A 30-Something Plays Angry Birds For 3 Minutes

1. I am old, probably too old to write for this website. Soon I will die. In the meantime, there’s Angry Birds. …Let’s see what all the fuss is about, shall we?
2. I’m using my friend Julia’s iPhone for this experiment. I don’t personally own an iPhone, and have only touched one like five times. Old; like I said. I’m 35. When I interact with iPhones, I tend to do “adorkable” things like holding them backwards and upside down, or pressing that one button that makes everything turn off.
3. So, birds. Okay. Julia helped me to get to the actual game. I kept pressing the button that makes you go backwards or the button that makes everything turn off.
4. These birds don’t so much look “angry” as they look determined. Or steadfast. Or staunch. Or stout-of-heart. Or some such Shakespearian term like that.
5. I have no problem with killing pigs, if that’s what it is that we’re actually doing. I worked on a farm for two summers. F-ck pigs. They are the one animal that actually deserves to die. “Kill em’ all!” Do you know that that’s actually, originally, a quote said by the pope in the 14th century? Before he was a pope, he was an army commander. Anyway, and he captured this city, and when his men asked him what to do with the women and children, the soon-to-be-Pope said: “Kill them all, God will know his own.” Whaddanasshole.
6. I’m already struggling to avoid talking about Angry Birds. In case you’re wondering, my birds are doing things like ricochetting backwards and flying wildly off target. But how much can be expected from a guy who can’t even touch an iPhone without accidentally turning it off? I can’t even believe that I write for the internet, to be honest. We didn’t even have the internet when I was a kid. It’s good that I’m still actually writing this without accidentally pressing the button that turns the whole internet off.
7. Anyway, pigs, so gross. They eat their own excrement. You might know that already, but wait until you actually work on a farm and actually watch them do this. So much for pleasant thoughts of Babe and Babe Pig in the City and Wilbur. Bye, bye; bye, bye.
8. Kill all pigs. I have eventually managed to hit something with a bird.
9. I don’t understand what the different types of birds do. I’m sure they have different types of powers, but if I feel like if I do anything different with this iPhone, like trying to get instructions or something, I’ll turn the iPhone off.
10. I turned it off. Restarting.
11. Piglets are incredibly cute in real life, though, if you were wondering. Baby piglets are as cute as adult pigs are disgusting.
12. I am vaguely mastering how to be Really Bad at This Game, as opposed to just misfiring and having my birds bounce backwards.
13. I got hit in the head by a bird once. I was walking down the street in Manhattan, when a bird thwacked me in the head. I thought birds would have bird-dar or something to prevent that from ever happening. It hit me in the head; it didn’t hurt, but I had clearly been hit in the head by a bird for no reason, and it was embarrassing. Passers-by saw it happen. I felt dumb, the bird probably felt dumb, the people watching it felt dumb.
14. And I wanted to shout, “OKAY, SOMETHING EMBARRASSING JUST HAPPENED.” Because without saying anything, I was just a dork who had just had a bird fly into his overlarge head. I wanted to acknowledge it in some way. But I said nothing. You can’t just shout stuff on the sidewalk like that. Anyway, that was as close as I ever came to a real life Angry Birds thing, I guess.
15. So I am playing this game on a cell phone. Oh, the future. I still remember the first cell phone that I ever had. I was in middle school, so, what, that’s like 1989? It came with a shoulder bag. My dad was very “techie” and liked inventions. Plus my dad’s greatest fear is that one day, somehow, one of his children will be out of contact with him and then will be trapped under a boulder or something. Hence, he gave us all cell phones.
16. So the phone, like I said, had it’s own heavy shoulder-bag/ briefcase with a strap thing. The phone itself came out of a side pocket with a coiled cord. But still, it was a cell phone. You could walk around talking on it, without it being plugged into your house, which had never happened before.
17. I never talked on it. I never wanted it. I took it to middle school on my first day and slammed it into my locker and hid it in my locker for the rest of the year. I was already a nerd. Walking around with some huge piece of 1980s technology that no one had ever seen before would have just called attention to myself, and would have made me even-nnn less popular.
18. Anyway, so that’s how I still feel about cell phones. I hate them. Including this iPhone.
19. I passed the first level, which was clearly designed so that even people who are awful at this game can win it eventually.
20. We also had the internet when I was a kid, in 1989. We were the first people I ever heard of to have the internet. My dad only had it briefly. You had to put the actual phone receiver into a ‘WarGames’-style thing. There was nothing to do when you were on the internet. Nothing existed yet. You could play a text-based “Dungeons & Dragons” thing. Or you could talk to the 2,000 other random people who had the internet. My slightly older step-sisters would use it to flirt with scientists at CalTech: they were the only other people we could locate on the ‘net. …So anyway, that’s what Angry Birds is: cell phone plus internet. Nifty.
21. Birds. They’re angry. Peeved. I suck at the second level. According to the one thing that I know about this game, it took the developers a while to come up with the idea that the pigs had stolen the birds’ eggs, which would seem like an easy idea to come up with. But so originally, the birds were just angry. They were dicks who were attacking the pigs for no reason. …Sort of like how that bird hit me in the head for no reason.
22. I lost.
23. I’m not playing again.
24. This is the future? Trying to touch things on an iPhone when it’d be easier to use a keypad or maybe just have a phone that didn’t try to be a computer when it’s not good at being a computer yet? …It’s just dumb and I don’t care. But the one nice thing about getting older is that I don’t have to care about stuff that I don’t really care about anymore.
25. I know I’m not truly old, but I am 35. It’s harder to get people to sleep with me now. If I don’t obey a starvation diet, then I get fat. …But the thing about being 35 is that there’s no more peer pressure. There just isn’t. Peer pressure decreases from the high school variety when you go to college, and it disappears entirely when you’re in your thirties. I don’t have to feign interest in things anymore just because  the majority of people around me are interested in them. And so, I do not care about your “Angry Birds,” as you call them. This is the only good aspect of getting older. I do. Not. Care. Like, someone tried to talk to me about the Fleet Foxes or something the other day, and I was just like, “F-ccccccccck I don’t care. I’m sure they’re a good band, and that just makes me care even less. Just let me like the few good things that I already like. I already have too many books to read and I will always have too many books to read, and that will continue for the rest of my life. I don’t care about Fleet Foxes or iPads or any of it.” So; that’s nice.
26. Forgive me. I am angry, as you may have noticed from reading my articles. I am a grouchy old dick. Well, that’s what happens. A natural part of the aging process. I am an Angry Oliver. Now, launch me at some f-cking birds. 

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