4901151195_c8faf63a51I try. I really do. But when it comes to those ever-smaller and lighter devices that are meant to make my life easier, as game as I am, I always feel like I am in their service rather than the other way around. And it’s starting to piss me off.

My latest challenge is the touchscreen. Touchscreens are obviously the wave of the future (i.e., next week, at the rate these things become obsolete) and if I don’t get with the program, I will be limited to the one or two devices that still have a keypad. I was one of those people who had a hell of a time relinquishing my cassette tapes back when someone decided without asking me that CDs were better, and now I can’t bring myself to chuck my CDs even though everything is in MP3 and stuffed into my little iPod.

Because of the touchscreen, in just the last week, my ass called my friend with the young child in LA and woke her up at 4 in the morning (my phone was in the back pocket of slightly too tight jeans and what was I thinking sitting down?); I texted a list of stuff I needed from the drugstore–including prescriptions and other sundries that I’d prefer not be the talk of the PTA room–to one of my kids’ friends’ moms; my cheek hung up on my hard-to-reach doctor; and called my agent a “ho” when I meant to be saying “hi.” Luckily, she’s a Formerly.

This is a distinctly Formerly condition, because we are just old enough not to have been raised with computers in the classroom or even mostly in the dormroom, yet just young enough to at least try to be fluent as adults if we want to make a living (not to mention order on-sale tankinis from J. Crew in large on the bottom and medium on the top. I’m grateful for the option but I do remember being in proportion, and not long ago!)

My mom, who is 70, can belly up to a  Verizon Wireless tech counter and with a straight face ask some to please help her retrieve her messages from her ultra-simple phone with the large keypad because, “I think people have been calling me.” But because I aspire a bit higher and need to be able to tend to this blog on the go, am regularly flummoxed my Droid, a “smartphone” that someone a few years younger and a few IQ points higher can operate as easily as a calculator. And yet I don’t believe I get to opt out. I need a phone like this more than it needs me. The power dynamic in this relationship sucks!

I welcome any and all advice, as long as it doesn’t involve having my fingers surgically made narrower.

Photo by mynameisharsha CC