Peeing in Typewriters

Back in Cairo safe and sound, and slightly afraid of all the things I will have done (or failed to do) before leaving near the end of June, but happy that each thing I cross off my list, at this point, is once clear step closer to getting me home.

As you all know, I'm currently phone-less, and I am thinking that I will need to just wait until I come back to the US for a phone, and take advantage of the huge discounts you get on nice phones when you subscribe to a new cell plan (which I'll have to do, anyway). The problem is that the US cell phone market is PATHETIC (example: I've already now had, and lost, two Motorola V3 Razr phones -- one original, and one V3c; there is now the v3m AND the v3x, but if you look on the US mobile sites, they are still selling the V3c like it's the latest thing...SO been there done that lost it lol).

Daydreaming about giving the Razr ONE last chance (I didn't like my second one, anyway, because of the internal design that comes with the black handset, which is nowhere near as gorgeous as my original silver one), I have been researching the V3x, and I found the most INSANE website! You have to see this. This website, Mobile-Review, is written with unbelievably bad English and unbelievable good information...I mean it walks you through ALL the phone menus (showing them to you), all the camera options (with multiple test shots), and even disects the MATERIAL that the screen is made out of and the way the keypad is assembled. I was blown away. I think it's really useful, too, when they add comments, about things like the software, and reveal that in certain aspects the developers were rushed and couldn’t work out solutions to certain problems in the development of the programs being used in the phone (how did I become such a mobile phone nerd?).

I also found this REALLY good website, called ConsumerSearch, that has great info and links about mobile phone plans in the US. I think that, since I don't want the limitations of a phone that will only work in the US (otherwise Verizon is great, I know), T-Mobile is the best option.

For laughs, check out this comment on the new V3x by one of the Engaget readers:

"The new V3X has a built in litho-nomylar plubium helix. Its great for those rare moments when you need a quantum tetranose boost. The only draw back is the unusually large quantity of fiscodiamium soft peed that it leaks during alpha phase 1. Never the less, studies have shown that most test subjects do not notice the cortical rot that this might induce until near end of life term. Have fun in any case."

Wouldn't it be funny (except not) if we discovered that the reason I keep losing cell phones is that I have experienced so much brain damage from talking on the phone all the time that I'm physically incapable or remembering where my phones are, so with each new mobile I'm increasing the chances of rotting my brain more and losing it again?

IT'S A CONSPIRACY!

On a kind of unrelated note, so many people I've met have commented to me, when they saw one of my Razrs, that "Motorola is SO American," which I think is ridiculous since, as I've just said, the US doesn't even HAVE the latest Motorola phones, and everyone knows Americans are whores for Nokia (as are Egyptians, incidentally).

The subject line for this blog entry, though, is actually meant to reflect (very briefly) on why it is that I might lose my phones. In India, although not totally sober, Desi accused me of having a psychosis related to mobile phones that, he says, is also connected to me being destructive and anti-gay (his words).

I have been thinking about why it is that I lose phones, and while I think that the solution is actually pretty simple and non-Freudian: I am absent-minded and lose WHATEVER is in my hands (Dr. Juicy was the one who solved this problem, as I think I may have blogged about, before, by mandating that I was not allowed to carry ANYTHING, a requirement that she facilitated by buying me a nice Tumi messenger bag [note: I then didn't lose any more wallets or phones for the next several months in NYC *and* my first 6 months in Cairo, until the bag was stolen out of a friend's car on my birthday!].

That said, a search for deeper meaning has led me back to the second grade when I, as a seven year-old (maybe six) received the present of a very nice, new typewriter from my mother. Things were NOT easy, financially, and I knew that for a long time she'd wanted to get me one. It had greater meaning for her, too, because she always wanted a typewriter as a kid (a candy apple one, if I recall the story I was told seventeen years ago, correctly) and was told she could only get one when she passed Algebra, which she went to summer school and did. My mother has ALWAYS been unwilling to think of money well-spent on a child as a "waste," and was never the type to think that buying a set of books, or language tapes, or computers etc. would be wasted on a child who couldn't fully appreciate them, and it was in the same spirit that she bought her seven year-old a typewriter (which I, to this day, think was a great idea...remember, of course, that people didn't really have home computers, in those days, although it rapidly changed and by the time I was 10 I had one of those, too!).

I really enjoyed the typewriter, for a few days, and I remember using the white-out and italics features with such delight, typing all kinds of simple declarations -- the kind you type when you sit down at a new computer that's off and let your fingers take-off: "My name is VC and I'm happy and my mother is so elegant but Cairo sucks." Just stream-of-consciousness stuff. I remember surprising myself, even, with some nice words for my brother who I generally considered to be too abrasive to deserve the same accolades as my sister and mother.

The reason I bring up the typewriter, though, is (as you can imagine from the title of the blog entry) that I peed in it.

Now, those of you who know me (even Desi has given me grief for this) know that I am NOT someone who is very public about bodily functions, and yes I DO close the door in my bathroom at home when I pee and I used to even lock the door (some kind of metaphysical containment of the taboo, I suppose), so you can imagine that, especially at the height of my perfectionism (up to, say, the age of 11 or 12...or 18 lol) for me to urinate, in my bedroom, was something that was VERY against my nature. It was against my nature (and still is) to be destructive and disrespectful of things in general.

So why did I do it?

I remember feeling, and I remember telling my ANGEL of an understanding mother this (people, today, would call her "permissive," but there is a difference between blind permissiveness and properly-directed, almost miraculous empathy, and to this day I think she understands me almost totally when I tell her how I feel about something or why I'm doing something, as she did then), that I liked the typewriter, but I had the urge to do it, and I didn't really know why, but I remember feeling like, for some reason, it had to be destroyed...maybe not destroyed, but tarnished. I think, perhaps because I knew the sacredness placed on it by the financial burden it represented (it was important because it was costly, or so the equation tends to go), and because I was so resistant to that kind of sacredness (even at a very young age, and I remember my mother telling me about my attitude, in this regard, towards money, when she and my father were divorcing: "I hate money," said the five year-old), I needed to reassert our control over it.

I remember my first pair of Prada shoes. I bought them two days after, in crisis and alone during Christmas my last year at Columbia, I buzzed all my hair off (well first it was: cut your own hair so that it's so badly mangled you HAVE to buzz it off...you know you'll have to), so I went to Saks and bought a GORGEOUS black pair of Prada sneakers (funky, at the time, for their Velcro, but since much-copied). I really loved those shoes (I even brought them to Cairo, before, a few months ago, giving them to the maid to give to one of her sons...the leather was getting faded and rubbishy, but the soles and everything were still in near-perfect condition), but I remember the surprise of a colleague, at Columbia, who, walking back from class with me in the middle of a small blizzard, looked down and said: "You're wearing your Prada sneakers through the snowstorm!?" Now, he had a few pair of his own, but he would never put them at RISK by exposing them to the elements. They were for sunny days where you could be seen with clarity, as far as he was concerned. I remember thinking, then, and I feel this way, now: do not buy something you cannot afford to lose or ruin.

I think that when, as a young child, you are constantly (and it is CONSTANT) subject to/aware of financial stress, you see how things that should mean so little (buying a bus pass, or a new jacket) acquire such importance because they are irreplaceable in their expensiveness: You have ONE bus pass for the entire semester (or year, if you could afford to pay that much up front, which we, back then, couldn't), and you have ONE backpack, and while my mother was never one of these types to tell you how much these things mattered (there were no desperate searches, when it got cold, for the heavy sweatshirt that thank God I didn't lose), I could sense it, and I could also sense that these material things should not be as valuable as we make them.

Fast-forward to a time of more comfort, and while people think that my losing things (and not crying about it) represents me not knowing what things are worth (well when he loses that camera he'll be sorry, and THEN he'll stop losing things), I think, on the contrary, I know exactly what things are worth, and most things are worthless (compared to people, I mean). I can be upset by the inconvenience of something (eg: my computer being broken and me not being sure if, preparing for law school, I have the money right now to buy a new one), but I am incapable of being UPSET over it. I would also resist criticism that this is about me asserting financial dominance over these objects, and by losing things and buying new ones I’m confirming for myself that we’re not as poor as we were when I was seven, because that would imply a feeling of continued financial insecurity which I no longer have. I think that part of maturing and understanding what financial security means, and learning when to be afraid (of grownups, of men, of money…) is a process of being realistic, and so while I can’t afford to lose 50 phones, I can know (and don’t need proof if it by doing it over and over) that I can lose a phone once in a while and know that I’m ok, and everything is still ok.

I loved those Prada shoes, thought they'd come through the snow ok (and they did!), and knew that if they didn't, my enjoyment of them would be curtailed, but it would be no tragedy. If one pair of Prada shoes means SO much to you that you can't afford (be it financially or emotionally) to have them lost or ruined, then it's not a responsible decision to buy them in the first place.

Back to the typewriter: I don't think that by losing these phones I'm continuing to pee in that typewriter (and I also don't think you can make it about me cutting people, numbers, etc. out of my life), but I do think that my response to my absent-mindedness (placid acceptance, combined with concerted, but failing, efforts to be more focused on what's in my hands) demonstrates a HEALTHY understanding of what things in my life actually have worth and what things don't, and I think that understanding was worked out, albeit in an act that was irresponsible and destructive (physically, not emotionally) in my early childhood.

This is not to say that we should NEVER respect the value placed upon certain things, even when that value is VERY out of synch with what it SHOULD be worth (according to our "people are valuable and Prada is not" understanding of the world), and I think, for example, that the fact that I never did lose my bus pass, or that, at 10 (and needing a computer for the ridiculous presentations that were the obsession of Orange County public schools, which I SHOULD blog about another time) I made SURE that my computer and printer were well-taken care of (even if people shouldn't, under other circumstances, necessarily have anxiety over such things), but I think that it's important to recognize when to give-in to anxiety over material things, and when not to. I will not be a prisoner to my watch, worrying if it’s been scratched, or to my phone, worrying if it’s in my sight at every moment – I will try not to scratch my watch, because I like it, and will try not to lose my mobile, because it’s terribly inconvenient and represents a real opportunity cost (eg: a plane ticket to Lebanon), but I will not walk on eggshells because of my possessions!

That said, I'm going to try very, very hard to not lose whatever phone I buy, and I'm quite happy that I've made it through Afghanistan, Dubai/Sharjah, Pakistan, Turkey (ok, I didn't take it to Turkey, because, not realizing that I just needed to charge the battery, I thought for about 5 months that it was broken), Israel/Palestine, India, AND the rest of Egypt without losing my current camera.

Without any plans to pee-in or lose "valued" electronic devices anytime soon,

VC