October 30, 2001
  yuppized

The Sims are dead.

Long live Tivo.

This could be my last entry for a while, since I've signed up for nanowrimo -- like that was a good idea -- which starts in all of twenty-four hours and forty minutes. For those who don't know what nanowrimo is, it's National Novel Writing Month, a spud of an idea baked by a man in Oakland, Chris Baty. (See? Even his name is reflective of belfries and flapping mice.) The theory behind nanowrimo is that, starting on November 1st, you sit down and churn out 50,000 words before the last day of November. Quality isn't an issue. Quantity however, is. This is basically an event for all those who are big enough to have 50,000 words trapped inside their skulls, thanks to all those long and lonely nights during high school when other teens were out partying and enjoying their youth while some of us spent that time productively reading Webster's Dictionary, Hardback Edition from cover to cover, instead.

"Do you get a prize at the end?" asks The Guy.

"No, no prize."

"You don't win anything? Do you get recognition? Does somebody read this?"

"No."

A blank silence. "Then why do it?"

"For the sake of doing it," I explain, patiently.

Plus, let's be honest, at the rate that new addictions have been hurtling into my life, there's no possible way that I could keep up a stringent schedule of writing journal entries every day, is there? I'm not a machine.

"It's quantity that matters, not quality," I tell him.

"Oh." The Guy's face clears. "If anybody can do that, it's you."

Bit by bit, I'm being consumed by the rampant materialism that is the religion of Silicon Valley.

I'm going to hell. At least I'll have company. Somebody save me a booth seat.

We went by Best Buy after the gun incident, a stopover that was originally meant for the purposes of getting me a cell phone. As one of the last cell phone virgins in Silicon Valley, I felt it was my responsibility to perform thorough research on the subject of cellular communication prior to the purchase of a $200 radioactive, carcinogenic tool of Satan. The subject of getting a cellular phone has been hovering in the back of my mind for a while, much like the thought of purchasing a car has been hovering in the back of my mind. This is the same portion of my mind that squirms through security in the dead of night, prompting dreams in which I go to 'NSync concerts and like the music, become Cruise Director on the Love Boat and flirt with Gopher, or -- God help me -- become a Pikachu and have an interspecies relationship with Hello Kitty.

I've always been a bit leery of telephones, ever since I played the part of an RA during my grad school years. There are few people more psychologically, emotionally, and professionally unstable than musicians; being assigned the role of caretaker for a building full of them was like being partnered with a colorblind technician in a bomb squad. Add in the bubbling putrescence of adolescent hormones, and the scatalogical immaturity of the average undergrad, and it's no wonder that my heartbeat would triple every time I heard my phone.

To my roommate, who lives for the telephone, this handicap is incomprehensible. There have been entire nights when our wireless home phone will disappear into her room, affixed to one of her ears, while her cell phone is firmly pasted to the other. At one point, prompted by curiosity, I started tallying the total number of hours she spent on the phone during a week. Speaking on both the home phone and the cell phone at the same time counted as separate hours. I determined that she spent an average of eleven hours on the phone a night, and that was only the hours that I knew about.

"I worry about you," I told her, gravely. "I'm afraid the electromagnetic pulses from the telephone are harmonizing in your head and causing destabilization on a subatomic level."

My roommate, who does not watch Star Trek of any generation, grinned at me, baffled. "Brain cancer, you mean?"

Lately, the issue of the cell phone has been more urgent, thanks in part to a yellowjacket and a certain mother figure. Rational people, like Flamingo and the Guy, point out that having a cellular phone wouldn't prompt my mother to call me if something happened. They use as proof of this argument the fact that she forgot to tell her daughters about her cancer, even while we were all living in the same building. I fail to find this a compelling argument against my purchase of a cell phone.

My point of view was that having a cell phone will effectively remove the last possible excuse from my mother's copious repertoire of excuses. My entire life has been spent eliminating them, one by one; I feel confident that I have now come close to the bottom of the list. I knocked down the one about wanting me to be more independent. I blew away the one about getting an education. I made a living in music, and I made a living doing something else. I now scoff at the one about wanting me to get out, meet people, and fall in love. Been there, done that. The last one left is, 'But I couldn't reach you.'

On the phone a couple of days ago, I also crossed off the, "But cell phone calls are too expensive."

"I make more than enough money," I informed her, "and the telephone minutes are on a flat rate anyway. I'd pay the same whether you called or not. So you have no excuse. You absolutely have to call when something goes wrong. On my cell phone. And," I added, triumphantly, "the phone number is really easy to remember, so you can't use that excuse, either."

The silence on the phone had, I thought, a feeling of defeat. After twenty-eight years, I had finally won.

And then: "I hear that with ther cerrurar phone, speaks, there is ther brain cancer."

Another point for the mother. Her lead. Oh, well. The world wouldn't have seemed right if I were ahead, anyway.

So, I said that my visit to Best Buy was originally meant for the purposes of getting me a cell phone.

What actually happened: I incidentally bought a cell phone. More importantly however, I bought one of the Sims Expansion packs, "Livin' Large," and I have to tell you, I'm not.

Livin' Large, that is.

You know why? I'm glued to the effing computer.

Hard to live large when you've become monosyllabic, eat through a straw, and live vicariously through electronic people.

And when I pull away from the computer, I get sucked into all the programming that Tivo offers me with. My favorite shows, all collected into this glorious, silver box of hashish! All the worst, most secret televised passions, bundled up in this cyclopic wonderland brain! Xena! La Femme Nikita! Buffy! All strong and -- let me point out, lily-white to boot -- female characters. (I do my part for my gender, I do! Take that, Taliban!) The Guy, whose purchase the Tivo is, has gone slightly insane with its programming; at last count, it had somewhere near 30 season passes scheduled. For those who don't know, it has the capacity to do what's called a "season pass," wherein it takes every instance of a certain show and records it for eventual viewing. Thus, if you're at work and didn't know that a lost episode of Babylon 5 is being played at 11:00 in the morning, you needn't worry. No more manual programming required! After a long day, you come home, prop up your feet, and flick on the Tivo. Voila! It has recorded every single instance of Babylon 5 that took place that day! A touch of your fingertips and you can fast forward past commercials, stop watching to get dinner, then restart at the exact place you stopped watching before.

All this is yours, for only $9.95 a month, and an initial outlay of $200+ for the box itself.

On Monday, I caught up with a six hour Good vs. Evil marathon on Sci Fi channel.

Is it worth it?

Hell, yes.

I need help.