Fun with Technology!

"During my birthday celebration, Meg bribed the guy at the piano bar to play “Colors of the Wind” just for me. A woman near us immediately closed her eyes and began to sway and feel it, which pissed me off because it was MY SONG."

Oh, that totally happened. Here's a picture of Chris, the second drunkest I've ever seen him, belting "Colors of the Wind" into the extra microphone at the piano bar. I apologize it's so blurry. The bar was crowded and I was obviously a-cackling as I took this. Although, you could argue that the motion blur is also a visual representation of the struggle between The White Man and Chris' people for land and freedom. (That's the second time in my life my art history minor has come in handy. The first time was in December 2008 when I overheard someone at a house party trying to remember the name of the artist who did "those paintings with the people and the squiggles," and I completely abandoned the conversation I was in, ran in from the other room, pushing people out of my way to be like, "KEITH HARING, UNTITLED, ACRYLIC AND DAY-GLO ON METAL, 1982. DIED OF AIDS-RELATED COMPLICATIONS IN 1990. IT WAS A LOSS. FOR US ALL." Nobody was impressed and I felt like an asshole. So, in many ways, it was like most of house parties I go to.)

X

OH, GODDAMNIT. So, my plan for today was to blog about my two most recent obsessions, but I'm going to have to scrap that idea because I'm now completely distracted by how my iPhone is making a sizzling noise. Per my most recent tweet, like an honest-to-god, fajitas being delivered to your table, sizzling noise. Aaaaaaand now it won't turn on, despite being fully charged. Shit. This might be the end of the line for my phone. Which makes sense because it's been dying forever. I lovingly nicknamed it Beth, after Beth March from Little Women because much like Beth March, my phone just lays around all day with a quilt over its fragile little legs playing the piano and waiting for Father to return from the war, making everyone incredibly anxious and sad because it's obviously going to die any day now. That's my phone. My poor, poor phone. Although, to be fair, I've put it through so much in its short little life:

1.) It's over two years old. Which isn't really anyone's fault, but it needed to be said nonetheless.

2.) I drop it. Constantly. As I blogged in '09, I blame this partially on its old school slippery little frame, but also on myself. Because sometimes I just hand to god forget I'm holding it and drop it. Like, I'll be standing there, hear it bang on the floor, look down and be like, "Oh shit, was I holding you, guy? I'm sorry about that." Like it's news to me that I was even holding it in the first place. It's incredibly unnerving. It's like when you drive home from work and all of a sudden you're at your house and have no recollection of getting there and you weird yourself out to the point where you don't tell anyone because you're either having a small stroke or are just incredibly bored with life.

3.) This is technically an extension of dropping it, but I also accidentally fling it across the room a lot. Both my iPhone and my sheets are black, so sometimes I won't realize that my phone is somewhere in my sheets and then I'll pull them up quickly or throw them back and it sends my phone flying across the room. I also lose bottles of Coke Zero, black underwear, and scissors incredibly easily in my bed. But when I take my sheets off to wash them and find all of these things at once, it feels juuuuuust a little bit like my birthday.

4.) Laura accidentally kicked it into the pool a few summers ago. I'm hesitant to even bring this up because she felt so badly about it. She sent me an apology card and a blank check a few days later, which was completely unnecessary because despite being submerged in five feet of chlorine water for thirty seconds, it was fine. It may have even performed better than before it had fallen into the pool. But this was back in my phone's younger, healthier days. Because...

5.) Last April it had another run-in with being submerged in water and it did not fair well. To be fair, I had had "one too many Chardonnays," if you will, came home and ever the diligent Acne sufferer, immediately went into the bathroom to wash my face before passing out. I put my phone on the edge of the sink, turned on the faucet, obviously knocked it in, couldn't wrap my head around how to solve this problem and continued to wash my face with my phone bobbing up and down in the Clearasil micro-scrubber filled waters. As a result, it still worked (shockingly), but for months I couldn't control the ringer or headphone volume, and it insisted on going back and forth between vibrate and ringer mode for no reason. Which was sometimes irritating and sometimes delightful.

6.) One night a few months later, I got drunk again, got mad about something and threw my phone at the wall, and I swear to god, it fixed both of those problems. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. It was like witnessing a self-sustaining economy.

(I swear I'm not just saying this because I mentioned it earlier, but I'm writing this in bed and I just patted around my sheets trying to find my tweezers and instead found a black sweatband I had been looking for forever. Black sheets: as it turns out, tacky and impractical.)

7.) I'm fairly certain I know what tipped my phone over from "rickety" to "barely functioning" status. As you may or may not remember, I house/Evie-sat for my parents while they were in Napa a few months ago. In a desperate attempt to lose some weight before our book release party (HAHA!), I made use of the treadmill and bike in their basement a lot. Now, normally when I go to the gym, I rest my iPhone on the tiny, tiny ledge the front of the elliptical machine provides you with and spend the entire workout being incredibly anxious that I'm going to whap the headphone cord with my hand and send my phone flying. And as we've established, I don't necessarily care about sending my phone flying, but I do care about having to stop, get off my machine, and retrieve my phone from under someone's treadmill like a jackass.

When I was at my parent's house, however, I was in a judgment-free zone and had the incredible luxury of being able to shove my phone in my sports bra and work out anxiety-free. I didn't think this was a big deal because my phone is no stranger to being stored in my cleavage. Rare is the time that I don't have either my phone, a pen, or both shoved in there. When you have boobs as big as mine, it almost makes less sense not to use them for storage considering how much goddamn space they take up. (Sidenote: one time in high school, Teresa and I tried to see how many things in my parent's basement we could shove into my cleavage. We fit 32 things, including a power strip and a VHS copy of Turner and Hooch. You'd think I'd be embarrassed, but it's very much a point of pride.)

What I didn't factor in, however, was that because I was working out, I was sweating. "Profusely", some might say. And I found out the hard way that although my phone can handle falling into a pool and a sink full of soapy water, it can not handle boob sweat. Yes, I believe boob sweat broke my phone. Because ever since then, the home button barely works, it's always putting itself on airplane mode, and every three minutes a window pops up being like, "WOAHHH WHAT'S HAPPENING?! THIS DEVICE WASN'T MADE TO WORK WITH THIS THIS PHONE!!!" and I'm like, you're not doing anything. You're just quietly sitting next to me while we watch an episode of Wings. Stop telling me that.

Update: OK, so it stopped sizzling and I somehow got it to turn back on, but now the home button doesn't work at all. And it's stuck on that goddamn picture of Chris singing "Colors of the Effing Wind" that won't email itself to me for some reason. Fuck. This is so unbelievably annoying. I know the obvious answer is go get a new phone, because I'm clearly eligible for an upgrade, but eh. It's still $99. And I know I'm going to get shit in the comments section for saying that because I'm always frivolously spending my money on things like yogurt and drugs and eyebrow threading (each one slightly more important than the last), whereas this is an actual necessary expense, but again, eh. $99 just feels like a lot of money to spend at once. When I'm buying pot and yogurt, it's like 15 bucks here, $4 there. This is throwing down $99 once and getting one thing in return. So I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather get high and have meticulously groomed eyebrows than communicate with friends and family. I mean, I suppose I don't have to get an iPhone. They're just incredibly useful. I could always get a "burner" until Hanukkah/Christmas and hope my parents help a sister out. This blog post has now completely unraveled into me essentially live-blogging my decision making process about what phone to get, so I'm going to stop now before this gets any worse.

R.I.P. Beth March. 2009-2011. "And it seemed to me you lived your life like an iPhone in my cleave..."