Millennial

As a native of NYC, claustrophobia is foreign to me. This is a thought that crosses my mind as I push my way to the front of a standing general admission concert, insincere excuse me’s peppered in the space linking my hand to my friend trailing close behind, palms damp and probably more than a little gross. My face is dangerously close to someone’s armpit and the speaker pumps out a rolling bass that vibrates past my carefully curated earplugs. I am so dehydrated that my tongue sticks to the top of my mouth and my hair sticks to my nape. My throat is sore from singing at the top of my lungs and my legs hurt from jostling against a crowd of swaying bodies.

It’s a damp and disgusting experience that they never warn you about in concert videos.

I am blindingly happy.

I try to explain the appeal of watching others play video games and record their daily life to my English professor.

“You watch baseball games without playing baseball yourself, don’t you?” I reason.

She is appalled that she agrees.

My friend’s phone rings incessantly.

“Pick it up?” I suggest after a few seconds of the ringtone.

She stares at me in horror.

“No, it’s an unknown number!”

I hate cell phones. My close friends rate me as most unlikely to pick up the phone at gunpoint. I regularly entertain thoughts of throwing my phone out the window, the bitten fruit logo smashed into applesauce on the pavement, a camera roll full of digital memories gone forever, contacts snipped on one end like a Missed Connections post on Craigslist or a frayed split end.

A couple of summers ago, I told a handful of friends that I was going to Japan and ditched my cell phone for a week and a half. Armed with conversational Japanese picked up from anime and travel vlogs, I jumped headfirst into the experience.

At first, it was weird not to take a photo before I dug into sakura ice-cream, the sticky sweet dripping off the waffle cone onto the mountain grass below my feet. I felt lonely without the music that usually accompanied my long commutes, a familiar and comfortable force. Instead of scrolling mindlessly through social media, I sat in the awkward pauses of new acquaintance small talk,  learning how to feel boredom again without a distraction.  Then I started saying yes to things without thinking about the time or asking for permission from a distant authority.  When I visited a temple, I stopped thinking about the people who would enjoy the majestic view or the smoky incense. I made fast friendships tied together by common destinations and good conversation alone. I experienced selfishly, vulnerably, whole-heartedly, skin sunburnt and eyes open.

This morning, my iPhone cheerfully informs me that I have spent 2 hours and 47 minutes of the past week looking at its glossy screen. I remember that  I was practically raised alongside the Internet. That makes us siblings, in a way – family. And family means no one gets left behind.

Lonely, lonely, so lonely

Are things always this hard?

No way no way, in this feed

People are living in a different world from me

“Wow, that’s so sad, Alexa play Despacito,” I say at the end of a rant that I only half-listened to, busy typing up an essay outline and looking at YouTube videos. (Mostly the latter.)

My brother, a sixty-year-old in a twenty-something body, stares at me.

“What does that even MEAN,” he replies, exasperated, hands thrown in despair. “Why is that supposed to be funny?”

I laught at his misery. Belatedly, I realize that I don’t even really understand the meme myself. I’m just tossing words at my brother to fill in the spaces where I wasn’t listening.

“You’ve never heard of that meme before?” I say, stalling for time as I frantically check Know Your Meme for a plausible backstory. Okay, it started as one of those Facebook chain things…

“You’re Googling it right now, aren’t you?”

“What? No.”

“Tell me you’re seeing this too.”
Mr. Robot

If you think to ask, Siri can tell you exactly what airplane is flying overhead at a given moment, right down to the flight number.

In our culture, realism is a must. As the interface between reality and fiction becomes thinner, computer screens become doorways instead of one-way windows. We crave instant gratification and one-click connections, like the world is globalized to an Amazon review system that impacts actual sales and the number of views it will take for a music video to trend. We watch reality television even though we know every line is scripted by a network conglomerate.

It’s not that we’re delusional. It’s that somewhere along the way, fiction and the reality met in the middle.

Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story.

-Monica