“Nope,” I said. “I just don’t need it. Cell phones aren’t for me. What am I going to do? Carry this thing around all day?”
When I was growing up, the Poehlers were the lower-middle-class family that had high-end gadgets. We had an amazing answering machine. It was as big as a toaster oven and used full-sized cassette tapes. I would come home and see the light blinking, excited that someone had tried to call us even when we weren’t around. I would rewind the tape with a giant button and listen to a strange voice asking me to renew my subscription to Seventeen magazine. That answering machine was a big deal. We fought over who would leave the outgoing message, each one of us believing that we could find the right mixture of humor and gravitas beneath our excruciating Boston accents. The answering machine was my personal secretary. I would run home after school and change the outgoing message as needed. “Keri, I am going to the mall. Meet me at Brigham’s and if you get there first order me a chocolate chip on a sugar cone with jimmies.” Sometimes you went somewhere and people didn’t show up. There was no way to instantly reach them unless you went to their house or called them on their home telephone number.
MTV arrived not long after. I would spend hours watching this incredibly cool and new station while thinking, “Finally, someone GETS ME.” I was ten years old and receiving a crash course in adult life. MTV introduced me to punk music and gay people. I met Michael Jackson and his talent split me in half. I would dance all day in my basement listening to Off the Wall. You young people really don’t understand how magical Michael Jackson was. No one thought he was strange. No one was laughing. We were all sitting in front of our TVs watching the “Thriller” video every hour on the hour. We were all staring, openmouthed, as he moonwalked for the first time on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. When he floated backward like a funky astronaut, I screamed out loud. There was no rewinding or rewatching. No next-day memes or trends on Twitter or Facebook posts. We would call each other on our dial phones and stretch the cord down the hall, lying on our stomachs and discussing Michael Jackson’s moves, George Michael’s facial hair, and that scene in Purple Rain when Prince fingers Apollonia from behind. Moments came and went, and if you missed them, you were shit out of luck. That’s why my parents went to a M*A*S*H party and watched the last episode in real time. There was no next-day M*A*S*H cast Google hangout. That’s why my family all squeezed onto one couch and watched the USA hockey team win the gold against evil Russia! We all wept as my mother pointed out every team member from Boston. (Everyone from Boston likes to point out everyone from Boston. Same with Canadians.) We all chanted “USA!” and screamed “YES!” when Al Michaels asked us if we believed in miracles. Things happened in real time and you watched them together. There was no rewind.
HBO arrived in our house that same year. We had no business subscribing to HBO, with the little money we had, but Bill Poehler did not scrimp when it came to TV. I was a TV kid. There was no limit to how much I could watch. I even ate in front of the TV. (My parents will wince at this, but more than once we ate in the living room with TV trays or at the kitchen table with the kitchen TV on.) If we had the money we probably would have put a TV in every corner of our house. My parents didn’t pay much attention to what I was watching because they were too busy working and remortgaging their house. I watched things on HBO that were much too scary and adult for my still-forming sponge brain. Seventies and eighties movies were obsessed with devil kids (The Omen, The Exorcist) and rapey revenge (The Last House on the Left, Death Wish). There were moments in those films that were just scary and sexy enough to burn into my brain and haunt my subconscious for years. But mostly, HBO was about ADULT CONTENT, and that meant movies about Divorce and Intrigue and Betrayal. I learned how adults communicated from watching movies on HBO. I also learned what made me laugh. I watched every comedy I could find: Annie Hall, Caddyshack, Fletch, and Airplane! I sat next to the TV and transcribed The Jerk in blue composition notebooks. I thought about comedy. I thought about being a writer. Technology was creeping into my life in slow and manageable ways. The Future was Almost Now!
I spent my entire college career without a cell phone or e-mail. I typed my papers on a Brother word processor, which had a window that showed five sentences at a time and had a tendency to go on the fritz and make you lose all your work. I typed papers in my dorm and printed them out in my hallway, because I didn’t want to bother my roommate with the loud mechanical noise of the Brother spooling out “Tiny Fists: The Use of Hands in the Early Poems of e. e. cummings.” When I moved to Chicago, I used a paper map that folded in your lap to navigate the city. There was no Internet, no e-mail, no texting, no FaceTiming, no GPS-ing, no tweeting, no Facebooking, and no Instagramming. A few people in the late eighties had giant cell phones that lived in tiny suitcases, and I saw some in movies. I became aware of the existence of e-mail and considered checking out this company called America Online, but the film WarGames had taught me that the computers could start a nuclear war so I decided to wait and see. In the meantime, I wrote letters and maintained a healthy dose of eye contact. I still carried an address book.
And now? Now my phone sits in my pocket like a pack of cigarettes used to. I am obsessed and addicted and convinced that my phone is trying to kill me. I believe this to be true. By the way, when I say “my phone” I mean my phone and my iPad and my laptop and all technological devices in general. Look, I am glad we have electricity and anesthesia, but I think this Internet thing might be a bad idea. Sorry, guys. So far the only good things I have seen to come out of this recent technological renaissance are video-chatting with your grandparents, online dating, and being able to attend traffic school on your computer. The rest is a disaster. The robots will kill us all. Here’s proof:
1.My phone does not want me to finish this book or do any work in general.
After I wrote the first paragraph of this chapter, I checked my phone to see if anyone had e-mailed or texted. Then I Googled “flip phone” and “when did Lou Reed die?” (Rest in peace, Lou Reed.) That eventually led me to watching lovely Laurie Anderson videos and checking out a local place to learn Tai Chi. Then I went to Wikipedia and clicked on “Chinese Medicine.” That reminded me of a healer I once met, which reminded me of a massage, which reminded me I needed my hair done, so I texted my hairdresser friend. She sent me a picture of herself from her recent trip and I put a filter on it with a funny caption and sent it back.
I don’t remember doing any of this. I am telling you, my phone wants me dead.
It wants to sleep next to me and buzz at just the right intervals so I forget to eat or make deadlines.
2.My phone does not want me to have friends.
I’m not on social media. It’s just not my thing. There is an amount of self-disclosure and self-promotion involved that keeps me away. (Says the woman writing a book about herself.) But I’ve learned to never say never. Perhaps in a year there will be some amazing new way to be funny, humble, real, and accidentally sexy all at the same time, with a great filter option and a deep social message attached. I’m guessing it will be called SoulSpill™. Until then, I prefer to stick to group texting with my close friends. I love gathering four or five of the important folks in my life and forcing us to be our own tiny chat room. Remember those? I think if I have established anything in my book, it’s that a key element of being my friend is being comfortable with my forced fun. I realize that a phone addict like me talking about how I don’t do social media is like a heroin junkie bragging about how they would never touch meth. But I like to do things I am good at, and I am sure that having a bigger online presence would only get me in some shit, especially with my history of texting the wrong things to the wrong people.
Once I was wrapping Christmas gifts with an old assistant. She was a young and lovely girl whom I was thinking of firing. Let’s call her Esmerelda (not her name). I texted my husband, Will, and said, “Not now, not today, but eventually we should think about getting rid of Esmerelda.” I wen
t back to wrapping my gifts and chitchatting about my upcoming schedule. Later that night, I received a call from Esmerelda. I had sent the text to her instead. I had sent it while we were together and she read it while I was humming Christmas carols right in front of her. She figured we should talk. She was right. I fired her. Then I threw my phone across the room and hid under my bed.
Another time, I spent an afternoon talking to a friend about a recent relationship she had been in. She had gone back and forth with a guy who was acting like an asshole. She had finally ended it and was processing her feelings. She left the room and I texted another friend and wrote, “Thank god they broke up. He is such an asshole.” My friend came back into the room and asked why I had just texted her that weird sentence. She was upset that I hadn’t even waited five minutes before reaching out to someone else and talking about her. I apologized. I threw my phone into the garbage and tried to run myself over with my car.
I wish I could tell you that those were the only times something like that happened, but it has happened over and over: an e-mail for the wrong eyes, a text to the wrong person, a picture sent with the wrong message underneath. My inability to keep my shit straight made me straighten out my shit. Now, as a rule, I try not to text anything that I wouldn’t mind the whole world seeing. I try to use restraint of pen and tongue and thumb. It’s a constant struggle. If my phone had its druthers, it would butt-dial my frenemies while I was in therapy.
3.My phone wants me to feel bad about how I look.
When I was younger we used to have these things called “parties.” They were fun hangouts where young people would get together and talk and maybe dance. During these “parties” we would take pictures with things called “cameras.” One week later, we would pick up those pictures from a strange man who lived in a tiny hut in the middle of town. By that time the party had become a distant memory, something that I had experienced in real time with little regard as to how I looked. I would receive the hard copies of the pictures and throw away the ones I didn’t like. No one would see those pictures but me. No one would be allowed to comment on those pictures until I decided to share them. They would be a reminder of a good time but not something that kept me distanced from the experience.
Now my phone lets college admission officers check to see if an applicant ever posed in a bra.
My phone also wants to constantly let me know what other people think of me. It lures me into reading about myself. At first, things seem really nice and great. My phone shows me lovely things the Internet made about my show or my work. But the phone doesn’t turn off after I see the good things. It stays on, and in my hand, until I scrape further. Then I find out that some people think I have “a scary face” while other people think I’m “just not funny, period.” My phone shows me that I didn’t really get a lot of e-mails over the weekend. My phone directs me to news that is gossipy and awful. Which leads me to . . .
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. O
r 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.
(They actually didn’t, I just didn’t get my shit together in time. It’s a whole thing.)
So let’s review.
My phone is trying to kill me. It is a battery-charged rectangle of disappointment and possibility. It is a technological pacifier. I keep it beside me to make me feel less alone, unless I feel like making myself feel lonely. It can make me feel connected and unloved, ugly and important, sad and vindicated.
So what do we do?
Well first, we go back to the Dalai Lama. He says, “I think technology has really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.”
Man, that’s good. That’s why he’s the Big Lama.
He goes on to say, “We are the controller of the technology. If we become a slave of technology, then [that’s] not good.”