Thursday, November 18, 2010

A CNN Thing

I read a thing on CNN today - I call it a "thing" because it certainly wasn't news.

Anyway, apparently someone has decided that some email domain names are "more awesome" and some are "less awesome." Myname@gmail.com is more awesome than Myname@yahoo.com. Having your own domain name is the most awesome, and having an AOL domain is the least awesome.

How interesting. Smug hipsters, no longer content with merely turning clothes and gadgets into status totems, have now made email domains into a minefield of angst and inadequacy. According to their resident expert, having an AOL email account means that you're probably seventy years old and haven't changed your email address since 1997. Well, I'm not seventy, but I haven't changed my email address in years - since everyone knows this one, it seems easier to keep it than to change it just to fit in with a bunch of idiotic techno-hipsters. And somehow I really don't think that getting my own domain name will make me a different person in the morning.

What fun it must be to live in a world where everything, literally everything, is some kind of status struggle, where lives and reputations hinge on having the right email address, listening to the right kind of music, or driving the right kind of car.

They go to the store to buy paper plates, and it's all so damned elite. "These paper plates are made from the finest Canadian boreal fir trees, and are processed without bleach in a carbon-neutral plant employing dispossessed Cambodian smallholders." Or, "These paper plates are hand-made by soulful artists in Brooklyn, with whom I've gotten severely gassed on crappy American beer." Geez. How can I possibly compete with that, when my main criteria for buying paper plates is finding ones thick enough that the hot food doesn't fry my genitals when I eat dinner in front of the TV?

There are, I believe, certain experiences one goes through in life that put things like that into proper perspective. Once, when I was going through chemo, my innards were so devastated I had diarrhea and I had to throw up at the same time. As distasteful as it sounds, I had to decide (and right sharply at that) which spurting end of me was most profitably aimed at the toilet. Do that a few times and you realize that all your hipster pretensions, all your yuppie status displays, all your elite stances don't make any difference at all.

Ultimately, all that matters is which end you aim at the toilet.

4 comments:

-Warren Zoell said...

Trying to find meaning and to fill voids in their gray little lives. Wait a minute!... You watched CNN? Oh dear.

William said...

LOL I read the CNN website while I'm eating lunch at work. There are these two dingbats that write so-called technology articles for the website that drive me so crazy I can't stop reading. It's like watching a train wreck, I can't make myself NOT read them.

It would probably be better for my digestion if I read the Cybermodeler website instead, but my workplace blocks everything fun.

Stockyard Queen said...

Hope you and Jean have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

William said...

You too! I hope everyone is well and happy, and if at all possible out of the cold wind! Happy Thanksgiving!