Essay on How to Survive Technology - Portugal

Life Without Commas
(Or
An Essay on How to Survive Technology)

I sat down to write_ this is rather an unnecessary observation to make given the utter difficulty of writing standing up. Either way_ I sat down to write. A million thoughts ran through my mind like tourists on their little green trains. My fingertips began to cruise the keyboard uncomfortably_ it is rather pathetic if I think about it: a teenager in the twenty-first century who cannot figure out how to properly use a laptop or a cell phone, a sixteen year-old who would rather use a pen than a pen-drive.
Moving on: I sat down to write. I knew exactly what to say (I always do when it will serve no specific purpose) and the words in dark ink (which is actually not ink) began to devour the whiteness of the page (which is not a page at all). I had written about a sentence when the world came crushing down: I hit the comma and nothing happened. I hit it again_ nothing at all. It was the first punctuation mark of the entire “page I tried the others.
Some worked such as the… period. I eventually found_ ”… the underscore hiding behind the question mark. And where was the question mark? one would wonder. I found it trying to pass as a hyphen. How on earth this happened I cannot say. One thing I can assure is that it was my fault_ it always is when it comes to technology and its complex gadgets (and by complex I mean things such as being able to comprehend the functions and keys and buttons that are actually there to help me).
What puzzled me the most was that the new arrangement of my punctuation marks seemed absolutely random and followed no logical pattern whatsoever. Slightly amused (and utterly appalled by my own incapacity to figure it out) I tried to come up with anything I could use. I am not one to give up easily_ you might call that stubbornness but I call it the ability to adjust. I hit every key I could think of and some that I had never noticed at all. When that did not work, I began to touch every key systematically. This process eventually led to me violently punching the keyboard. I found (scattered across the upper row) the parenthesis_ yet, to my horror, the apostrophe and the comma were nowhere to be found!
I needed a moment to regroup. I removed my hands from the keyboard bluntly (as if it had burned me). I nibbled distractedly on a lacquered fingernail_ what on earth was I to do? At that moment my self-disappointment turned to rage. What kind of an idiot would dream up such a function?! How terribly sadistic would one have to be to come up with something like this?! Who had the brilliant idea that upon hitting a specific set of keys one would summon the gift of scrambled punctuation marks?! And who on earth would want such a thing to happen?! Who uses this?!
Well I do not have a pause key and my print screen key either does not work properly or is meant to do something completely different from what I thought it did (a function which must be invisible). I do not have an iPod or an iPhone or any type of electrical appliances beginning with the letter ii. But eat your heart out_ my laptop can screw up the order of its keys.
And in the end I end up a subordinate of it instead of it being subsidiary to me. But I am here_ writing without commas and apostrophes and colons. In the end that is all there is to it_ we have to adjust to the way things work. They are not going to adjust to the way we all function because we are all different. Some of us use pen-drives and other write things down. The
stubbornness_ that is… ability to adjust_ will come in time. And even if we have to live like this (in a fast and unruly pace)_ even if we have to live without commas_ I trust that we will be able to adjust. That we will always be just humans.

Sofia Galego Silva
No. 23