I'll Mature When I'm Dead by Dave Barry Read Free Book Online

e-mail and text messages, surf the Internet, pay my bills, book flights, play games, take pictures, listen to music, watch TV shows—in short almost anything except reliably make or receive telephone calls. For some reason, cellular telephones lack that capability. It’s as if they made a washing machine that mowed your lawn and made daiquiris, but if you put your actual clothes into it, they burst into flames.
    But my point is that while Lucy is inhaling her way around the yard, I am using cell-phone technology to get things done . I am reading e-mails offering to sell me male-enhancement products so powerful that I will need a wheelbarrow to cart my privates around. I am also reading e-mails from available women on other continents who are hoping to strike up a friendship with me that could blossom into a deeper relationship with the promise—someday—of exchanging intimate personal financial data.
    I can also use my phone to go to Facebook and Twitter to read messages and “tweets” from a vast network of people I do not really know, updating me on their random neural firings on such issues as what they are eating. In the old pre-technology days, it would have been almost impossible to replicate Facebook or Twitter. The closest you could get would be to mail dozens of postcards a day to everybody you knew, each with a brief message about yourself like: “Finally got that haircut I’ve been putting off.” Or: “Just had a caramel frappuccino. Yum!”
    The people receiving these postcards would have naturally assumed that you were a moron with a narcissism disorder. But today, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, you are seen as a person engaging in “social networking.” As the technology improves, we’ll reach the point when you don’t even need a phone to socially network. You’ll have some kind of device implanted in your brain so you can receive other people’s brain waves directly as they occur. You will know everything about them. You will know when they fart .
    Speaking of which: When Lucy finally decides, after much deliberation and a minimum of eight full clockwise rotations of her body, to poop on exactly the same spot for the 1,379th consecutive time, we head into the house. The sun isn’t even up yet, and I have already, using handheld technology with just one hand, wasted more time than my father did in an entire day.
    And I am just getting started. In the kitchen, I turn on a TV set that has hundreds of channels devoted to every conceivable subject including celebrity bunion removal. 10 I tune in to one of the literally dozens of news shows, all of which feature a format of 55 percent celebrities promoting things, 30 percent e-mails from viewers, and 15 percent YouTube videos showing bears jumping on trampolines. While I’m catching up on these developments, I turn on the programmable coffeemaker, which I hope that someday, perhaps by attending community college, I will learn to program. Then I take a breakfast “sausage” made of processed tofu from the freezer and pop it into the microwave oven, which in seconds converts it from a frozen, unappetizing gray cylinder into a piping hot unappetizing gray cylinder. It performs this culinary miracle by bombarding the frozen tofu with atomic radiation—the very same deadly force that, back in the 1950s, caused insects to mutate into savage monster killers the size of Charles Barkley, now harnessed by modern technology for peaceful breakfast purposes.
    OK, that might not be 100 percent technically accurate. The truth is, I don’t really know how my microwave oven works. I also don’t know how my cell phone works, or my TV, or my computer, or my iPod, or my GPS, or my camera that puts nineteen thousand pictures inside a tiny piece of plastic, which is obviously NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE, but there it is. Basically all I know about these devices is how to turn them on, and if they stop working, I know I should turn them off and then turn them back on,