I have too many options. (Suffragettes in graves around the world are rolling over restlessly, or perhaps heaving a finally-satisfied sigh.) I have only to turn on the computer to know that this is true. Because in the computer age, my office (the computer) is also my shopping mall, my newspapers and magazines, my cinema, my water cooler.
Of course you know all this.
But more than that. Because even when I squint my brain into a tight-winched focus, even when I bypass the gossip and the models and the housewares on sale today only and go straight into Microsoft Word, even there I have too many options. Before I even start, rows of icons are offering to emphasize my text, check my errors, capitalize my sentences for me, and am I writing a letter? And would I like help with that?
My personal Moms is awesome, but Word is the hovering, anxious, art-crushing mother I never had, so solicitous to make me lunch, to brainstorm with me, to quash my errors in advance so I get a good grade. I long for the zombie silence of a blank piece of paper.
I will be thirty soon. For god’s sake, somebody buy me a typewriter.
