Saturday, March 21, 2009

Freddy P. is always captain of something

For someone who loves chatting, I’ve been having my fair share of telephone issues lately. And not even the sort of phone issues that I am accustomed to having because I am at heart a spazzy and destructive person who decimates cell-phone civilizations with a single searing glance (read: I often drop my phone out of two story windows, or into toilets) but a more emotional variety of phone distress.

In my new place of living we’ve actually got a telephone hooked up to the landline and I am consistently being startled and mildly creeped out by its ring. To be clear, I haven’t lived with a phone that didn’t ring to the tune of the Ghostbuster’s theme and sport a camera feature for a number of years and so my confusion is to some extent only natural. However I did have a phone (a phone heavily abused by a chatty family) for my whole upbringing, and for this reason I can explain away the startling feeling but not the vaguely spooky feeling of sitting still and listening to it ring its way loudly through the whole cycle in the spare room.

In my defense, we haven’t given our phone number to anyone, so in some ways its creepy because it’s definitely a complete stranger ringing up. In my further defense , I’m a pansy and I like to live my life this way, so I won’t hear anything about the supposedly redeeming rewards of being brave.

To my way of thinking (which I wouldn’t dare press on anyone else, but I’m just yakking here), I’ve been so long away from the landline telephone as a social tool that it has been reduced in my mind to its strictly commercial-media representation.

As I’m a no longer a spring chicken, I’ll refrain from detailing my age exactly, but I’ll tell you that I when I was coming of age in the nineties, and in the nineties telephones in the movies meant only one thing: horror flicks.

I know what you are thinking, “This chick has finally come off of the rocker that she was so precariously perched upon.” But stay with me, I’m mildly getting to a point.

See, in the horror movies of my teenage years (I don’t watch them anymore, being altogether too squeamish and freed from that teenage desire to prove otherwise) there was always some young babe who was for whatever reason being pursued by the evil fellow in the mask/rain-coat/demonic permanent facial scarring. In these movies there would inevitable be a scene in which the girl has fled her attacker, and feels that she is secure in the home of a friend, usually some Freddy Prince Jr. who is laughing off her fears.

She pleads with him “Please Freddy P., that evil guy will kill us both for reasons not yet clear.” And he will laugh, secure in his position as captain of the varsity something.

SUDDENLY THE PHONE RINGS. But Freddy is not expecting any calls.

And we all know that it is definitely the freako with the knife. The hot babe and Freddy P. look up, the camera focuses on the phone and because of the generally bad dialog of these movies, the director decides that it will be much scarier to just focus on the steadily ringing phone for a good five minutes.

And that scene, when you know that Freddy's dreamboat face is going to get slashed with a pig slaughtering knife, epitomizes why I get the wiggins every time my unlisted telephone rings. It also epitomizes the reason that I compulsively lock my car doors when passing surly men in raincoats.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Social network name dropping.

I divide my internet free time into three clean categories: stalking via blogs and social networking, reading liberal slant publications, and looking up horses to buy on craigslist. I have found, much to my utter disdain, that lately two of these have been overlapping beyond my level of comfort.

I won’t leave you guessing any longer than it takes to build a rudimentary level of suspense (A horse with a blog? Craiglist has a twitter?). I mean of course, that social networking sites have been gaining an alarming degree of legitimate mention in the press. I’ve been reading articles as of late that take great pains to praise Facebook as a serious and useful social networking source (the counter-argument being that it’s an unbelievable waste of time disguised in charming blue and white) to call out Facebook-outsiders as making a grave and damaging social statement. And when I happen to chance across an article that doesn’t list Facebook as subject matter, it often commits a more grievous crime by quoting a status-change or a twitter post as news.

To be clear: I love wasting time on the internet and when I’m not harping on about nothing on twitter I’m subduing my general angst with the calming blue-and-white of Facebook. But perhaps that’s why I find this sudden shift toward popular acceptance by what I would term “adult industries” like journalism so very disconcerting.

You see, in my prime Facebooking (I can verb it, I’m fb old school) years there was nothing legitimate in the least about social networking, beyond the sheer egotistical satisfaction of wracking up friends and drunken photo tags. In those days (let’s call it circa 2005) anyone over 25 on Facebook would have been branded an automatic creeper.

“Get back to myspace, you skeeze-bag,” the collegiate masses would have shouted metaphorically, rejecting this aged friend request with a practiced click.

Now, however, the actual news sites are covering the introspective quandaries of Facebook while I’ve got friend requests from three uncles sitting in my inbox. Man do I miss my youth.

So here’s the clincher for me, Facebook is a subject for satire, not for actual news because it’s damn ridiculous. Maybe I’ve penned too many “Caterday: Drink on Saturday” Facebook invites and spent too many hours perfecting my “Buffy Fandom” score to respect anyone who can reference it with a straight face. And I hope any journalist quoting twitter winces every time they attempt to sign in and get the little cartoon birdie proclaiming “Opps, technical error!” in its cutesy font.

Ask yourself, ladies and gents, whether you’re really taking a suped-up chat-room with photos and a “Poke” option seriously. If you aren’t interested in being taken seriously, just contact me using the Build-Your-Vampire-Army application, because I'm always looking to pad out my friend list.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Do people still send memos?

Memorandum to all rockabilly kids:

Stop putting cherries on everything that I want to buy. It's really freaking me out.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

This space pod seats four.

I’m going to preface this entry by warning you (yes, you, oh boundless internet) that it might seem at first like I’m going somewhere meaningful and sentimental with all of this nonsense. I assure you, without the smallest shadow of a doubt, that I am not.

Somewhat deep people are always jawing on trying to define all manner of loaded, biblical-type words. Specifically I’m thinking of such arbitrary concepts as “right” and “wrong” or (to their friends) “good” or “evil.”

Lately I have been assaulted repeatedly with these terms over the pressing issue of wedding-reception-invitee-etiquette. [I feel by just typing that phrase my blog is going to get twice the hits. Internet fiends watching bootlegged anime are nothing compared to the sheer googling prowess of the prospective bridal class.]

Certain members of my family, being left nameless out of gaping obviousness, seem to feel that the rules of wedding attendance are so fundamental that they are completely warranted in using the cliché (and yet, so effective) guilting phrase: “Do the right thing.”

And to this I apply a basic theorem. There is nothing so serious in the implications of inviting to people to eat cake on your dime to provoke such severe language. I’m not perfecting the guest-list for the last space pod leaving earth as a fiery-hot comet draws increasingly near.

In my perception there are good things in the world (the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small being available to stream online) and also bad (attentive salespeople).

So unless it’s about the crack-fiends at the mall, the BBC or the aforementioned space pod, I don’t want particularly wish to be saddled with the fate of personal morality.