Techno-divination #8: please please please

please please please!!!

please please please: an endless clicking game where you can beg the cruel and unrelenting universe for good fortune; a perfect choice for any place or state of oblivion, e.g. waiting rooms, airports, typing awareness indicators, sports arenas, and others.

Recently, I realized I don’t have a way to send my desperate pleas out into the void, to beg at the feet of an relentlessly cruel, vast universe. I have vibe checks (aura reader and aura reading with a friend), ways of taking assessment of my fate (billboard astrology and planet alignment), and ways of asking for advice (i-ching and the barthes tarot), but I don’t have a way to just yell out “please, please please, please please please don’t let this happen / do let this happen / don’t let everything I’ve been working towards get ruined / etc.”

I have a long history with this kind of desperate bargaining. I didn’t grow up in a religious home, but I did grow up in one that made me feel scared and helpless all the time. I knew silently pleading in my head was futile, but it was all I had.

As an adult, this happens a lot less. But after getting married last Spring, my husband and I have been planning a honeymoon trip. We’ve been very COVID-cautious and overall anxious about the state of the planet, especially over the past four years, so taking an international trip has been a big deal. So as we’ve gotten closer to the travel date, my anxiety around something unexpectedly terrible happening has been keying up and up and up, and the silent “please please please” in my head has returned. Every time I’m walking behind someone who starts coughing, every time a plane has something weird happen, every time wildfires or hurricanes go into turbo-mode, when I hear a family member has a new weird pain, anytime I have a new weird pain (real or imagined), when my husband has a headache, when my cat scratches me and I’m think “this will surely turn into uncommon bacterial infection”: my brain is immediately emptied of everything except little prayer emojis.

Technically, the site structure is trivial: just enough javascript and css to add the cries for help to the page, to have not too many get made, and to have them disappear when popped (or when they are too old – did you know omamori should be replaced every year or so? mine are all several years out of date). I thought about making the bubbles more aggressive over time (pleas increasing in urgency, similar to how I start crying and then hyperventilating when I think about how I don’t want to be crying anymore). I still might do that, but I am focusing my time on being anxious for the next 50-ish hours, and then I’m either in a pit of despair from which I’ll never recover, or I’m having a great time on vacation. :)