If you're not familiar with Draw Something, it's an app that, according to the App Store, is "the most popular social drawing and guessing game in the App Store with over 100 million drawings created! Experience for yourself the laugh-out-loud game your friends are raving about!"
Believe me, Apple. I want to experience this LOL-phenom all of my smart friends are raving about. But I can't. Because I have seen what it does to them. It makes my smart friends boring.
Okay: Just as I think that all chimpanzees will try to kill you if domesticated and assume that getting tired before 8 p.m. automatically means I have mono, I'm overstating things. My smart friends aren't boring all of a sudden because they like to draw pictures of penises for others. Still, since acquiring this app, some of my favorite, quick-witted, flowery prose-producing counterparts have checked out completely. I can't peel their beautiful faces away from their phones for even thirty seconds. I end up talking to their hair.
When I can manage to distract them, I get this "Look, mommy! Look!" routine, as my smart friend shakes his or her phone screen in my face to show off a blotted figure with a microphone sitting next to a banana that is supposed to be Conan O'Brien.It's worse than Grindr. Except with Grindr, we're usually looking at real dick pix, not simulated pencil sketches of peni (though, from talking to other Draw Somethings outside of this particular circle of mine, it seems that not everyone else's friends like to include genitalia in 90 percent of game rounds, or always select "pee" when given the option to scribble it for a guesser).
I'm not dogging the skills of my smart friends -- I myself can't draw a stick figure, let alone a beach scene involving the Statue of Liberty or a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. In fact, a friend's recent drawing of Coco was commendable. I'm just irritated that sometimes, when I'm sitting across the table from the smart friend I've met to share a meal and some gossip, I find that instead of listening to my very important story involving a mall cop and an illegal parking maneuver, he has been staring at his own crotch for the last ten minutes trying to guess "snakepit."
But I'm handling my Draw Something response as a useful lesson: It's free, unsolicited insight into my own childish behavior. Insight into the idea that as annoying as it is that my friends are on Draw Something, it is equally atrocious that I spend so much time texting, Tweeting and Facebooking while in the presence of actual people.I should note, though, that there are acceptable times to text or draw your fingers off: at the doctor's office, on the bus or to keep yourself from committing suicide while standing in what turns out to be the wrong line at the DMV. There is nothing modern or fun about waiting, so utilize technology to the best of your sex-scene-sketching abilities.
But when you're standing in front of me, tell me about a dick you saw. Don't show me a drawing of a wang you made for your friend in Canada, hoping they would know you were really trying to convey the word "bagpipe."
