american update, part one (cliffs notes version)

I considered it my patriotic duty to kill some shorter trees in order to create the tree-death (printable) version of this post. Also, I said "duty"! Hee-hee!

Or you can click here to read the longer original version of the post. Or you can wait and read the longer version two days ago, when I posted it.

SUMMARY:

1. At the time the text begins, the narrator has been in the US for just over six months. He owns a cell phone. He bought three house phones at Circuit City[1]. We learn that the narrator’s story is set in an alternate-universe version of our world where cell phones are allowed to be as large as a Pez dispenser.

2. The narrator is a fat, country-western-music-loving American who has a lot of credit-card debt and votes Republican. His remarks about the War in Iraq reveal him to be an idiot.

3. The narrator analyzes an uninteresting headline from his local TV news, not realizing how this may confuse readers who believe that headlines are actually used in newspapers.

4. The narrator bought a house and through use of irony[2], he details the financial pitfalls he encountered, including:
1. moving to New York,
2. specifically Westchester County,
3. where the houses cost a great deal of money.
4. He also timed his purchase badly--
5. --here he digresses into a blatant rip-off of The Truman Show and a re-tread of earlier remarks about the alternate-universe America he inhabits; he attempts to avoid sounding unoriginal through use of postmodern self-conscious narration[3]--
6. arrived in the US without the paperwork he needed to establish his credit history while living overseas,
7. and moved into his house at a really inconvenient time for his family.

5. The narrator confirms the purchase of the house in the end and makes an unsuccessful joke about his own sarcasm.

6. He concludes by being rather unkind to the very nice lawyer who helped him with his home purchase. And all over a pen. What a jerk.

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[1] The name of this chain of stores is derived from an early draft of the screenplay for the classic 1982 movie Tron.

[2] Irony (ī′ ruh nē, n.) - a literary device which allows posh speakers to be sarcastic without sounding common.

[3] Postmodern self-conscious narration (fan′ shaw, n.) - a literary device in which hack writers plagiarize the ideas of superior writers who have gone before them and attempt to come off as clever and knowing by pointing out that they’re thieving someone else’s work, but really just come across looking shabby and desperate.