Now, where was I...?

Between Facebooking, IMing, Yelping and GoogleReading, I haven't had much time to put together a lengthy coherent thought about anything remotely important. Brain waves have varied between blurbing about what I "is" at the moment, composing three word updates on IM, briefly rambling about what I ate and why it [sucked/rocked], and glancing momentarily at the latest fugs or prison breaks.

This makes me sad. It's not that I don't enjoy the snippets, but it just adds to my suspicion that peoples' attention spans and patience levels are NOT being helped by all this frivolous technology. Yes, it might let me see pictures of a long lost high school friend's four kids, or spare me a bad meal, or save me a millisecond by clicking a button instead of going to a bookmark and scrolling down, but thanks to technology I'm starting to expect immediate gratification in other areas of life.

Like at the grocery store. I used to be fine with lines at the grocery store. It gave me time to peruse those magazines I would never, ever purchase. Nowadays I look for the shortest line, and keep an eye on the other lines, and get anxious when the person in front of me won't put the little divider thingie behind their stuff so I can start loading my stuff, because DON'T YOU KNOW? I have to get home to find out what so-and-so scored on Scramble.

OK, it's really not that bad. I do regret that all these distractions take my attention from more important things like having meaningful conversations with friends, crafting reasonably intelligent blog posts (but then again, when did I ever do that?), playing with the cat or watching sixteen consecutive episodes of The Wire.

Honestly, my biggest fear is that all this mindnumbing technology is creating a generation of young whippersnappers with no attention spans whatsoever... Hey, look, a penny!

By the way - did you catch this guy on the Colbert Report last night? I've gotta read this book.