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A Shiner Like a Diamond
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Me Talk Pretty One Day, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Insecurity
Humor, Commentary, and Observation
Class and Belonging
Family, Love, and Support
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his typewriter everywhere he goes, attracting quite a bit of attention from people who think typewriters are already outdated.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.
“Nutcracker.com” is Sedaris’s ode to the technology he grew up with, as well as a lament of the rapid ways in which the world changes. Frustrated that nobody uses typewriters anymore, he detests the proliferation of computers and the internet, feeling as if these technological advances have pushed his lifestyle to the sidelines of contemporary society. Inherent in this frustration is an overall resistance to change, as if a new way of life will threaten how he moves through the world. In this way, new forms of technology feel like assaults on the identity Sedaris has formed as somebody committed to a certain way of doing things.
Themes
“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.
What Sedaris fails to consider about the internet is that he might actually be able to use it in ways that appeal to him. Before Amy shows him this strange video, he thinks that the only reason to own a computer is to write emails—something he’s uninterested in doing because he likes writing physical letters. When Amy shows him the video of a man getting his testicles trampled, though, Sedaris realizes that the internet is vast and strange—just like life itself. Rather than taking away his ability to live the way he wants, then, this technology will give him new ways of exploring the interests he already has.
Themes
