must let go of the urge to siphon off our identity into our technology, or before you know it we will start to feel that the robots that have replaced us are actually pretty cool.
Anybody who uses the Internet (and dear God I hope that includes whoever is reading this now, otherwise you have hacked into the Word doc files on my hard drive) cannot fail to have noticed that Google™ has redesigned its home page. Now, the options bar across the top “fades in” once one wiggles one’s mouse. For a moment it seems like a lag or a glitch, as if the connection has slowed and the user will soon be seeing the dread hourglass icon (PC users) or that freaky multi-colored pinwheel thing that can provoke more irrational panic than a + sign in the e.p.t. (Mac users.) But, indeed, the slowdown is negligible and temporary; it really does only last for a moment and a barely measurable moment at that.
In that fading-in moment, however, Google™ is sending us all a vitally important self-help message. And that message is: “we know you are surfing the web and therefore may fly into a rage that borders on the onset of lycanthropy if a single click of your mouse does not produce a new image on the screen in less time than it takes for an ant to drive a go-kart around the inside of a Cheerio®, however seeing as it will take a millisecond for the menu bar to appear, perhaps you could use that half a heartbeat to take a deep breath, contemplate the wonder of existence and realize that your superficial, instant gratification-motivated desires may not be as important as, say, whether or not some people in the world have access to adequate nutrition or uncontaminated drinking water.”
Google™ has done a revolutionary thing, here in the Information Age. They have made us wait. And for that, we thank them from the bottom of our over-stimulated hearts.
