Dear Amritsar,
I'm just your average teen who spends seven hours, 12 minutes and 49 seconds playing online games, checking what my fiends are doing on Farcebook and catching up on the latest ocelot getting its head stuck in a jar videos. That was, until the day everything changed.
Wednesday.
That was the day I was diagnosed with Sonnenfeld-Reitman, a degenerative disease that makes it increasingly painful for me to look at screens. The doctor explained that it had something to do with microscopic rifts in my eyes' oculus muscles, but all I could hear was, "The headaches will get increasingly worse until you either claw your eyes out or give up screen-based entertainment for the rest of your life." Well, that and, "Fair d'ost thine brine suply intertwine with Mine craft," but, that didn't seem as immediately important. Or, as delayedly important, for that matter. My point is that it was easily ignored.
I can't give up screens! I live my life on screens! (Literally - the floors of our home are all room-sized monitors. My dad had some strange ideas about popular culture. Don't ask.) How would I communicate with my friends? - none of us knows how to talk when there are no cameras pointed at us! And, oh my blog, what would I do with my time? I can't read - books have complete sentences and stuff (how can anybody concentrate long enough to read a novel?). I can't go to live plays because I'm allergic to sawdust, and I can't go to live concerts because I get nosebleeds whenever I'm in a room with more than 23 people.
What am I going to do?
Geraldine Scarpetti
Hey, Babe,
Actually, the average teen only spends seven hours, 12 minutes and 46 seconds online, but my friends say my quibble gland over-excretes at the most inopportune moments, so I will fight the urge to point that out to you. Instead, I will say that you have a looooong, arduous journey ahead of you, so be sure to cram your emotional baggage with a lot of heavy coats and long underwear.
In the short term, you're going to go through the five stages of grief, as outlined by Elisabeth Kubler-Elph: denial, anger...infantile whinging...umm, hair pulling tsuris and...and...and...chocolate meringue. More or less. I used to know them back in grad school, but that was such a long time ago...
If you're planning on going through the five stages of grief (I hear it's all the rage with kids these days), keep in mind that, like all emotions, they're messy. One moment, you could be in denial, the next, infantile whinging, the next back to denial. Or, you could skip infantile whinging altogether and go straight to hair pulling tsuris. Some people settle comfortably into anger and never progress to chocolate meringue in their lives. Many people. Too many people, frankly, although it does explain the sorry state of the world these days. If you have a choice, skip the other stages and go straight to chocolate meringue.
Not that you have a choice. Did I mention emotions = messy?
However you deal with the five stages of grief, you will ultimately end up spending a lot of time inside your own head. Now that the distraction of modern culture has been taken away from you, you're going to have to reacquaint yourself with yourself.
I'd send roses.
Some people see their minds as a padded cell. Others see their minds as a funhouse, complete with distorting mirrors, moving floors and rotating barrels you have to walk through to exit. A better way to conceptualize what you're about to experience is that your mind is your home, a home you may have taken for granted for many years, which, as a result, needs a good dusting, the replacement of burnt out lightbulbs and perhaps getting rid of some of the rattier furniture. Oh, and you might want to rethink the wallpaper in a few of the rooms - honestly, it was out of date when you moved into the place! You may also find that the oven in the kitchen needs replacing - it's an emotional firestorm just waiting to happen! Oh, and the place looks too small to accommodate children: you may have to call a contractor to add on a couple of rooms.
I...I may suffer from Intermittent Metaphor Stretching Syndrome; my friends are in the middle of debating this one. Still, I believe my point has been made.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: I said I would fight the urge to point that out to you - I didn't say I would win.