It’s 2011 — the future — yet it’s not quite what I expected as a child. I kind of wonder if I could even make it all sound that interesting to my ten-year-old self. So, as a little thought experiment, here is an imagined conversation if I were able to go back in time and talk to young Frank J.
* * * *
“Hello! I am you from twenty-one years in the future!”
“Wow! Are you astronaut?”
“Well… no.”
“Then get away from me, loser!”
“Hey, not so fast. The future is a lot different than you would have thought. Didn’t get to be an astronaut — they’re still pretty rare — but I did get to be a blogger.”
“That like a plumber?”
“No, I write my thoughts on a computer and people all over the world get to read them.”
“So really cool people read what you write?”
“Well… people read what I write. Oh, and I’m also on this thing called ‘Twitter’ where I can instantly share my thoughts with thousands of people… as long as it’s under a 140 characters.”
“That’s asinine.”
“Wha… How do you even know that word?”
“So do you have jetpacks in the future?”
“No, not really. Those are dangerous.”
“Flying cars?”
“No, that would be dangerous too. We don’t like dangerous things in the future. Instead of flying cars, though, we have cars that are part electric and part gas.”
“Why?”
“Um… I’m not sure. I think to stop the planet from getting too hot… or too cold. One of those.”
“Asinine!”
“Come on; you can’t actually know what that word means.”
“So what cool tech do you have?”
“We have phones with lots of features on them.”
“Phones are boring! Who cares what features they have?”
“No, phones are really cool in the future. They’re like the coolest thing now.”
“You have the dumbest future ever!”
“No, it’s neat. You can throw birds at pigs.”
“What are you even talking about?!”
“I have a Droid.”
“You have a robot! Awesome!”
“No, it’s a type of phone.”
“Why is the future so boring and stupid and full of phones?! Do you even have robots?”
“Just… um… robot vacuum cleaners.”
“You guys took every cool idea for the future and made it boring! What do you guys even do in the future?”
“We… um… like things ironically.”
“Huh?”
“Well, we take things that are kind of cheesy, and pretend to like them. Especially things from our childhood. Like, things you really like now, we’ll pretend to be into that in the future.”
“So you’ll pretend to like the Simpsons?”
“Oh, you have that? That’s actually still on and decently watchable. Wow, I forget how old that show is.”
“So is there anything interesting from the future?”
“Well… we have a black president.”
“Like Mr. T?”
“Um… more like Urkel. I forget if you know who that is yet.”
“The future stupid and you are stupid!”
“Oh, I did bring one thing from the future: Here’s my new Nintendo 3DS
“THE FUTURE IS AWESOME! I WANT TO LIVE THERE!”