Techno, Techno, Tech-tech-tech-tech, Techno-no-no

Technology--I never know if I love it or hate it. One moment I'm drooling over my new laptop, spending hours into the night looking up old Camille Paglia interviews and Googling everything about the human brain, the next minute I have a too-much-screen headache and I'm grumpy that there's no poppy field for me to bound in. Maybe it's just one of those poisonous relationships where you know one of you will end up throwing a martini into the other one's face, but at least it was an amazing, sexy ride.

I once saw two couples sitting in a restaurant that were the definition of juxtaposition in technology. First was an old man and an old woman, each reading the paper across from each other, sipping their tomato soup. She'd look up occasionally at him and point at something in a column. He'd grunt and nod.

Next to them was a young couple, a hot little woman and a nerdalicious man. They each were typing furiously on their laptops, sometimes with one hand so they could grab their lattes and sip simultaneously. She would look across at him sometimes, feed him a piece of bagel. He'd nod and hunch further into his screen.

I thought it would have made an amazing photograph--new, young, it doesn't matter. In mathematics, the numbers are irrelevant if the proportions are equal. And I thought in that moment how gorgeous technology could be.

That's why I've suddenly become a defender of it in my Humanities class. Me, someone who despises Nooks and Kindles and Nindles and Kooks and thinks a book without old pages is a travesty, someone who believes in "organic sound" from "violins" and "real musical instruments." Someone who resisted the appeal of ridiculous, Katy Perry, vocoder, clearly synthesized music for a long time--then fell, hard, face first into the fun and thrills that technology offers.

"Modern music isn't going to be on our syllabus," my Humanities teacher told us. "We're going to focus on the classics. You know, when music was real and meant something," she half-snickered. I wanted to remain quiet but instead, I was THAT student. I raised my hand and mentioned that music that makes you feel something is real. Maybe it is made up of weird, strange sounds, computerized instruments, false notions. But it's the music of my time. It's the music of Finley's time. Will she even care about natural instruments someday? Is that a universally, biologically implemented love that people have--or will she just be serenaded by the sounds of her generation? Does it really matter that much?

Since I've been born and raised, there have been night-and-day type changes made in the field of technology. World of Warcraft was that stupid Chex cereal computer game that came in the box. Can technology be beautiful? Hells yes it can. Can it be wasteful and ridiculous? Hells yes it can. Do I need to be threatened by it any longer? I don't think so.

What was the point of this post? I dunno.

Am I going to stop asking myself questions like this? Okay. Yes. Done now.