I'll Mature When I'm Dead

by Dave Barry

  Clutching the program, you take your seat, which is near the back of the auditorium, because all the seats near the front have been claimed by Serious Dance Moms who got in line early, in some cases before their daughters were actually born. Finally the lights dim, the curtain goes up, and you begin to watch other people’s daughters perform their routines. Each routine takes about three minutes, or, in Dance Recital Time, six years.

  The most entertaining routines are the ones performed by three-year-old girls, usually dressed as something cute, such as bumblebees, so that everybody, even men who are not fathers of the dancers, goes “awwww.” The bumblebees come out in a line, some looking excited to be out there, some terrified, some lost, some picking their cute little bumblebee noses. But when the music starts, an amazing thing happens: what had been a random-acting group of little girls suddenly transforms itself into a group of little girls who are continuing to act pretty much randomly. Some face the audience; some turn around, presenting the audience with their little bumblebee butts.

  Meanwhile, offstage, their dance teacher is frantically gesturing, trying to remind them how their routine goes. If, for example, they’re supposed to twirl, the teacher will twirl. One or two of the more alert bumblebees will notice, and they will twirl, usually in different directions. Other bumblebees, noticing this, will then twirl, so you have a chain reaction of twirling, along with a certain amount of falling down, standing still, and running offstage in tears. Then the music stops and everybody applauds heartily, and the bumblebees run off the stage, except for the ones who remain on the stage.

  As I say, these are the more entertaining routines. Most of them, however, consist of other people’s daughters prancing around more or less in unison to various styles of music that you would not listen to voluntarily, using the medium of dance to express universal human emotions such as love, fear, joy, despair, and prancing.

  Then, finally, comes the moment you have been waiting for: You fall asleep. At some point after that you feel your wife’s elbow, which is the signal that your daughter’s first routine is about to begin. The lights come up, the music starts, and . . . There she is! You watch in amazement as she performs the routine she has practiced for so long. You are stunned. She’s so beautiful! So poised! So confident! Your heart swells with pride. You can’t believe that’s really your daughter up there.

  Then you realize that it’s not, in fact, your daughter. At this distance they’re hard to tell apart under all that makeup. You look around frantically, and just as the routine ends, you locate your daughter. Your heart re-swells with pride. Then you settle in for the long wait until her second routine. To pass the time, you think of ways in which the dance-recital experience could be improved. It goes without saying that beer vendors would be a huge help. But there is another element that I believe would make the dance-recital experience far more enjoyable for male audience members: competition.

  Imagine this scene: Onstage is a group of daughters in tutus, prancing around to classical music, expressing the Hopefulness of Spring. Suddenly a second song, some kind of hideous inscrutable modern music, starts playing on top of the first one, and a new set of daughters appears onstage in leotards and starts slinking around to express Existential Angst. There are collisions. A member of the Hopefulness team goes down hard. A member of the Angst team takes a tutu to the eye. Then things get really exciting as a third song breaks out, this one hip-hop, and a third dance team charges onstage, dressed as tough streetwise urban gang members wearing enormous quantities of makeup. Now the stage is total chaos. The audience is also getting into it; parents are punching each other. Somebody knocks over a beer vendor. Wouldn’t that be great? It would also help if there was a score-board, and some kind of ball.

  Of course none of these things will happen. These are just daydreams you’re having while you’re waiting to see your daughter again, assuming you recognize her. By the time her second routine starts, she may have gone through puberty.

  Finally, the recital ends, and you stagger outside. You reunite with your daughter and present her with the bouquet of flowers that your wife bought at the supermarket. You tell her she was wonderful, and you mean it sincerely. She was the best dancer you have ever seen. Assuming that was her.

  Technology

  There was a time when the human race did not have technology. This time was called “the 1950s.” I was a child then, and it was horrible. There were only three TV channels, and at any given moment at least two of them were showing men playing the accordion in black and white. There was no remote control, so if you wanted to change the channel, you had to yell at your little brother, “Phil! Change the channel!” (In those days people named their children “Phil.”)

  Your household had one telephone, which weighed eleven pounds and could be used as a murder weapon. It was permanently tethered to the living-room wall, and you had to dial it by manually turning a little wheel, and if you got a long-distance call, you’d yell, “It’s long distance!” in the same urgent tone you would use to yell “Fire!” Everybody would come sprinting into the living room, because in the 1950s long distance was more exciting than sex. In fact there was no sex in the 1950s, that I know of.

  There were automobiles, but they lacked many of the features that automobiles have today, such as a working motor. In the Barry household, we had a series of cars named (these were all real Barry cars) the “Rambler,” the “Minx,” the “Metropolitan,” and the “Valiant.” You could rely on these cars—rain or shine, hot or cold—to not start. The “Metropolitan,” in particular, was no more capable of internal combustion than of producing a litter of puppies.

  There also were computers in those days, but they filled entire rooms and weighed many tons. An ill-advised effort by IBM to market one of these in the “laptop” configuration was abandoned when the first test user was converted into what the medical examiner’s report described as “basically a human pizza twelve feet in diameter.”

  This pre-technology era was especially brutal for young people. We had no Wii. Mainly what we had to play with was rocks, which we had to throw at each other by hand. What few toys we had were lame, like the Slinky, which did basically one thing: go down stairs. And it did that only in the TV commercials, which apparently were filmed on a planet with much more gravity. Here on the Earth, the Slinky went down maybe two steps, then fell over on its side, twitched, and died, like a snake having a heart attack.

  We also had the Wheel-O. This was a toy that, by federal law, was issued to every American boy and girl who was alive during the Eisenhower administration. The Wheel-O consisted of a red wheel and a wire frame:

  The wheel stuck to the frame because of magnetism, which was a new and much more exciting force back then. To play with your Wheel-O, you tilted the frame so the wheel rolled down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, and so on. Before you knew it, two minutes had flown by, and it was time to go outside and throw rocks.

  The most technologically advanced toy I had was the Erector Set, which was a box containing hundreds of metal pieces, gears, bolts, nuts, washers, etc., along with instructions showing how to assemble these into projects such as a miniature Ferris wheel that actually rotated. This required many hours of effort, but I found that if I followed the instructions carefully, I learned something important: I could never, ever, make an object that looked anything like the miniature Ferris wheel in the instruction book. What I produced looked more like a tragic miniature building collapse. That is why I became an English major.

  We have come a long way since the 1950s. Today we have technology up the wazoo,9 and we use it constantly in our everyday lives. Consider, for example, my typical morning routine:


  For openers, I sleep next to an alarm clock that is accurate to something like one jillionth of a second. This is because it receives wireless signals from the official U.S. atomic clock, which as its name suggests is a clock made out of atoms, making it very small and difficult to wind. Half the time the government scientists can’t even find it. (“Dang! I think I sucked the atomic clock up my nose again!”) But it’s very accurate, so when I go to bed at night and set my alarm clock for 7 A.M., I know for a fact that in the morning I will be awakened at precisely 5:43 A.M., because that is when my dog, Lucy, decides that it’s time to go out.

  Lucy is also part of the high-tech revolution: She contains a tiny implanted microchip, which can identify her if she runs off, which is not an unlikely scenario given that she has the IQ of a radish. Actually, that’s not fair. If you feed and care for a radish, it will have the sense to stay with you. Whereas Lucy would leave in a heartbeat with anybody. A machete-wielding lunatic could come to our house, hack us to tiny pieces, then whistle to Lucy, and she would cheerfully follow him away, especially if he was holding her squeaky toy.

  So anyway, at 5:43 A.M. sharp, according to the U.S. atomic clock, Lucy and I head out to the backyard so she can initiate the complex process of finding an acceptable place to poop. I think that while they’re implanting chips in dogs, they should implant one in the dog’s brain, assuming they can find it, that would allow you to make your dog poop by remote control. As it is, I have to wait while Lucy sniffs, one by one, every single odor molecule in our yard before settling on the exact spot where she has pooped 1,378 consecutive times.

  In the old low-tech days, I would spend this idle backyard time standing around scratching myself with both hands. But now, thanks to technology, I scratch with just the one hand, while using the other one to be productive on my cell phone. With this amazing device, I can send and receive e-mail and text messages, surf the Internet, pay my bills, book flights, play games, take pictures, listen to music, watch TV shows—in short almost anything except reliably make or receive telephone calls. For some reason, cellular telephones lack that capability. It’s as if they made a washing machine that mowed your lawn and made daiquiris, but if you put your actual clothes into it, they burst into flames.

  But my point is that while Lucy is inhaling her way around the yard, I am using cell-phone technology to get things done. I am reading e-mails offering to sell me male-enhancement products so powerful that I will need a wheelbarrow to cart my privates around. I am also reading e-mails from available women on other continents who are hoping to strike up a friendship with me that could blossom into a deeper relationship with the promise—someday—of exchanging intimate personal financial data.

  I can also use my phone to go to Facebook and Twitter to read messages and “tweets” from a vast network of people I do not really know, updating me on their random neural firings on such issues as what they are eating. In the old pre-technology days, it would have been almost impossible to replicate Facebook or Twitter. The closest you could get would be to mail dozens of postcards a day to everybody you knew, each with a brief message about yourself like: “Finally got that haircut I’ve been putting off.” Or: “Just had a caramel frappuccino. Yum!”

  The people receiving these postcards would have naturally assumed that you were a moron with a narcissism disorder. But today, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, you are seen as a person engaging in “social networking.” As the technology improves, we’ll reach the point when you don’t even need a phone to socially network. You’ll have some kind of device implanted in your brain so you can receive other people’s brain waves directly as they occur. You will know everything about them. You will know when they fart.

  Speaking of which: When Lucy finally decides, after much deliberation and a minimum of eight full clockwise rotations of her body, to poop on exactly the same spot for the 1,379th consecutive time, we head into the house. The sun isn’t even up yet, and I have already, using handheld technology with just one hand, wasted more time than my father did in an entire day.

  And I am just getting started. In the kitchen, I turn on a TV set that has hundreds of channels devoted to every conceivable subject including celebrity bunion removal.10 I tune in to one of the literally dozens of news shows, all of which feature a format of 55 percent celebrities promoting things, 30 percent e-mails from viewers, and 15 percent YouTube videos showing bears jumping on trampolines. While I’m catching up on these developments, I turn on the programmable coffeemaker, which I hope that someday, perhaps by attending community college, I will learn to program. Then I take a breakfast “sausage” made of processed tofu from the freezer and pop it into the microwave oven, which in seconds converts it from a frozen, unappetizing gray cylinder into a piping hot unappetizing gray cylinder. It performs this culinary miracle by bombarding the frozen tofu with atomic radiation—the very same deadly force that, back in the 1950s, caused insects to mutate into savage monster killers the size of Charles Barkley, now harnessed by modern technology for peaceful breakfast purposes.

  OK, that might not be 100 percent technically accurate. The truth is, I don’t really know how my microwave oven works. I also don’t know how my cell phone works, or my TV, or my computer, or my iPod, or my GPS, or my camera that puts nineteen thousand pictures inside a tiny piece of plastic, which is obviously NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE, but there it is. Basically all I know about these devices is how to turn them on, and if they stop working, I know I should turn them off and then turn them back on, because usually this makes them resume working. If it doesn’t, I know I need to buy a new device, because nobody in the entire world knows how to fix a broken one.

  Don’t get me wrong: I love technology. I don’t want to go back to the days when people had to churn their own butter and make their own sausage by going out to the barn and personally slaughtering tofus. But it bothers me that I depend on so many things that operate on principles I do not remotely understand, and which might not even be real.

  Take “digital” technology. At some point (I think during the Clinton administration) all media—photographs, TV, movies, music, oven thermometers, pornography, doorbells, etc.—became “digital.” If you ask a technical expert what this means, he or she will answer that the information is, quote, “broken down into ones and zeros.” Which sounds good, doesn’t it? Ones and zeros! Those are digits, all right!

  But here’s the problem. Say you’re watching a TV show. Say it’s 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, the angst-ridden lone-wolf federal agent who protects America from terrorism by sooner or later causing the violent death of pretty much everybody he meets. If you study this show carefully, you will notice something curious: Jack Bauer never goes to the bathroom. That’s why he’s so ridden with angst.

  But the other curious thing you will notice is that no matter how close you get to the TV screen—even if you get one inch away and examine the picture (I have done this) with a magnifying glass, so that any given one of Jack Bauer’s nostrils is the size of the Lincoln Tunnel—you cannot see any ones or zeros. They’re lying to us about that.

  Why is this? My theory—and bear in mind that I have won several journalism awards—is that the “experts” don’t really know how any of this technology works either. All they know is that it arrives here in boxes from China. I don’t know where the Chinese are getting it, but I do know that they’re not making it themselves. I have been to China, and if the Chinese had any grasp of technology, they would have better toilets.

  So the bottom line is that we have become totally dependent in our daily lives on technology that nobody understands and that could be coming from (this is speculation) space. What if all this technology is some kind of sneak alien invasion force? What if one day all these devices rose up and attacked us? What if, for example, all the Bluetooth phone earpieces in the world suddenly sprouted drill bits and bored into people’s brains?

  OK, that particular example would actually be fine. But you s
ee my point, don’t you? If so, could you send me an e-mail or tweet explaining it?

  No, seriously, my point is that technology is a blessing, but it is also a serious potential threat to humanity in general. Somebody needs to look into this. I’d do it myself, but right now I can’t. My atomic-clock alarm is going off, signaling that it’s 7 A.M., which means it’s time for me to go back to bed.

  Solving the Celebrity Problem

  I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I am something of a minor celebrity.

  “How minor? ” you ask.

  I’ll give you an example. Often, when I’m in a public place such as an airport gate area, I’ll notice that one of the other passengers keeps looking at me. Finally this person will come over, and we’ll have a conversation like the following (I have had this conversation literally dozens of times):PERSON: I hate to bother you, but I’m a huge fan of your writing.

  ME: Thanks! No bother at all!

  PERSON: And my kids LOVED Hoot.

  ME: Um, you’re thinking of Carl Hiaasen. We both write for the Miami Herald. I’m Dave Barry.

  PERSON (HUGELY EMBARRASSED): Oh my God, I am so sorry.

  ME: It’s OK, really. Carl’s a good friend.

  PERSON: I’m a big fan of your writing, too!

  ME: Thanks.

  PERSON: Obviously I am lying. (The person never actually says that last part out loud; there is no need.)

  I’m not saying that I’m as big a celebrity as Brad Pitt, although when you look at the following side-by-side comparison of Brad and me in chart form, you’ll see that there’s not really such a huge difference: 11