Don't come at me with your technology fasts

Don't be frightened children – it's just a cellphone from the '90's.

A few days ago I was trying to send a photo to a friend via text, and my phone died. My phone is old so this has been happening a lot, and I proceeded to do what I do every other time this happened – curse at it, threaten to throw it out the window (because it feels threatened when I say this) and then eat a handful of potato chips to ease my suffering.

Of course, then I had my kumbaya moment where I realize how fortunate I am to be able to take a picture with my phone and then somehow miraculously send it through space to my friend's phone fifty miles away, and I took a step back and just praised science. Then I had another handful of potato chips to calm myself down.

Technology has been daunting to me lately – my phone dies, my computer crashes, my FitBit keeps telling me I'm a lazy bitch – and a friend suggested I join her in a tech fast that she was embarking on. This inhumane endeavor consisted of going three days – cold turkey – without any computer or phone use, except for work or essential activities. This meant no posting on Facebook, sharing pictures on Instagram, conversing on Twitter or texting photos of my cocktail to Rigel.

This sounded like a hell I wanted no part of. Who would validate my feelings about life if I couldn't share them on Facebook? How would I know about world events without my Twitter feed? And without photographing my lunch and then enhancing it with a pleasing filter, DOES FOOD EVEN EXIST AT ALL?

I politely declined to participate in this heinous exercise in self-torture, and it got me thinking about how we all love to demonize technology, although I think there are very few of us who could go without it. Is this just a fad? I can't imagine a farmer in the 1800's declaring that he was going to go on a plow fast, or our parents defiantly announcing that they would go without their toaster oven for an entire seventy-two hours. Come to think of it, I don't remember any one of my friends ever bemoaning the fact that they were becoming overly-dependent on their pager, either.

I'm still going to curse at my phone and threaten to cut my computer if it shows me that goddamn spinning beachball again, and yell – at no one in particular and on a daily basis – "They can put a man on the moon but I can't get a decent WiFi signal in my bathroom?!" But I won't be giving up my technology anytime soon. Come to think of it, not my potato chips, either.
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I just signed up to do NaBloPoMo (short for National Blog Posting Month) which is an online event where bloggers are challenged to post every single day of the month. I joined in around six days in, which means I've already failed before I even started. On the upside, you can come back here everyday for thrilling stories, like this one about my phone.

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