I'm Not Pinterested

The ultimate catalog and bathroom reader!

This morning, as I was standing at the stove stirring walnuts into my oatmeal, my husband shared a story he was reading in the Wall Street Journal. It was about Snapchat, the online messaging app wherein sent photos and videos disappear seconds after they are seen by the recipient. Apparently teens and twenty-somethings are heavy into it. This has led to some of them "obsessively cultivating Snapstreaks," which occur when messages between two people are exchanged for three consecutive days, earning them a little flame emoji.

There are so many things wrong with the preceding paragraph, it's hard to know where to start. First of all, it's far better to add the walnuts after the oatmeal is done. If you add them during cooking, they invariably get too soft. I learned this today. Second, who the heck needs to have a message disappear besides Hillary Clinton and John Podesta and every other snarky politician who ever garnered votes, and surely they've got better methods? But for regular folks, if it's so damn secret or so damn important just say it in person, or at least on the phone.

And last and perhaps most important, what's with all the emojis? They are replacing normal conversation and turning us all into drooling automatons. On the plus side, after North Korea bombs us back to the Stone Age and we're surrounded by rubble and have lost all our vocabulary along with our hair and teeth, we'll still be able to communicate, sort of like those hieroglyphics the cavemen used. (Don't get me wrong; I use them frequently; that big yellow "thumbs up" is my go-to answer for everything these days.)

Another modern menace besides Twitter that I completely reject, misunderstand and just plain abhor is Pinterest, wherein you get yourself a page online and "pin" things you are interested in onto it, so that everyone in the entire world can see just what floats your boat. Why anyone needs this remains a mystery to me, when you could just tell them about it. Why do strangers have to know that you like a particular bedspread or watermelon smoothie recipe or brand of diapers or, in fact, anything at all unless it's the answer to world peace or ending hunger or curing cancer? Now those would be worth pinning!

Pinterest calls itself "the world's catalog of ideas." What, they never heard of Hammacher Schlemmer?