please call me
i had a conversation with a bot against my will and now i'm crashing out
doing something very different here! this is kind of a poem, kind of stream of consciousness thing, kind of personal essay. let me know if you like it! (if you hate it keep it to yourself <3)
call me if you need to ask me something or tell me something or just want to say hi or are lonely or bored.
i’m not good at talking with machines.
i’m addicted to my phone like everyone else so i don’t know why i’m embarrassed to reply to a text right away, and then i have to remember to reply when it seems like enough time has passed, but i usually forget and then i look like a jerk who always leaves you on read.
maybe i just resent being so profoundly reachable.
there was a brief period within my lifetime but before it really affected me when if you wanted to get ahold of someone you’d have to call them at their house or their work or the restaurant where they were having dinner.
i watched tv shows with jokes about teens tying up the phone by talking to their friends all day, assuming that some day I’d beg for my own private line, too.
instead, i begged for a facebook account.
did you know that the concept of the teenager has been around for less than a century?
a new species defined by its abundance of free time.
i don’t think it’s got much longer.
its kind of a meme in my house to periodically curse the invention of agriculture — wait, is it just in my house? i feel like i remember this being a running joke in 2019ish but i couldn’t for the life of me tell you if it was just within my friend group or a larger trend.
it is very clear that we’re not meant to live like this!
we’re supposed to know like 50 people and hibernate during the winter and spend most of our brainpower trying to stay alive long enough to reproduce.
i am sure that is a gross simplification of human evolution and i’m obviously not saying that i would prefer life in a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe than the sort of everything everywhere all at once living we do here in the 21st century.
(why do I feel the need to do all this preemtive caveating?)
i’m just saying our bodies weren’t built for it.
we are evolving though.
most people are lactose intolerant; being able to process dairy after infancy is a relatively new human mutation; those freaks should be really be called lactose tolerant.
i read an article — actually i didn’t even read the article, i read a summary of it in a newsletter — that suggested ai writing ticks have infiltrated human speech.
evolution is an algorithm.
what happened to the galapagos finches who saw their fellow birds drop out of their branches and start grubbing around on the ground?
when did they notice their stubby little beaks?
how long did it take to stop recognizing each other as kin?
it catches me off guard sometimes when i encounter these talking machines in my daily life.
i had a full conversation with a real estate agent’s “assistant” and when i got off the phone i said to my husband, “i think i was just talking to ai.”
at least with that one i understand the utility, though it backfired this time because it just guaranteed i won’t be using that real estate agent if i do end up scraping together the money and effort it takes to buy a home.
(i hate that it’s always referred to as buying a “home,” as if people who rent are homeless.)
but then a gal i’ve met a few times at craft markets messaged me on instagram to say hi and when i apologized for not responded for a few weeks she replied with the familiar detached friendliness of a customer service agent’s pregenerated prompt.
it threw me for a loop; what does this person want from me so badly that she presumably paid for a bot to try and get it?
what actually depresses me is that the transactional interaction is easier to comprehend.
the algorithm in my brain doesn’t have a prompt ready for an acquaintance reaching out just to say hi.