As I was making myself a cup of tea this morning…actually, it was coffee. I rarely drink coffee, but while checking my email I saw a picture of a steaming, creamy mug of coffee and decided I wanted one today. Mine may be steaming and creamy, but it only barely qualifies as coffee, because I’m drinking the instant coffee my mother-in-law left after her last visit. My father-in-law, who is a coffee aficionado, finds my lack of coffee discernment appalling, but I told him that to me, coffee is only a robust vehicle for milk and sugar, in all their glorious variations – caramel, toffee, vanilla crème - mmm.
So as I was making my “coffee” this morning, I got to thinking about some of the great pleasures of the modern age. I loved living in the 1800’s in September, and I’ll happily do it again if others will play along, but there are some really wonderful things to be grateful for in our own time as well, and the first of these is one of those yummy coffee-enhancers.
Did you know that you can buy organic sweetened condensed milk in a squeeze bottle? How cool is that? There it sits in my fridge, waiting with a long and patient shelf life, for me to have a rare coffee craving and reach for its creamy sweetness. What a wonderful world!
Another marvelous mod con is TV clickers. I don’t even watch tv, but I do watch movies, and if I have gone to the trouble to plop my bum on the couch for two hours, you can bet I don’t want to get up again to change the volume! How did we ever survive before tv clickers? Who would actually bother to get up to change the channel? In fact, I’ll bet clicker invention had a radical effect on the Nielson ratings, because now, instead of watching whatever channel they started on for the whole night, people can actually watch the shows they want at the touch of a button. Unless the battery dies, in which case I am likely to turn the tv off and not watch it again until I get around to buying batteries.
The clicker idea seems to be spreading, as it should! I have a clicker for my fireplace and one for the dvd player in my van. (I didn’t choose the van dvd player, it came with the car, okay? Pointless luxury, in my opinion, but surprisingly useful, since now I can subject my children to educational lectures while we drive, and thus their schooling never ends!) You can get clickers for lights and stereos and probably just about any electronic device you desire. Wouldn’t it be fun to sit in the middle of your livingroom with a battery of clickers before you, controlling everything around you? Nah, I guess not, because even two tv/dvd clickers confuse me, but it’s a nice megalomaniacal fantasy.
Google. Just the name makes me happy! I absolutely LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that, with a few swift fingerstokes, I can find the answer to almost any question I have! The internet is such a boon to people like me with severely limited memories. Now I don’t have to remember more than the barest scrap of data, since even typing a partial word into a search engine will yield me the information I need. I wonder how this easy access is changing our brains. Are we becoming smarter because of all the information we take in, or dumber because it sidetracks us from gaining really important, in-depth understanding? Like all technology, I suppose Google is a double-edged sword.
Guilty confession: I like teeny-bopper jeans. I am totally laughing at myself for this one, but it’s true; I like those lower cut jeans that teens wear. Not the oh-my-gosh-please-cover-that-up-and-don’t-you-have-a-mother? low cut, just the ones that sit nicely on your hips. I used to hate these and scoff at them, until I discovered that I no longer have to tolerate jeans up against my ribs on my short-waisted frame. A swell modernism, I think, and along with that goes another swell modernism: those elastic band and button arrangements that now adorn boy jeans - a godsend to the mothers of very slender boys! Speaking of which, did you know that you can buy boys’ relaxed fit jeans in slim? Relaxed fit, slim? Total oxymoron.
Perhaps my favorite pleasure of the modern age, and certainly the one I missed most in September, is the wide variety of foods available to us modern suburb-dwellers. This is a tricky and controversial issue, because I realize that in order to enjoy the availability of all this abundance, lots of fuel energy has to be wasted. But it’s really more the variety of preparation I enjoy, I think. When we left the San Francisco bay area for the Pacific Northwest, I was so excited, no relieved, to learn that we could still get Vietnamese food. Then, shortly after we moved, our town opened a Trader Joes (a roaring success among all the transplanted Californians that live around here!) Now I need never leave, and if they ever open a Chipotle in my town, you can just bury me outside its front door.
However, the modern age has its share of annoyances, and I often think they outweigh the pleasures. Those toys in fast-food meals? Why? They should be banned, along with the many other pointless wastes of plastic and energy, like extra packaging, that modern man has come up with. Have you seen those images of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It’s got McDonald’s written all over it.
Sales calls. Isn’t it the height of rudeness to call someone in their home to ask them to buy something from you? I’m on to them though. There’s always a pause and a little click before the real person comes on to tell you about their product, and I’ve gotten really good at hanging up before they arrive.
But I did respond to one once. A very nice acquaintance called to ask about our real estate needs, and we happened to have some, and happily bought a house through him. I’m convinced that since doing that, the universe is sending me sales calls in the hopes that it’ll work again. I said “the universe”, just like people who don’t believe in God and use “the universe” as a convenient substitute for a higher power, because I don’t believe God would send me sales calls. He’s not like that.
The holiday season brings on another modern annoyance: endless holidaying. Since when does the Christmas season start before Halloween? And isn’t the blending of those two very opposite holidays a little weird? I firmly believe that the Christmas season must not start until the day after Thanksgiving. Actually, the holidays are all beginning to blend into one another, no doubt to meet the hopes of desperate merchants seeking to entice the spending public into one year-round shopping spree. Have you noticed that the lesser holidays are now becoming Decorating and Gift-Giving Occasions? Have you seen the Halloween decorations? Valentine’s Day decorations? Independence Day decorations? Soon our garages will be overloaded with carefully labeled and color-coded plastic crates of holiday decorations for dozens of annual holidays, and our days will be spent either putting them up or taking them down on the mutually-agreed-upon dates set up by our neighborhoods.
But I began this post talking about the pleasures, not the annoyances of the modern age. So now I’m going to go throw on my teeny-bopper jeans, have another squirt of sweetened condensed milk (on a spoon – who needs coffee?!), and plop on the couch with my clicker. 2012 rocks!
