My eyes hurt. They might fall out of their sockets.
If your eyes were about to fall out, I bet you would do everything you could to prevent that from happening. You would put some tape over them or maybe just lie down and let gravity do its business.
Not me, though. I haven't touched any office supplies with a ten-foot pole since finishing college. And as for science, us religious folk don't believe in that hocus pocus. That's what they tell me, anyway.
But there's a deeper reason as to why I am willfully allowing my eyes to ooze out of my skull (Chabad.org editors, eat your hearts out). The problem, I guess, is that I love the very thing that is doing this to me.
What could be so fascinating, so amazing, so cool, that would cause a person to ignore all this physical distress? It must be something fascinating, something beautiful, right? Well, you'd be wrong and you'd be right.
It's a cell phone. A smartphone, to be exact. In case you're not as big of a nerd as me, smartphones are the new big things in the world of technology. Instead of those crazy devices with buttons and antennas sticking out of them, smartphones are often based on technology that allows a touch screen. Essentially, the phone does not need any buttons, because the phone itself is one big button.
But more than that, smartphones are basically super-small computers. Little devices that connect to the internet, tell you the closest kosher restaurant near where you are standing, check the weather and a million other things. They even allow you to make phone calls.
When you begin to unlock the power of these devices, it becomes clearer and clearer why so many people in the world are burning their eyes off while they scold their children for sitting too close to the television.
One of the biggest advances in this market are based on a technology called "augmented reality." Wow, even the name sounds cool. Augmented reality is a technology that allows someone to use their phone's camera to record or display what is in front of them and to layer information or image. So, for example, you could take a picture of a mountain, and this technology would give you the name of the mountain, its height and other statistics. Or you can scan a bar code of a product and find out if there are better deals in nearby stores. Crazy!
More and more, technology is reaching outward rather than focusing inward. For years, we crazy Generation Y-ers were playing video games that sucked us into the television or computer. Now, though, we have the Wii, a gaming system that turns the entire room into an entertainment zone, and your whole body into a game controller.
People used to be amazed just by going to a movie theater and seeing cool special effects. But now they want the movies to pop into their reality. Literally. 3D movies, man. Intense.
This is the direction technology is heading, my friends. We are bringing what used to only exist in a tiny little box, out into the world. We are making the imaginary real.
Remember when people were paranoid that we were going to turn into machines, staring at our computers all day, hooking our minds up to crazy contraptions? Well, as recent history has shown, there is no reason for us to be worried. The opposite. We should be excited. Jumping for joy.
Why? Because this is all a sign of what moves us as people. What we desire deep, deep down in our nutty little souls. What we desire is to bring those very same souls that are deep, deep down out into the world. What we want is to bring the non-physical into the physical. To augment our reality.
And the more we do this, the more that we'll see that getting good deals on sponges, and finding the height of a mountain, aren't necessarily the most amazing things ever. Rather, we'll want to augment our reality into something truly gorgeous. Augment it so that we begin to see spirituality everywhere we look. To aim a camera and take a picture of G‑d Himself.
Let's just hope our eyes don't ooze out before then.
