Tele-phony
My phone and I have a bad relationship.
First off, I don’t even know what model it is. Many people are lucky enough to have a phone with a chic, memorable name, like RAZR, Chocolate, Edge, Glide, Voodoo, Peanut, or Tigerjaw. Others till can mumble something about it being “some damn Smartphone” or “a Blackberry”. People often see my phone and I together in public, and, doing the polite thing, they pipe up, “Oh! What a neat phone. What model is it?” and I always have to resort to sputtering, “Uh.. it’s a Samsung, something-or-fucking-another. Samsung DHzx-B-niner five-quad the third”. All I know about the model number is that it:
- Is only visible for about half a second on some splash screen that’s only visible when I do a hard reboot of the phone.
- Is somewhere between 6 and 9 digits, with a dash or two in there.
- Is totally lame and boring and uncool and stuff.
It doesn’t help that I have a pretty rocky relationship with the general concept of phones and talking on them. Specifically, I hate talking on the phone. Let’s just say they make my ear sweat, and it’s always my left ear, because I feel so dreadfully helpless and confused every time a phone is held up to my right ear. I wonder if it’s normal to have a “phone ear”? Maybe if I didn’t have a “phone ear”, I could swap ears every now and then, and all these troubles would just melt away.
Anyway, my standard ritual when I come through the door to my apartment is to either take off my pants and leave them in a heap by my door, or to remove everything from my pockets as soon as possible and throw the objects onto the first available non-floor location, which is this poorly-assembled Ikea shelf near my door. It’s pretty far away from where the action typically happens in my apartment. Since my phone is always on silent because I hate the ringer and I’m too lazy to change it, this isolation means as long as I’m home (which, on the weekends, is most of the time), there is nobody around to hear its cries. When I’m at home, my phone doesn’t exist.
I probably do this subconsciously because I always feel a little pang of negative emotion every time I hear, feel, or otherwise sense that my phone is going off, because I know I’m going to either have to pick up, speak, and generate ear sweat, or I’m going to let it go and feel guilty and icky until I work up the courage to call whoever the hell it was back. When my phone doesn’t exist, life is good, and I can exist peacefully in my personal hole, wrapped up in blissfully ignorant solitude, without those little pangs I get every time I’m reminded that there are people out there who care about me.
So, yeah, the whole situation with my horribly-named phone and I is a mess. I know it’s wrong, and I know I’m being a naughty boy when I stash the little guy on an out-of-the-way shelf where it can’t be sensed. It haunts me to the point where I actually hear my phone go off even when nobody’s calling. Certain video game sounds, certain rhythms and frequencies in music, hell, many sounds that just happen during day-to-day life remind me of this emotional baggage I carry around regarding that little device that wants to badly to be loved.
I’ll give you an example - this evening, I was sitting on the couch in silence, eating edamame out of a bowl. I’d pick one up, run my teeth along the fuzzy skin to extract the succulent nuggets and catch every last salt particle, and then put the husk back into the bowl. Repeat. Repeat. Grab for another, lift it up - DING! I hear the distinct ding my phone makes when I’ve received a text message. The sound is distant and lonely - almost too distant. I actually like receiving text messages, because they encourage passive, asynchronous participaton, so I’m not too unhappy, but I just sit there and continue eating. After a few more bean-rounds, I hear the sound again, but this time I’m paying attention; the adrenaline from hearing the ding a few moments ago had sharpened my senses. I had misplaced the source of the sound before; as it turns out, it was the sound of a soybean pod tapping against the side of the bowl.
Get ready to learn a fun new fact: the sound of a soybean pod against the side of a small ceramic bowl is a very distinct sound of a certain pitch which is also produced by a certain Samsung-model phone with a name which was not influenced by anybody in Marketing.
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