The Frustrations of a Desynchronized Life

Here’s my theory on how life works: every creature on Earth (and probably in the Universe, but let’s start with Earth) lives in its own personal bubble of time-space continuum. Each bubble co-exists with all the others and most of the bubbles of the same species are bungled together like bunches of frog eggs. But once in a while a bubble would get so desynchronized with the rest that the creature inhabiting it actually feels like they have been kidnapped by aliens during their sleep and dropped in the wrong time period.

You can guess where I’m going. My bubble is so desynchronized [(All together) How desynchronized is it?] I sometimes feel like an alien myself, trying to blend in with the Earthlings so as to not attract any attention, while being barely able to conceal my impatience with the people around me. For instance: I have a home phone (landline) for my Internet connection and because my banker said that I would look like a shady character without a regular telephone number. But I am using my cell phone as my main phone and whenever someone asks for my phone number, I look suspiciously like a shady character going «Um...uhh.. let me look at my PDA». Each time I give someone my home number, I also give them my cell phone number and tell them repeatedly: «Please put the cell phone number as the main number, don’t bother calling my home number, I will not pick up the phone, remember, don’t call me at that number». It’s no use, they keep calling the home number, get a message that my voice mail box is full and get all pissed off. I even have some close friends saying: Well, I didn’t call your cell phone, cause I didn’t want it to cost you money.

Other instances of unsynchronized lives are my tastes in music or my use of the computer. For some reason, all the people I know that are my age have stopped listening to any type of music after the eighties. They’ve heard vaguely of Eminem, and they don’t know about techno, house or trance or any such nonsense. Computerwise, they barely know how to open Outlook to read their emails so don’t ask them to open any attachments. I have a friend I’ve been trying to teach how to forward jokes she received without forcing her correspondent to open twenty attachments before reaching the joke, but she still doesn’t understand, so now I just delete any email of hers that contains jokes. All in all, my friends’ knowledge of computer technology is hard to distinguish from my 82-year-old mother’s knowledge.

On the other hand, I must look like a retarded old coot to my children and their friends because I don’t know Nas or The Game and when I instant-message my children, I type much too slowly for them and I can’t read their stupid abbreviations, except the ubiquitous LOL, ROTFLMAO and IMHO. I don’t feel bad or embarrassed about that because that’s how it should be, considering the age difference. But why am I so many light years ahead of my peers?