My Technological Situation At Home

I’m on my 11″ MacBook Air (7) at the dinner table not having dinner, on Twitter checking for favorites while streaming Changing Lanes (2002) — starring Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson, in a fateful tale of corporate douche meets angry black man, respectively — on my 21.5″ iMac (9) via Netflix ($7.99/mnth, streaming only, hence making my DVD player (15) absurd), when I get a “favorite,” which sends non-vibrating sound alerts to my 16GB iPhone 5 (5) and iPhone 3G (4) — the latter from a defunct AT&T acct, and is now basically a glorified iPod, which I keep because I’m too lazy to sync all my songs and images — which are both on my WiFi, whose password is unprotected, as I keep having to reset my Linksys WRT54G router (3), and sometimes even my modem (2), and haven’t quite figured out how to set a password w/o the start-up disc i.e. from the “back end” I.P. address way. I’ve the former phone (5) on WiFi since my Verizon (6) plan ($80.00/mnth, unlimited calls and texts) only has 300MB data per month — though a mere $10.00 more would take me to 2GB, we’ll see — and I don’t want to “chew” through my data. Both phones actively “push” for notifications, so I walk over to my desk, on which both devices are presently being charged, and release each duplicate notification by going into their respective mirror Twitter apps and confirming what I already know to be true, that one of my followers — as corroborated in a tab on my MacBook Air (7) — had favorited a tweet, which I find affirmation in for 20-25 seconds. Here I grab the remote (14) and turn on my LG 42″ LCD TV (13) but have to walk over to my Comcast (1) cable box (11) and turn that on since its remote (12) doesn’t work — and no it’s not the batteries, just a long story about corporate bureaucracy. I manually toggle to Bravo (channel 44) which is now playing Kourtney and Kim Take Miami, whose protagonist(s)’ nasally way of speaking induces anxiety, so I mute them — all this because I want to be ready for Top Chef, which starts at 9:00 p.m., but don’t want to have to turn it on; it kind of comforts me that Bravo Network is already cued and ready to go. Besides, I enjoy the entropy of multiple narratives happening in my condo at once. I just have to unmute it, which will hopefully happen at least 2 minutes after Changing Lanes ends, giving me enough time to close out of my Safari on my iMac (9) and make it go to “sleep,” which is somewhat delusional, since I’ll likely “wake” it up to wank to a PornHub clip during the first set of commercials. Here’s when my mom calls me on my land line (10) to ask me if I got her warning email, which I had deleted, since it was an inconsequential yet paranoid rant forwarded within a circle of likewise gullible ladies whose original author is clearly senile. “Mom, I’m really stressed out right now,” I sort of lie. Changing Lanes ends with race relations tepid at best, and with the phone tucked between ear and shoulder, I unmute (14) the TV (13), filling my condo with a Kardashian argument between sisters involving cat shit. I tell my mom to just email her concerns or questions to me, since I’m thinking of getting rid of this land line (10), that the only reason I still have it is because it was “grandfathered” to me as 1/3rd of a “trio” package (Comcast internet-cable-phone (1) for $99.00/mnth), to which she mentions preferring to call, to talk to her son. My iPhone 5 (5) receives either a Twitter notification or a text, as I use the same sound alert (Tri-tone). It’s a text. Someone wants to see a movie. I tell her to get Netflix and become a little more self-reliant. My MacBook Air (7) evidently has hopped on another unprotected network (8), of much more distant signal, which I only discover trying to refresh my browser. I cuss, find my actual router, and refresh again. I receive multiple favorites for a tweet I wrote at 4:58 p.m., just before leaving work, about how a man who buys rope and a stool at Home Depot doesn’t need a receipt. An hour or two later, I am to discover a frozen porn clip in full screen when I wake up my iMac (9). I had paused it when my mom called. The image was strikingly clinical yet morbid, detached from all emotion, like Duchamp’s urinal, whose contours you blankly take in without any idea of what it could mean. It was a woman’s face up close and blurry, and it looked like she might have been crying.