Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Bathroom Monologue: Clarifying Lies about the Internet


I need to the clear the air. The internet has not diminished attention spans. People were never able to take in more than four paragraphs of information unless it was formatted into The Top Ten Best Asses in Hollywood. There were never newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, or epic poems that entire tribes memorized verbatim. No one ever intended you to finish a short story in a single sitting. Man did not evolve to read the entire Nutrition Information on the side of a cereal box, and certainly not to figure out how much saturated fat he was actually consuming in four bowls of the stuff, unless someone first designed an app for doing so. Except man has never had the patience to design an app. They are found in the wild, caught, captured, domesticated and price-coded by Apple. Contrary to your memory, you could not spend all day reading for pleasure when you were a child. You sat by the window and dreamed, wished and prayed that someone would put videogames on a phone, and you sat there doing nothing more than this wishing until it went on sale. You should not feel badly for skimming Cracked to get to the next item, or for only reading the funny captions under their stock photos. Nor should you feel bad for having the same NYTimes article open in your browser for two weeks, perpetually intending to finish it. It cannot be finished. If you had the superhuman will to consume every sentence, you would find that the writer herself did not finish it, instead trailing off into a series of vowels and punctuation marks. This was the result of her bravely passing out from the effort of trying to sustain thought. This is hazardous and should not be attempted for so long as you can get Angry Birds at a discounted price. I’d go on, but then I wouldn’t have the mental stamina left to tweet about Twitter going down for half an hour tonight. Farewell.

8 comments:

  1. I'd laugh but, sadly, you're absolutely right.

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  2. I'm going to come back and finish this I swear!

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  3. If you had the superhuman will to consume every sentence, you would find that the writer herself did not finish it, instead trailing off into a series of vowels and punctuation marks. BIG SMILEY FACE

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  4. Kudos to all of you for braving as far into this post as you did. I know it was a struggle and I appreciate your hunger for words.

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  5. Look, there are kittehs doing funny things. Oh wait, was I supposed to make a comment. Very funny. *email pings* Got to run.
    Adam B @revhappiness

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  6. I read every single vowel and punctuation mark of whatever it was you wrote! I swear!

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  7. I managed to get to the end of the article, but then it wasn't that long so I was able to sustain my thoughts until a e i o u sometimes y what was I saying?


    :)

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