The Future
"LESSON #1: People don’t want to know as much about you as you think they do. This may come as a shock, since you spend a whole lot of time preparing every last detail of your social network profiles to superfluously describe every facet of your being, but the reality is no one reads every word in social network profiles. They skim them, just like they skim your photos, your updates, your blog posts. Just like they skim your life.
The people you know and care about are the speed readers of your life. Like those old commercials from the 80’s, they’re sitting at a kitchen table with you opened in front of them while they run their fingers along your edges as quickly as possible, absorbing only the most important, most relevant parts. They don’t care what dandy musings and favorite quotes you have plastered across your MySpace profile. What they see is your name, your location, your status. What they see is all they want from you ever.
LESSON #2: Don't ever expect that just because you are having some kind of emotional trauma that anyone else needs to mirror your emotions. They absolutely do not have to feel something just because you feel it, and if they do, be highly suspicious of them! No one who really loves you will want to be just like you. It’s only the people you need to be wary about who willl react just the way you want them to."
Mike stops typing for a moment. Outside his window a man is giving a jump start to a woman’s car as she sits on the curb weeping into her cell phone. Mike spends ten minutes watching them, watching the woman cry and then thanking the man empathically for helping her. She drives off in a hurry as the man spends the next few minutes wrapping up his jumper cables and fidgeting with the hood of his truck which has a corner spring stuck on something and won’t go down. Finally he slams it shut, and Mike starts typing again.
"LESSON #3: Stop allowing things to distract you so easily! Focus and focus again! Your life is right now in this moment and all you can do about it is sit there and stare at strangers performing mundane tasks across the street. Don’t you think your time is worth more than that? Don’t you owe it to yourself to not care whether or not that man finally gets the hood of his truck to go down?"
Mike prints the page he’s just typed and folds it three times over and one time across. He puts it in a small envelope, then that envelope inside a larger manila envelope, he drives it to the bank and places it inside his safe deposit box. He double checks the date of expiration on the drawer as he returns the safe to the box. August 18, 2010. He’ll have to remove all the contents by then.
