Well, I couldn’t be more excited. Headbang8 of the Deutschland űber Elvis (still here) blog blogrolled me after my lauding his witty recounting of an uncomfortable encounter with the Deutschlandisch police. I’m tickled, well, pink, I guess, not only because that’s my only chromatic option in that cliche, but also because his blog is by turns very funny and well-thought-out, and he is as gay as my gay exhusband. Which I suppose means nothing other than that if I were gay, we’d have that in common. A tenuous link, but one I’m more than happy to grasp at. Plus, even though he is a devout atheist,

he is not one of those stinky, unthinky kinds who are as dull as their religious-fundamentalist counterparts: he asks questions, as all good believers and non-believers alike should do. (As opposed to just the people in between, who seem to be the only ones consistently and reliably to have no problem doing that!) (Which makes the religion question different from, and in fact less prickly than, the musical theatre one, as there are no agnostics with regard to that particular cultural phenomenon.)

Anyway, I so routinely experience near-meltdowns while tackling technological issues (notice my sorry excuse for an umlauted u above and you’ll get the picture; other than the MS Character Set, and pillaging them from other sites, I don’t know how to get one up on Blogger) and forget what I am doing halfway through, that I at some point abandoned giving the descriptions of sites I like, or even separating the list into categories. Mr. 8, however, apparently encounters no such difficulties routinely, and therefore appended a brief description of me to his link.

What he put as his description was ‘very, very well read,’ so I put a different version of the Unamuno header up to substantiate that accusation. (Okay, fine, also to prove to others who might stray here - and assume something altogether other from the curmudgeonly prose - that I’m at least moderately ‘well built‘ as well, if, that is, you like miniaturized versions of Anglo-Saxon Homo sapiens sapiens) (and, okay, also because I didn’t like how the Richie Fahey didn’t take up enough space horizontally). Of course, that required some mind-bending, positively deadly HTML, much hand-wringing, and forty-five minutes of crying into the neighbor’s cat’s fur, not to mention the fact that I destroyed my carefully-crafted color scheme and now have to put the blog name and rotating blog description in black in order that they be seen over the too-variable hues of the picture. I also tried black-and-whiting versions of the previous blue-and-red header so that I wouldn’t wreck the color scheme, but it looked wrong with all the colored photos around.

Anyway #2, I don’t really know what I think of a complete stranger encapsulating me as ‘very well read.’ Of course, he is gay, so ‘gorgeously well read‘ is perhaps hoping for a bit much. After all, I look nothing like Celine Dion (I’m sorry, gay people; I know it’s a cheap shot, but I can’t help it any more than I can tolerate her mincing anorexic-motherhood persona), so what would he know? I am so much more, of course: poor driver, good cook, bad hairstylist, great decorator, inept photographer, skilled volunteer, terrible flyer, superlative girlfriend.

—Nuts! I have to go! I feel a song coming on!

Well, fine, I’m on a (gay) roll with inexplicably yogurt-loving, antisocial lesbians. I came upon this brilliant old (last October) post on Deutschland ȕber Elvis about attempting to teach irony to German police, while looking for something totally different (Schoenberg somethingsomething, if you care). The story is great, it’s well told, and I can viscerally relate to odd encounters with traffic cops.

However.

What I want to know is why do The Gay People love the musical theatre? And, once we’ve figured that out, why don’t The Straight People, and why don’t The Lesbians (whatever side of the yogurt fence they stand on)?

My exhusband is gay, so rest assured I have even less insight than the straightest of all other straight people. Clearly. All I can tell you is that he seemed ungay enough for me to marry him and, looking back on his lax attitude to home furnishings and clothing, not to mention his complete silence on hot guys and ideal gay vacation spots at the time, the only thing I can look back on with any sort of reasonable self-accusation is his fondness for the musical theatre.

And, boy, did he love it!

Whereas, I and my lesbian and inveterately heterosexual friends will never be persuaded to care at all where precisely it is that the wind (allegedly) goes sweeping down the plains. The less advanced of our two races easily get Lerner and Loewe confused with Leopold and his friend! Apart from a sentimental fondness for Marlene Dietrich resulting in casual knowledge of a few too many 1930s cabaret songs and Holländer riffs, and possibly here and there a cruel delight in the spectacle of Marlon Brando breaking into ’song’ with no defensible narrative impetus, we just don’t care. And we can’t be made to.

Yes, I admit I crank up the Kurt Weill every so often, but it’s only ever the Brecht-Weill, and it’s never Teresa Stratas; I never forget myself and let things slip into Gilbert and Andrew Lloyd Anything. And if ever there were an argument that from the very start Gays Are Gays and the Rest Is Rest, it is to be found at the crucible of Musical Theatre. If we can have a Nalgene, we can certainly have a Gay Gene, and if little Jake or Tyler or Ronan knows what the Hills Are Alive with, and whether or not there is One Maiden Breast (Oh!) and can sing a musical list of Argentinean place-names before he knows whether to pass the Phillips head or the hex bit when Daddy is again sandwiched between the Ikea sofa and the Crate and Barrel rug, then the fight should be over, the debate won, and all the gay men and their straight female friends should retreat to their corner in victory (and eat celebratory yogurt to the strains of ‘Gypsy‘ or ‘Cats,’ erroneously convinced that they are too fat).

Meanwhile, we contentededly chunky straight and lesbian people can go out for some pizza and double bock, knowing there is nothing we can do to make ourselves like Broadway or Celine Dion, but feeling a little better knowing we don’t even have to try. It’s an argument that everyone wins!

It snowed today. Honestly.

As you faithful reader(s) know(s), I cannot do math. Because I cannot do math I live by rounding. Sometimes I round up and sometimes I round down: this allows me to believe that ‘everything evens out’ in some theoretical Final Reckoning I won’t understand in the slightest. Even if today’s specific roundings include only one upward with bills and one downward with mileage, I content myself with the belief that in the near future I will do the opposite and things will therefore again attain equilibrium.

I tell you this because it means that in the realm of rounding, and therefore in the realm I inhabit, today is early April, and that means that it is snowing, in Seattle, in early April. It is, moreover, predicted to continue for days. Apparently, I was one of the few who arrived home safely, so I poured the last glass of Quinta do Et Cetera and congratulated myself on my prescience for not yet having put away the foul-weather drinks and clothes. I have no idea what the tulip-trees and daffodils are thinking, but I cannot express how deeply I want winter to end.

In Greece, when you go to a regular neighborhood market looking for yogurt, you choose between the texture/thickness of the yogurt, and the type of milk. Perhaps at a chain supermarket you can get some wacky sugary ones from Sweden with berries in them, but there is not a whole aisle devoted to 533 different varieties as there is here.

And I for one am sick of yogurt. I am sick of there being 533 kinds, I am sick of wanting the taste of yogurt and then being unable to find a yogurt-flavored yogurt, and I am sick of the ads with the poorly-substantiated claims for the yogurt that makes your bowel movements ‘regular’ and likewise for the other yogurts that make you lose weight.

But I am utterly at my wits’ end with the ostensibly unending, years old series of ads for yogurt in which two vapid bints staged in various social situations attempt to one-up each other in tiresome encomia to their favorite bacteria-laden dessert brand. Throughout the years, after a first unwitting encounter with this ad, I have taken what precautions I can not to hear any version of it. However, like so many others, I am human, too, and I recently heard and saw what I imagine to be the newest incarnation.

Here the hideous duo are kitted up in over-the-top stereotypes of the Bad Bridesmaid’s Dress. After looking this ad up in an attempt to find some of the actual dialogue (in lieu of watching Lifetime programming for days on end hoping for a chance to see a commercial I don’t want to see), I learned that the African-American component of this unctuous couple is famous for being, and playing, a lesbian, and thus some of her lines can be read as in-jokes to those in the know.

I am neither in the know nor in the care because these ads are wretched and unwatchable. Extradiagetical biobits cannot redeem their inspidity. I would still know nothing after seeing one of them about what sets this particular yogurt apart from similar brands or styles except that a lesbian who plays a lesbian on television got paid to wear a puffy dress and say vapid things about it. I do not surround myself exclusively with lesbians, to be sure, and I have not attended an unusual amount of weddings, I confess, but my (admittedly limited) experience and keen intuition tell me that lesbians are no more likely than any other subset of wedding guests to sneak away from the festivities with a friend to eat yogurt.

I realize it is just an ad. I realize the point of the ad is to make me want to eat their yogurt, not to present an accurate 30-second snapshot of American suburban reality. And I further realize that 99.9 percent of all catered or preplated food little resembles, in taste, texture, or even color, the freshly-cooked dishes it vainly attempts to duplicate or evoke (take that, Herbfarm, you pretentious, hideously-decorated, lukewarm-food-serving, taco truck without wheels!).

I know all that. When I went to a music conference in BC for the arts council in my town I lived on Pellegrino, Diet Coke, minibar Jelly Bellys, vodka gimlets and sourdough rolls for four days, because the thing went on all day and all night and there was no way to leave the hotel. And whether it is a conference or a wedding or funeral, I would never eat my one-of-three-thousand tepid chicken breasts over stale brown rice with a day-old shallot-dill sauce. However, I would also not tuck two yogurt containers and spoons in my purse so that I could invite my best friend out to the veranda for curdled milk with high-fructose fruit compote while everyone else was drinking enough and having a sufficiently festive time dancing and congratulating the happy couple not to trouble themselves overmuch about the realities of catered food.

But let’s say I were the sort of person destined to find the hidden pain in every experience. I know the food is going to be wretched, I know I’m going to be petulant, and I don’t want to risk ruining yet another social occasion for my significant other. The hosted bar alone may not suffice; perhaps I’ll get violently drunk like the last four times and tell the hosts just what I think of their elastic chicken breasts and scorched sauce.

No, this (ridiculous and entirely implausible scenario) calls for forethought. I eat a bit in advance and tuck a tiny treat into the handbag, perhaps. A treat, ladies and gentlemen, not a one-cup serving of nonfat bacterial cultures. Yogurt is not a treat. In this country it is punishment food for people who think they are fat.

The risible point of this and other equally cloying ads is that by adding loads of sugar and a portion of denatured fruit, the punishment food becomes a pallid - but good enough when you’re starving yourself! - simulacrum of the sort of foods that always have a lot of sugar, as well as flavor, texture, and fat. The consumer buys the ‘lemon meringue pie’ yogurt because she has resolved to deny herself lemon meringue, and all other pies, cakes, tortes, and pastry, until she has lost a certain number of pounds. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for those of you who hadn’t realized it up to this point, there is no transubstantiation involved. It’s really still nonfat sugared yogurt - and it’s really still crap.

Nonetheless, here are some of the sighingly orgasmic, fatuous (mmmm, and - hamfistedly ironic! Get it: not catch the bouquet? I’m a lesbian!!!) sighs of the two bridesmaids as they curb their hunger and sartorial angst with spoonfuls of Lactobacillus and Streptococcus:

“This yogurt is not-catching-the-bridal-bouquet good.”
“It’s burning this ugly bridesmaid dress good.”
“It’s getting out of these uncomfortable shoes good.”

I’m in too much pain to delve into why one of them should be so disturbed by being paired with an usher shorter than she is; clearly the job description must be a more, em, encompassing one that in the past if physical compatibility is such a large part.

I have so little to complain about that the blog is suffering. I could write about the apparent epidemic of somewhat inept and apathetic volunteer coordinators in this city — but that’s more boring than writing nothing. I could tell you that I a) actually went to a Barnes & Noble today (very specific desire, and one best met by a warehouse of a store, yet always still a deeply tragic voyage) and b) was forced to leave before making my purchase because the music was that intolerable. (I don’t know her name, but yet another of the baby-voiced, on-the-verge-of-tears female singer-songwriters.) Or I could describe how the neighborhood sphinx is causing me to be cognitively impaired and narcoleptic with his indecipherable and unslakeable cries for something at all hours of the night. Or that, as a result of this ongoing REM deprivation, I slept from one AM to four PM today and could thus not go out for a glass of wine with a friend, as that would have meant having wine for breakfast, even if breakfast were being served at eight at night.

However, in an earlier post when writing about ways not to seem alternately boorish and mincing in the handling of import words in English, I mentioned ‘Paree‘ as always being de trop, and ‘intaglio/seraglio‘ as keeping some, but not all, of their Italian heritage in the course of their Anglicization. While looking for something entirely different today (why I speak Spanish like a Salvadoran) I came upon an old thread on phonoblog in which a few posters struggle mildly to figure out through what principle or principles in US English ‘Chartres’ comes close-ish (minus the difficult Gallic r’s, that is) to the original, while ‘Paris’ never does, and why a more native pronunciation of Latin American place-names seems to mark one as a leftist still, and also does not carry over into the individual’s pronunciation of words in other languages with which he might be equally familiar. I also learned that the English pronunciation of ‘Catalan’ is supposedly the same as for the primitive plastic. Since the time I first knew what Catalan was, it seems I have been pronouncing it in an off-putting way for most native English speakers — but, luckily, perhaps, equally in a manner not likely to suggest to antique dealers that I am in the market for an earring-and-brooch set in the shape of a raspberry cluster.

Nothing was resolved in my mind as to why we use foreign endonyms for some things and exonyms for others, nor why we say ‘Filleep/Feeleep Paytann’ and ‘Sharl d’Gall’ (I don’t have easy IPA access, so we’ll make do) in reasonable, good-faith, and (also important) not unduly encumbering English approximations of ‘Phillipe Pétain’ and ‘Charles de Gaulle’ yet also canonically say ‘Catherine the Great’ (’of Russia‘) and ‘Philip of Macedon.’

I think in casual conversation the rules vary according to the group, but for what it’s worth, I do say ΥΔΡΑ, with a thelta sound and minus an ‘h,’ for the island I lived on, instead of ‘Hydra’ with the ‘h’ and with an unaspirated ‘d’ — the way Americans pronounce the mythological monster. But I don’t in English say ‘Makeδonίa‘ for the area of Greece, or any variant of ‘Makedonija‘ for what nationalistic Greeks derogatingly call ‘FYROM’ and which many other people call ‘Macedonia’ or ‘the Republic of Macedonia.’ And I still don’t know the ways in which I sound Salvadoran except for one, and now due to my abortive mission to the hideous book barn, I can’t use a new Latin-American Spanish Dictionary to figure out the mystery. At least I am well-slept!

Fascinatingly enough (or not), my reunion with the Blackberry occurred late Tuesday of last week. In all my excitement I might well have failed to notice, anyway, but had we renewed our vows the day previous instead, there would have been a three-hour interruption in our recommitment ceremony and ensuing celebration.

For me (and that I am alone in this perspective as in so many others is proven by the absurd furore this caused), a couple hours twice a year of uncertainty as to whether I have any incoming emails seems a manageable risk and tolerable cost when weighed against the other 8750-something other hours of instantly-updated connectivity. Moreover, that the outage’s scope is attributable to the fact that all data sent by all Blackberry users, regardless of carrier, must pass through RIM’s two network operations centers in Canada, makes me so happy I wish I could send money, flowers, and handwritten love notes to Research in Motion directly. Did last Monday’s short-lived BB breakdown bring the US and global economies to a crushing, grinding halt? No. But I find the idea that thousands of advance-copy HR memos on new breakroom policies and rough-draft PowerPoint presentations from hemorrhoid-treatment salesmen had their full, momentous impact delayed because something went wrong in Waterloo terribly, terribly amusing.

Elstir] began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded….We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.’” (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)

I pray to God it is not that I am ‘growing accustomed to,’ or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one’s coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you’ll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world’s ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it’s not still dismal where you’re heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes — and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, ‘denial,’ as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn’t care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose’s interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such ‘fatuous or unwholesome incarnations‘ as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot ex-Jesuit, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians…

you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.’ (Emerson) Trite rubbish, of course, but I don’t know any profound quotations about Blackberries by heart, and nothing in the text on either the BB or T-Mobile websites struck me as an uncannily profound opening for this bit, so we are stuck with me searching on a ‘quotations’ website for something marginally utile. So, Emerson it is; you can accept it (and ‘lose something else!‘ thereby), or forgo this whole, dull posting and do something truly worthwhile, like reading some Merton or Jefferson, or listening for owls out in the woods.

Alright, praise God, the Blackberry is fine. The Blackberry is fine, and so is all of my so-called data, and so now when you call I will know who you are and answer the phone. Well, not the phone, of course, but the ‘handheld,’ the PDA, the ‘device.’ And maybe my knowing who you are will mean I will not answer the phone. But at least I will be making an informed decision.

In all my conversations with T-Mobile during this tedious ordeal terrifying crisis, it was only in the last two, after the Blackberry was once again cooing contentedly in my hands, that anyone mentioned there was such a thing as insurance for my device. The second time, after the person explained the basics of it (6 dollars a month gets you a replacement phone for 50 dollars or something in case of damage, theft, loss, or being me), I was daring enough to ask how long ago it was that this bold new idea was introduced. She or he let me know this was hardly a new idea, and that my telephone travails of the past many years could have had a quite different character had someone told me of this before…

Hmmm. I think it is like when I was sometimes having to spend three or four hundred extra dollars a month in overage charges: they see a good thing and don’t want it to end, so no one makes a suggestion. Then, when I finally make a comment about it seeming like perhaps a change might be in order, I get a more perceptive one on the line who says he can’t believe no

one ever called me and ran down the options before, that that’s just crazy, that someone should have called, that he’s never it wouldn’t he can’t understand why they. I suppose it’s entirely conceivable that anyone looking at my records might just think I buy a lot of phones because I like change. But if there are any notes somewhere on my account, ‘stopped working after three months‘ and ‘stolen with purse on ill-starred New Years Trip‘ have little to do with a zest for variety, even in the most generous or ESL-inspired reading.

At any rate, welcome home, little Blackberry. I have done the previously unthinkable and backed everything up. I have updated the software and loaded a picture of the neighbor’s cat for the homescreen. I have read the NY Times on Opera, updated my Google Maps, added a new email account, deleted the 789 messages that were waiting to herald its rebirth, attempted anew to type coherent emails with enormous thumbs on microscopic keys, and had the pleasure of once again looking like an unrepentant Star Trek fan driving down the highway with a blinking light in my ear.

From now on I swear I will be a more careful and adept user. I will put the device in its little disabling holster when not in use so that neither my lipstick, purse lining, nor pointy hipbone on the other side of my coat pocket dials calls I don’t intend. Second, now that I know what it is from the brief tutorial after the update download, I will use the ‘escape’ button located conveniently beneath the trackwheel (yes, it’s an older model, because manifestly I can’t be trusted with the newer ones) to exit screens I used to have to remove the battery to leave. I will keep the device synched to the computer and to reality to the greatest extent possible. I will not be reckless with battery life, and I will not cram SIM cards in past the point they should go. If I need to remove the SIM card and find I cannot, I will seek professional, or at least semi-professional, help. Torque will never be applied in the extraction or insertion of SIM cards. And lastly, I will endeavor to utilize Google Maps on the Blackberry in conjunction with GPS to preclude being three hours early, or one hour late, for anything ever again.

Although we have not been together a long time, I feel I need to be honest and tell you our relationship is in trouble. I have been patient and faithful thus far, but it has been hard. I know you will not be surprised to hear me repeat that I have nothing but fond feelings for your predecessor, XP, and remember quite happily the years we shared together. As you are well aware, we did not end the relationship voluntarily, quickly, or easily; our bonds were severed due to the death of the perishable body he inhabited, and we both tried as long as we could to stay together despite ever-increasing odds.

I admit I was lonely by the time I met you. In the last weeks of XP’s life I could only be with him one or two hours at a time; in his last days, our precious time together narrowed to minutes. His congenitally poor ventilation system weakened and whined until he could no longer even feebly cough out the cat hair, the incense dust, the errant biscotti crumbs and minute Egyptian-glass debris — the cruel, cruel insults of this too-material world of which he never wished to be a part yet heroically tried to surmount.

I didn’t expect a replacement, Vista. There is no room in my heart for another XP, let alone Win 95. We all have our great romances, our soulmates, and I did not demand that you be one of them. Still, I am not the sort who looks for ‘NSA’ relationships. I had hoped at least you would treat me with respect, that you would honor my very meager requests of you. Have I loaded you with unwieldy programs, failed to conscientiously monitor CPU usage, clogged Startup with needless tasks, or been other than extremely cautious and considerate in every possible way?

No, I have not. And I don’t ignore you and certainly don’t ask more of you than you should be able and willing to give. Moreover, I support you in your personal growth and well-being: I actively encourage your agility and physical fitness by running every manner of scan on your behalf every day. I have you inoculated six ways to Tuesday — and I don’t even do any questionable things for which that should be necessary. I just do it because I value you and want you to stick around. And yet you behave as though I am taking you for granted, you passive-aggressive, self-righteous, opaque, whorish, game-playing varlet!

So let me say this to you now, Vista: XP was a Mensch. He did what he had to do and he never complained. He was sufficiently confident in himself such that this confidence was readily extended to others. XP never whiningly asked me if I was absolutely SURE I wanted to open a program or change settings; he knew that I was a big girl and trusted my decisions. XP didn’t have to use Apple widgets or garish 3-D to win my affections. He didn’t have to advertise his ’snipping tool’ to let me know it was there. He was understated; he knew I was smart enough to feel around and find it if I needed it, just as I would with his registry once we were intimate enough. He earned my loyalty not by trickery and flash, but by participating fully in the relationship and always keeping up his end of the bargain.

Vista, I’m sorry it has to end this way, but I have given you more than enough chances. Day after day you abandon me yet again just when I need you most, and recoil back into yourself, as distant as though we had never met. I know I was rash, I know I was bereft and lonely and I turned unthinkingly to the first OS I saw. But, Vista, it’s been months and you still don’t want me to touch your registry keys. You continue to try to keep me out of everything. There is no Us, and the way you are, I don’t think there ever will be. Maybe it’s my fault and not yours; maybe you were never expecting to be in a relationship in which something was expected of you, in which you would have to be ‘on’ so much of the time, where you would really have to be part of a team and not be able just to shut down and be alone whenever you felt like it.

I just know I feel misled. Dirty. Used. Yes, I had heard some things about you, but maybe I thought you would be different with me — after all, I ask so little compared to other people. Maybe I thought I could change you — but unlike 95, 98, or XP, you refuse to change and grow. You are like a bitter and stubborn, yet somehow unnervingly cocky, old man, Vista, and I wish I had never come to know you.

Angrily,
Me

I had to go cold-turkey on my cell-phone addiction briefly, which means I was, in fact, completely incommunicado telephonically, as I haven’t had a landline since the Great War and I’ve never bothered with VOIP. The reason? A cell phone serves all my needs: I can use it at home just as easily as in the car!

And normally my ’system’ serves me well. I have a one-million-minutes-per-month plan, and I have five ‘friends’ whom I can call at any time without using any of those minutes. Gone are the months with surprise overage charges of two or three hundred dollars. Plus, I have been with T-Mobile since the days when we had to strap our forty-five-pound ‘car phones’ to the roofs of our Datsuns anytime we wanted to carry a passenger, or freight larger than an evening bag, so every time I talk with them I receive shocked and somewhat disgusted but nonetheless effusive thanks for my unwavering loyalty.

This gratitude has come in handy, as I tend to go through a number of phones per year and have then to change my plan each time to suit the features of the model I haven’t lost or broken yet. I also have to call a lot to figure out how to use the features or software on the phone I’m just becoming acquainted with. (As well as the regular ‘Please send me a new phone as soon as you can no the cheapest one no I don’t care what it has yes I need a phone not a camera no I’ll buy one I like later when I’m not at work crying into an office phone and deactivate the old one ASAP it’s on a flight to Bangkok and I have no phone!!!! Help me pleeease!‘ calls.)

Now, as you can well imagine, unless I am at work, where I can comfortably cry, slaver, cajole and whine into the multi-line, my refusal to have a landline or VOIP has its unpleasant consequences each and every time I lose, destroy, or have stolen another cell phone. This last time was especially egregious, it being winter and me being about 90 pounds and the few pay phones remaining in this very wireless city not being enclosed in metal and glass as in Ye Olde Days when people used them for purposes other than setting up drug deals. It was wet, it was windy, it was cold, and I was small. Eventually quite grouchy, as well, as each time I attempted to set up my prepaid, stopgap account (which it turns out was unnecessary anyway) it seemed either I had forgotten yet another bit of crucial information, or the customer service person I reached was not privy to a different but equally crucial bit of crucial information at his end.

Much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth ensued, interrupted by bouts of shivering and clattering teeth and trips home to sit in front of the heater, after which a restorative and healing sleep was inevitable, swift, and full. The following day I spoke to a better-informed representative at great length who informed me the whole prepaid scheme was unnecessary and yes, contrary to what I had been previously told, he could indeed use an old SIM card to restart my account on a different phone.

Now I have that account on that different phone, and perhaps the Blackberry will come back to me, along with all the Terribly Important Information locked inside itself and its SIM card. For the future, though, I now have the delightful comfort of knowing that although the prepaid phone costs about sixty dollars a minute to use, it is nonetheless a phone, with a number and account and working ’send’ button which I can use in two months from the comfort and privacy of my own home to order a new phone when I lose or destroy the current one.

In the meantime, call me: I don’t have your phone number…