MC + GPS = BFF

So, yesterday I took the little GPS out for its first official drive. I was going out to Worcester to have lunch with Peter Blute of WCRN Radio, where I have done a number of interviews and will be a regular guest. (I'll let you all know when we've figured out my schedule.)

It was a phenomenal experience. If you've been on the fence about getting one, let me push you over like Emo Philips in that "Guy on the Bridge" joke. You know how political scientists and pundits sonorously intone about the tradeoffs between freedom and security? With a GPS, you have both! Mine even tells you what your the estimated time of arrival is, so you know if you need to call and tell people you'll be late. It's like the ideal parent, giving you roots and wings at once.

Basically, if they'd put Alan Rickman's voice on the thing, I'd marry it. (For all I know there is one with Alan Rickman's voice, and Mr. Improbable deliberately got me the one with the flat-voiced American woman for that very reason. I wonder how long it will be before they offer custom voices ... "British Don" would be fun, but what about "Sarcastic Gay Man"? Marge Simpson? Captain Picard?)

The intersection of technology and handicap is a fascinating one.* I'm not claiming that my bad sense of direction is a anything like a real disability--for one thing, it only manifests itself in Boston--but it's certainly a shortcoming that technology has removed for me, just as my contact lenses take away the burden of my bad eyesight. Are these, then, "really" disabilities or not? Some of the disability-rights community maintain that disability is a cultural problem, not a medical one. I can't go that far in my thought, at least not yet, but I can see what they're talking about.

Because society/technology can create disabilities, too. Think about it. Before we invented beer--which was a long time ago, but there was a beerless age e'er back in the mists of time--there couldn't have been any alcoholics, could there? Even though whatever patterns of genetics and brain chemistry and emotional response lead to alcoholism today must still have been there as a potential in us then. And before literacy, no one was dyslexic. Which brings up, in a fun science-fictiony way, the question of what as-yet-undiscovered potential for disability or disease lies within us? Maybe we'll be invaded by aliens and some people will turn out to be allergic to them--or irresistibly attracted!

Now there would be a fun idea for a novel ... all written in letter form, about an advice columnist in the year 2525! Hey, where's my silver jumpsuit?

*A couple of days ago I was browsing through some back entries on this blog, and some informal notes and things I'd written for myself, and realized how much I overuse the word "interest" in noun, verb, and adjective forms. So I'm trying to work on that. Later that day I was in a doctor's waiting room and started to take this quiz in Scientific American Mind magazine to find out how susceptible to boredom I am. Then I realized, wait, one of my biggest writing problems is that I overuse the word "interest." I guess I'm not overly susceptible to boredom. So I put the magazine down and stared at the wallpaper. It was amazing.