Me Talk Pretty One Day: Nutcracker.com Summary & Analysis

As an engineer at IBM, Lou Sedaris has always fantasized about the internet, speaking at length to Sedaris about its future capabilities. This has always bored Sedaris, though he has to admit that his father accurately predicted the large-scale proliferation of the internet and the ways in which it has made its way into contemporary life. Still, he resists technology, preferring to use typewriters over computers. He detests the ugly holiday cards he receives from people who make their own family newsletters using absurd fonts. Unwilling to change his own habits, he lugs his typewriter everywhere he goes, attracting quite a bit of attention from people who think typewriters are already outdated. This frustrates Sedaris, who can’t stand it when airport security forces him to unpack the typewriter to inspect it, or when people in neighboring hotel rooms complain about the noise the machine makes when he uses it.

“You should really be using a computer,” everyone tells Sedaris when they see him using a typewriter. Even more annoying to him is the fact that everyone wants to use email instead of writing physical letters. Accordingly, he’s disappointed when Amy gets a computer and tells him she only uses it for email. Trying to show her brother the benefits of using email, she shows him a video somebody sent her of a naked man lying face-down on the floor. A woman enters the room dressed in pointed shoes with “pencil-thin heels,” and when the man moves so that his testicles come into view, she responds as if she’s just seen a mouse, stomping on his testicles, “kick[ing] them mercilessly.” Sedaris is mesmerized by this and suddenly understands why his father has always cared so much about the internet: it is “capable of provoking such wonder,” he thinks.