The Cocoon in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

I have to be honest, I cannot operate technology. Like at all. It’s confounds me at every turn. I have somehow gotten through college without ever having learned how to use PowerPoint. I don’t have Microsoft Word or Excel or any of that nonsense. I am pretty much useless when it comes to technology.

I’m not entirely useless. I can do basics on Word and Excel because I was shown how to use them back in the 90s (but PowerPoint didn’t exist then, so I got left in the dust). Also, my major does train us in a few complicated programs, mostly Adobe. I can operate Photoshop like a beast, as well as InDesign Desktop Publishing.

But where I was going with this whole technology spiel is that there is one absolutely amazing thing about technology. You can use it like a time capsule. You can actually gear technology to completely shut out present day occurrences and live almost entirely consuming media from a different time period. For me, my chosen time period is the 90s. I know this sounds ridiculous, but just follow me. Media is received completely differently than it was twenty years ago. The radio almost doesn’t exist anymore. I can listen exclusively to whatever I want for nearly as long as I want thanks to limitless storage capacity in MP3 players or streaming radio (although, you still get pesky commercials for products that would’ve been unheard of in 1994). Thanks to video streaming providers, like Netflix and Hulu, and the ease of downloading movies or television shows, you no longer have to watch anything you don’t want to.

I watch and listen to the same exact things I listened to when I was in high school. I still listen to Jagged Little Pill at least once a week. I fall asleep nearly every night to Are You Afraid of the Dark? as if it were still 1995. Using 21st Century technology, I have completely insulated myself from the 21st Century.

The internet really frustrates me. This quarter, I have been taking a Communication Law class and one of the major components of the class is the First Amendment of Constitution of the United States of America. I’m really not sure I agree with the First Amendment. I mean, I agree with it in theory, but in practice, it creates so many problems.

I get it. The internet allows for the free trafficking of ideas which contributes to greater complexity of intellect amongst a civilized society. Blah blah blah. In the 90s, the internet and computer technology were only for people who could understand the complex philosophical implications of that system. Now, any idiot can get on the internet and post something and it becomes gospel.

I read an article about dating for gay men in their 30s. I’m a gay man. I am now in my 30s. But this whole article said nothing to me. In fact, I think I read this article in Cosmo 10 years ago, but it was geared toward women. There were all these little things in it that struck me as really alien. It’s because I’m different.

I remember when I started blogging at OD in 1999, I read one writer who was 31 at the time. His writings seemed like they were on another planet. The things that he was worried about seemed like such strange concepts to my 15-year-old mind. I used to wonder what my writing would like when I was that… if I even would still be writing when I was 31. Would I be writing about my partner? Would I be writing about my career? Would I be writing about changing the storm drains on my house?

Now I am 31 and those things seem just as foreign and strange as they did to me at 15. I understand what they are and what they mean conceptually, but I am just as far from that life now as I was 15 years ago.

The article was filled with references like “you’ve dated enough losers now to know when something good comes along” and I just thought… I dated like three people in my twenties, and nearly all three of those people were crammed into one year-and-a-half span. It also said, “Now you have had enough time to adjust to your career path and know how to balance work and personal life, including dating and relationships…” and I just thought, WHAT?! I’m just getting ready to graduate, not even to mention that I have no idea what in God’s name I’m going to be doing four months from now? Balance? On the edge of a knife maybe…

The choices I have made in my life mean that I am at odds with all of the labels in which the world uses to identify me. Things like these articles remind me how out of step I am with the rest of the world in which I am surrounded. There is no peace from it. It is everywhere. Everything about the world now gives me anxiety and stresses me out.

And you wonder why I have retreated to the 90s. I feel as though there is nothing left for me now.