“Thirteen-month-old baby, broke the looking glass / Seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past.”
The answer was right there, but what was it? I knew I heard those lyrics before, but I couldn’t just name the song. The right circuits in that portion of my brain weren’t connecting.
This has happened to others before – knowing the answer but being unable to speak it aloud – it’s what makes us human.
However, this night was different. This was the night I realized just how dependent I, maybe even we, have become on technology.
Every Thursday night, a group of my friends and I travel to a bar in Arlington Heights to take part in its weekly trivia night. It’s nothing too complicated; a simple two-hour, four-round event where an array of questions ranging from world geography to movies to sports are asked, answered and points are tallied up.
This was maybe my fifth week going? I’ve always enjoyed trivia nights but have never had the time to go due to my current job in Evanston (working a couple of hours at night really hinders one’s availability).
Enter this scenario. Our team has a respectable 13 points going into halftime (of the 21 possible so far — we didn’t have a good first round).
The question for the “halftime” round was lyrics. One song from the 70s, one from the 80s, one from the 90s and one from the 00s. We were given a line or two and then had to determine the name of the song.
The 70s was aforementioned. The 80s turned out to be Erasure’s “A Little Respect” (again, something I knew but couldn’t name — we didn’t get that one right). The 90s was Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” and the 00s was Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.”
From the second the host read those lyrics, I knew the answers. The last two were pretty easy. The “thirteen-month-old baby” one was driving me insane. What was it?
I felt compelled to cheat (that is, to look up the lyrics in my phone) — even though the No. 1 rule of this event is to refrain from using any sort of technology to get the answer.
I just had to know. If we were to describe the need I possessed to figure out this answer, one would quote Veruca Salt from the classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” – “don’t care how, I want it now.”
In this age of technology, with the vast amount of information that is available at our fingertips, I realize I have turned into someone who just needs to know the answer. Waiting the simple two minutes for the song to end before the answer is read aloud seemed like eternity, especially when the information is right there.
I think, in a way, we all have. It’s just so much easier to access information now that, when we are presented with an obstacle, it kind of throws us for a loop. A “wait, what? You mean, we have to wait?” sort of response.
I saw it in my little brother, who switched cell phones as he prepared to move to Hiroshima, Japan. To save some money, he switched his contract from a smartphone to a basic flip phone. He couldn’t use it in Japan, anyway, but it was merely so he could keep his phone number.
He had the cell phone for about a week before he moved, and you could tell he was not a fan. Someone who is connected to the world through a piece of technology is all of a sudden cut off. Especially to a piece of technology that I used in high school (which means it’s at least 10 years old at this point).
From unlimited texting to a device that can only store 50 messages at a time. No more Internet. No ability to send or receive emails.
To quote him, “I feel like I’ve been thrown back into the stone age.”
I can see what he means. Granted, I still possess a smartphone and am able to do all of the actions mentioned in the paragraph before the quote, I felt so cut off in that five-minute period on Thursday. Because I had to rely on my gut. I couldn’t get the answer right away.
I don’t like what I have become, but I have accepted it. That is just the age in which we live. One that is consumed by information, and the speed at which we are able to receive it.
The answer was Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” by the way. I did eventually get it, but this involved me singing aloud to our group. Without a melody to back me up, let’s just say, it wasn’t pretty.
We ended that night in third place. A $10 gift card. Sweet.
