Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 66
January 4, 2014
Pouch for Windows Phone - concept work
Pouch is my Pocket 3rd-party app of choice on Windows Phone. They're running a contest right now for a new logo design, so I threw my hat in.
Keta
Keta | The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows from John Koenig on Vimeo.
keta /KAY-tah/
n. an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past.
January 3, 2014
More Things
I do not want to live without irony. I do not want any New Sincerity, I do not wish to emulate a plant, just NO. The world is far too dark and rage-making for me to dispense with irony entirely.
So now we no longer buy the thing we want, we buy the shape of the thing we prefer.
Unprofessional in the best possible sense: taking my humanity just as seriously as I take my profession.
The internet might end up returning journalism to a faster, more technologically sophisticated version of what it was before the advent of the commercial newspaper business.
In 2013, I was happy to see more video games exploring violence with focus and honesty.
If a book isn’t immersive and incredibly visual), is there much of a point in seeking out a paper copy?
I felt for all of the people in this house — alive or otherwise — and got genuinely wrapped up in each chapter of family drama. It expertly captures the compromises of family life and the impossible decisions everyone has to face at some point — between personal happiness and family stability.
January 2, 2014
Pro-folio: Millions of fake designers just because they can
Given the availability of information online ranging from open source names to college databases, computers can construct a believable identity in no time. All it takes is to carefully lay the facts in a logical sequence, which can be coded as an algorithm. If this is possible, can computer programs create all sorts of human identities in future? And what will be the motivation to do so? Will it be just populating identities and adding noise to our already overloaded Internet or will it give birth to interesting, engaging, avant-garde, mysterious identities and art works?
This is the first jaw-dropper of 2014 for me, and something that necessitates a shift in authenticity online. It moves the needle from "You're probably a person," to "I need more proof."
December 30, 2013
A Beginner's Guide to Pinboard
I was going to write an article about Pinboard sometime this month, but then I came across this article and now I don't have to.
December 28, 2013
My Lover's Phone
My lover’s phone has 92 buttons, and I don’t know what to do with any of them. It’s the same bland beige that coats every computer I’ve ever seen, like cement without texture or wear, the kind of beige reserved for storage Tupperware. It’s a small phone, well, for what it is I would call it small. It’s small compared to other phones I’ve seen in person, like my dad’s, who only ever uses it in his truck even though he says it’s not a car phone. It sits in his glove compartment next to the truck manual and slowly dies of misuse. He says it’s just for emergencies, and that’s why it’s so thick and heavy. He bought it because if he rolls his truck again he wants to be able to call for help. There’s only one line for digital numbers on the brick, as opposed to my lover’s, which has two screens, one small one on the outside for dialing and one secret one on the inside for stuff I didn’t even know you could fucking do on a phone. She doesn’t even have to tell me; there are buttons for email, fax, Kontakte (which is German for Contacts), internet, and escape.
My lover’s name is that of a Disney princess. Dark hair thickly layered and curved inward, just above her neck. It is the type of haircut that looked like it took real effort to keep up every morning. I didn’t know what I would do to myself in the same time. What would my hair even look like with an hour of work? It never occurred to me to try. I never asked her because I never really cared about the details. She wore light white blouses and plaid skirts even though we didn’t go to a catholic or private school. I saw her legs often and never got the chance to touch them but I have the memory of what it was like to wonder what it would have been like. My lover needs glasses but only wears them at home.
She doesn’t let me call her my girlfriend in front of other people or even when we’re alone (which is never enough) so I call her my lover and even then only when I’m by myself. I walk her home every day, and I call her after I’m done eating, and we talk for half an hour most nights. I don’t remember what we talked about. If I had to guess it would be class gossip. I want to say we talked about television but we didn’t watch the same things and no amount of liking her was going to get me to watch the shows she would mention. I was into sports, so I watched all the sports. I did not talk to her about sports, equal parts being that she would not be interested, I would not be interested in telling her, and I didn’t understand sports enough to communicate anything interesting. I could recount stats and scores but without even trying I knew she wouldn't care. But if I could go back and listen to these phone calls, I doubt I’d pick out anything interesting anyway.
The quality of conversation was not why I called her. She is the first girl I like, even if I haven’t properly processed that or was even terribly conscious of its effects. I want to be around her as often as possible, and if we can’t be in the same room then I will do what I can to hear her voice—what she would say and what I says in return would become important things. For the entire time we are together, it is about the difference between not wanting to be around any girls and immediately wanting nothing else. It is about that struggle in my head, and because of that some days I don’t call and I don’t like her or think about her. I would go back and forth between this and I wish I would just get a fucking hobby already. In my head I exaggerate this time to be an entire year. It absolutely was not.
Her dad bought her the phone, and I wasn’t allowed to do anything with it because she says he says only she could touch it. She says she could send emails and she did to some boy named Toby in New York. Fuck that guy. She says she emailed me once but it didn’t go through and she wasn’t going to keep trying just because I couldn’t figure it out on my end. This is after I sign up for an email address specifically so she can send me one. Now, when something related to technology doesn't work, I don't know if it’s real or just people trying to get me off their case.
My lover's phone weighs and feels like a stapler. She keeps it in her purse and almost never takes it out while in school. It was so seldom that it was talked about like a rumour. Because I am more often than not in her corner, I never whisper hey, you know what? I've seen it. I've pressed the buttons. They feel great. They feel like they've never been touched by anyone else. Because I'm 13, these are normal thoughts. It is important to me that no other boy had ever held it.
It was just the once that I really got my hands around the thing. I was in her room. I have no memories around this room. I don't know how long I was in there. I don't know how I got home. I don't remember what her dad looked like, but I do remember he came upstairs once to make sure the door was open. He made a whole theatre about it. He wanted me to contemplate how good a guy I was. But I was not a good guy. Her phone was on the bed, and she was flipping through her tapes and telling me what bands she liked (I did not like these bands but also didn’t care to argue) and I cracked open the case and carelessly mashed buttons with my thumbs. I tried to find this asshole Toby in there, like in the contacts, but couldn't figure out the menu. Phones came with instructions back then and I could imagine how thick the book for this phone might have been. It was like an overgrown game boy with three heads, a monstrosity not built to be handled by humans but some kind of super business robot with no regard for humour or love. It was the phone Miss Havisham would have used.
My lover sat down next to me and she took her phone and placed it on her nightstand and looked back at me and right then and there I knew that absolutely nothing was going to happen between us. It was around the moment she says “You know nothing’s going to happen between us, right?” It wasn’t even heartbreaking. I knew it before she told me. That’s some self-defeating shit, but that’s where I was at thirteen. I had no ego to bruise. I asked her what she thought we were.
“Friends,” she says. “But I want to keep it that way. And even then, just between us.”
I looked up her phone on my computer at home. It took me an hour to find anything about it. There was a review some magazine had scanned and posted. They says the internet on the phone was slow. They says the functions never really worked as advertised. They says it wasn’t worth the price, that this would be what everyone would eventually want, but not like this. Not this way. Nobody knew a better solution, but they says this wasn’t it.
My lover’s phone could receive texts, but not from me because I couldn’t convince my parents to give me a phone. My lover’s phone could receive email, but I just got an account and didn’t know how to use it and didn’t see the big deal. We were the same age and sat in the same science class, but she might as well have been an empress on Jupiter. I talked myself into how lucky I was that I got to spend any time with her at all.
One day I was feeling particularly masochistic so I asked her why she spent any time with me at all if she didn't want me to be her boyfriend and she probably just wanted to be with that American jackass Toby. I knew that whatever she says about me would immediately become my least favorite thing about myself.
She says she wanted a few days to think about it. In those few days, we called back and forth. Sometimes I would call her cell, and sometimes her house. I began to call her cell more often because that meant I wouldn’t have to speak to her father, but also because the phone kept a record of calls. My home phone had no screen, but her phone did and it showed all the people who had ever called her. I wanted on that list and I wanted nobody else on that list. I looked at it like a high score list on an arcade machine at a corner store that other people played, and I excelled. I had no idea how to treat women so I just reverted to ideas from sports and video games. I am an idiot.
She calls me back in a few days and has something like this to say. “I wanted to give you a good answer, because we’re friends and I like you. I didn’t just want to give you some bullshit, but the truth is, you’re just different. Sometimes that’s nice, because the guys I actually like can be dicks and you’re nicer, but even then sometimes you’re exhausting to talk to, and your niceness is something I feel you sometimes put on because someone told you acting nice was better than being true to yourself. The reason I don’t want to actually date you is because of that artifice. I can’t quite put my finger on the real you and the you that you can’t help but project when I’m around. There’s just something about you that isn’t authentic, like you’re wearing a person instead of being one.”
Like her phone with her 92 fucking buttons, there wasn’t much I could have done to make it work. But I would argue this point incredibly. I wouldn’t let up on the idea that “No, this is the real me. Please, listen. There’s nothing else. I’ve shown you more of myself than I can ever actually admit. This is my skin and these are my feelings. If I’m awkward and unseemly it’s only because I’m new to this and keep trying on different hats to see if they’ll work, and I’m not even sure what I’m trying to get to work other than that I like you and don’t know why and you don’t like me and I don’t know why.”
She would say something almost pretty much exactly like “Well, if this is the real you then I don’t know what to do. Maybe the answer to someone questioning your authenticity isn’t admitting that this is all there is. Maybe there should be something underneath that you weren’t willing to show out of nervousness or self esteem, and maybe a girl wants to draw that real person out so that she can see him and only her, and that’s what makes a relationship special, and any indication that she’s not actually receiving something unique is a killer.”
I would rally back, and find myself holding my corded phone harder, until I feel the plastic squeeze in my fist. I have no idea how much my phone cost, because it belongs to my parents and at this point I’m not even sure where one would even buy a thing like this. We move every year but I don’t know where our stuff comes from. Tense and nearly breaking my own phone I defend myself poorly. “It isn’t that this is all there is, but it takes time to really form. I don’t know what I like. I don’t even know if I like you. But I can’t stop thinking about you and your life and how I’d like to be in it and explore that, swim in it, breath it, and find who I am and whatever that means, probably nothing, probably something you don’t even like, but god damn I try, try, try, try, try. And that’s it, that’s my problem, isn’t it? You like Toby cause he doesn’t give a shit and he lives in New York, and I know that because I snooped on your phone you call him and not the other way around just like you and I in reverse and isn’t that just the oldest and saddest thing? I could criticize you but I know that’ll only do damage and tear at the little I’ve got left so I’ll just let you have the last word and then I’ll leave and never talk to you again but know that you, or the idea of you, whatever you represent, will probably never leave my thoughts. You will somehow hurtfully inform every decision I ever make about a woman ever again. And man, that’s not gonna go great for me.”
The real conversation was much shorter and much more hurtful, but I can’t repeat it because I don’t remember it. At this point, I don’t even know if the conversation happened at all, or if she just faded from my life and we stopped calling one another. I have a feeling I implanted this memory because it changes every time a new relationship falls apart, and the faults I display in the latest failure inform the criticisms she gives me. I don’t know if I was artificial with her or another girl. I don’t know if I tried too hard or too little, and I don’t know this because I did not possess the ability to actually be honest at the time. If I had it, I would have surely let her have it, and perhaps her future relationships could have been improved by our arguments. Maybe she would have liked me. Maybe it would have worked out. And maybe I’m just kidding myself.
Part 2
I have this fantasy where I'm lazy. In it, I play hundred of hours of old video games I already own. I order takeout for every meal of the day. I sleep for months at a time, dreaming on autopilot, breathing so deep forever. Nothing gets accomplished, and I have no desire to succeed or attain. I do nothing, and I am no one.
I have this fantasy because I cannot help but do the opposite. I am a consumer of eccentric and exotic technologies, and I buy these things because I have to work, and I have to enjoy my work, and this compulsion has led to strange and regrettable choices.
I cycle between three conflicting thoughts, and these thoughts have led me to alter the structure of my life. The first thought is that technology gets in the way because its not good enough, and that progress will make it better and will eventually get out of says way. The second thought is that technology gets in the way because it isn't good or bad but improving, and that the constant iterating is what gets in the way. The third thought is that technology is the enabler of all created things, and that progress inevitably leads to better things, even if that's sometimes difficult to see in the moment.
These thoughts conflict because I have no earthly idea which one is right, or if it depends on context, or if I am in fact the problem and everything else is just fine.
My lover’s phone came from a gas station. She bought it along with some cigarettes, and the coarse plastic edges of its packaging dug into my palms as she handed it over and asked me to open it. It required scissors, the attendant suggested. Shears would be ideal. He didn’t have a pair to lend me.
My lover is the kind of girl who will lean against the cheap facade of any old place. People are cool because they couldn’t care less, but she goes beyond. There are so many things wrong with her world. There are practical measures she could apply to improve things. Measurable, accountable, reachable solutions could so easily be procured. Things are not great, and they could be better, but she just does not give a fuck.
My lover’s phone is a piece of shit. It has a brand name on it but apparently that doesn’t mean anything. This brick feels like it was built with scorn, as if its entire existence was meant to make you want to throw it on the ground with all your might. That is what happens to it eventually, but not yet. First, for months, she uses it to the best of her indifferent ability, oftentimes asking me to figure it out. When I can’t, she shrugs. She didn’t even want one in the first place, but her parents thought it would be a good idea. What’s the point of phones, she says, if you don’t want to talk to anyone?
My lover’s phone often just sits at the very bottom of her ragged, piecemeal tattooed backpack, dirtied by makeup felled loose and coke bottles improperly tightened. Within two weeks it is a sticky mess, its battery barely holding a charge, its screen cloudy with a cursed substance not of this world. It accessed the internet once and we still to this day don’t know what it found but it was not help.
I have no idea if she thinks I’m cool and I’m afraid to ask her because that is the absolutely most uncool thing I could possibly do, and it’s in this bubble of thinking that our relationship floats. I would love to think she is as insecure as I am, unknowing and blind and just letting her fingers do the talking in the dark, but I have no way of knowing this. I can speculate all day long her motivations for dating me or talking to me or having sex with me or with the two guys she cheated on me with, but at the end of the day I just don’t know. All I can do is read the text and hope it comes to me later, hopefully before it is too late.
It is December, and I am kissing her on her bed and her door is closed and we have more privacy than I have today as an adult. The tops of her walls have Christmas lights stapled permanently all the way around, and these lights are never off, even at five in the morning, right before the sun comes back, drawing first atop her deep-blue and messily-painted room and then on us, the bodies below. It is February and we are doing the same thing, but we are both a percentage point better at it. It is April and we feel so confident about our abilities that we cheat on each other at the same time with people who know both of us and end up dating later and breaking up because of us. We are careless with each other and our friends.
It begins to cut at us. We are not equipped for villainy. My lover lies to me about seeing other men. She drives around with them and hides in forests. When she wants to hurt me, she describes bedrooms she shouldn’t know about. She talks about wallpaper as if she was pushed against it, and unfinished basements decorated with posters from metal bands. She leaves pieces of clothing everywhere, and they do not get returned to her.
I am no better. I begin to attract girls who don’t have phones like hers do have cars of their own. I can’t call them but I can sometimes get them on the internet, on little lists of fake names next to green indicators designed to communicate presence. The technology gets in the way because it is not good enough, it is rough and causes so much miscommunication. I should not have access to these tools. I have no idea how to properly talk to a woman in real life, but I am talking to them with words, and these words are heavy, coated, syrupy and alcoholic, and I can’t back anything up but I so rarely have to that I never stop.
It is June and we have broken up twice. We are together again by August, determined that we can make things work. She wipes the numbers of other guys from her phone, and she shows me because I don’t trust her. We are good to each other for a half-semester. I am somehow friends with everyone she’s slept with, and we all know it but we say nothing. We just talk about punk rock and starting a band. I spent two hours in the back seat of her best friends’ sedan and they go to the mall every weekend. I don’t know if we’re all horrible or if we have it figured out.
It is another December and she’s still using the same gunked-up phone. I’m on my second one of the year and it’s nicer and I paid for it with the money I made cleaning up a restaurant after hours. I’ve already decided to leave her but I can’t bring myself to actually break up with her. I try it over the phone and she stops me, insists I come over. We make up. We can’t break up in person. We’ve both tried and it doesn’t work. Looking someone in the eyes and kissing their seventeen-year-old tears away is too hard. We break each other’s hearts. We fall asleep fighting, the whispers dissipating to nothing, our lips less than an inch apart as we collapse. In the morning I walk home alone and figure it’s really over, but then she calls me and we get lunch from a souvlaki truck.
It is March and we’re at a party for a friend and we leave early to make out under a bridge. It is the last time we kiss, but neither of us know this. My hands get dirty against the cement, and her skirt gets ruined. The knees of my jeans are irreparable. We are illegal.
She throws her phone in the nearby river to make me happy, even though I never asked her to do that and it doesn’t do a thing for me. I’m not jealous but I am possessive. The phone lands in the water but it’s so shallow that it just bounces off a wet rock. We watch it launch upward and spin. The battery casing comes off and then the battery itself dislodges and flies off in the opposite direction. It hits the water first, the phone’s body floating in the air for a quarter second longer. We watch this display and I remember it lasting. Time stopped for us all the time but never like this. The phone hit the ground closer to us, off the water. I picked it up. I asked her if she really meant to destroy it. She told me she just wanted to break something.
I took my lover and her phone home, walking the long gravel by the highway, carrying her for part of it but not as long as I want. Tucked away she had a replacement battery and we didn’t think there was much chance for recovery, but I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t power on. She used it for another few months before giving up entirely. She never liked the phone, and she abused it so much I wondered if she hated all technology or just the people she talked to. She had the same chat program on her big beige computer as I did, but after that night I never saw her on my list.
Later, after it was all over, I asked her why she bought the phone in the first place, if all she was going to do was beat it up and eventually break it. This technology is not good, and I have no idea if it is improving.
She says, “I bought it so I could talk to you, you fucking asshole.”
There are arguments that hurt relationships, but few hurt the heart as much as when you learn just how much more that person loved you than you ever considered. Few things hurt as much as finding out that she was so much more invested than you were. My lover bought her phone to talk to me, and treated it so badly because that’s how I treated her. I was flippant. I took advantage. There are so many things I should have done better. I hadn’t yet learned to treat people as such. I thought myself different and better and able, but I was just callous. I left bruises. There was no replacement battery for us. There was no fishing what we had out of the river.
She had no questions for me, but I wanted to dissect. If we were dead, I wanted an autopsy. An exit interview. If I was being escorted from the premises in handcuffs, I wanted a full report. I didn’t care that I didn’t deserve it. Even then, I thought, I don’t want to do this to someone else. I want you to save me from repeating the same mistakes. Even then, I knew it wasn’t right, wasn’t sane, wasn’t sustainable to act this way as a human being in a humane world.
She whispered the answer in my ear, but I wasn’t awake to hear it.
Part 3
My lover is poor at technology. She owns things, and knows these things are superior products, but places zero emotional currency in them. Her technology is nice because they are things and her things are nice.
My lover's phone isn't a thing she loves. It isn't a thing she thinks about. My lovers phone sits in its charger dock for days, repeatedly synching contacts with her mammoth desktop computer. She spends a lot of time on her contacts list. We both like to collect names and information, as if one day we might finally take advantage of the data and push our agenda. But what would that be? What do we even believe in? “Networking,” she says. “That’s what we believe in.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the term in this context. It’s the first time someone else has told me what I believe in.
“People are all that matter,” she says. “Technology isn’t it. You can’t make a living with technology. You can’t be happy with it. You can only be happy with other people.”
We spend a lot of time with her friends, but also in rooms full of people neither of us have met. She is a collector of business cards. There are piles in her room next to her CDs that she bought and immediately burned on her computer. When we sleep, I see the screen saver illuminated on the ceiling, small circles of colour slowly crossing over one another.
My lover has hair I lose myself in, and I have to keep my distance when we cuddle, or I am suffocated in my sleep. I find her hair on my clothes, in my bag, on my bed even if she hasn’t been there in weeks. In her absence, there is all this proof. My decisions are quickly becoming her decisions. I am dressing to her liking. I am cutting things out of my life she feels offer no value. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a video game controller. There are numbers in my phone I haven’t called in weeks.
My lover’s phone beeps in the night. Someone is texting her, and because I can’t be trusted I know who it is. My lover has another lover, someone she tells me isn’t around anymore, someone she hasn’t seen in months, since before we got together, but who sometimes forgets that they’re not together anymore and wants to come over. She swears there’s nothing there, but who has ever believed that? She still has his mix CDs.
She’ll play music from her computer I’ve never heard before, and she’ll say “Oh my god, you don’t know this? Where have you been” and I’ll feel terrible about all my life choices that led to anything but knowing about that particular pop rock band from fucking Queens.
Soon I’m saying “You haven’t heard of these guys?” to her, and she recoils. I learned it from watching her, and she doesn’t like what she sees. She didn’t go out to try to make me better. She has things she’d prefer about me, sure. But sometimes my decisions warp her ideas, and before too long I am invited over a little less. What was four to five nights a week become one to two, and within a few weeks it is once or nothing. Eventually it is nothing for a long while.
I craft a response. I make an effort. I see my faults. I write them out. I don’t wonder if maybe this drift is what’s best for both of us. I don’t reflect so much as parrot criticisms she had communicated. I don’t grow, I just resemble a man who can grow. In time, I am successful. She agrees to hear me out. We talk on the phone. We talk in person. We talk in bed. And then we talk on a plane, in a hotel room in another country and we take pictures of one another and put them in books that will last forever. This is an improvement. Her phone doesn’t come with us, and when we return there are twenty messages from a guy who still doesn’t get it.
I ask her why she chose my instead of someone else. “Why don’t you start right now. I know you won’t regret…”
She interrupts me and tells me she it’s a stupid question. She says “I’m gonna make it good this hour, make it true” and I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about but go with it because she wants me to turn off the lights.
I talk to professionals about my life. I buy a new phone and put her number in first, and this process takes an hour. I program the thing so I just hold down the “3” button for a few seconds and it dials. She doesn’t do the same, but she did take a picture of me with her very nice camera and put it in her address book. We own the same kind of phone so there’s no real excuse but there’s just no budging on this apparently. The thing is thin and black and fits into my pocket, which is something a phone has never been able to do before. It takes pictures and I take four before I realize how terrible they are. I’ve still never taken a great picture of my lover. She’s taken plenty with her camera but all of her images live at her place.
Eventually, I tell my lover what I want. “I want that feeling that my girl is really, really into me. I’ve had girls like me before but never to the point where I feel I’m safe. I feel like I need to keep trying, digging, prying, fighting. It never ends. It’s exhausting, the trying. I don’t feel like I’ve ever been with anyone who wants me the way I want them, who look forward to just seeing me, without all the effort. It can get to be too much, you know?”
My lover, who I can only imagine what she’s doing because we’re on the phone. She’s holding her phone close to her mouth because I can hear her exasperations, but as to her location I’m not sure. It’s quiet. All I hear is her. She says, “But that’s what a relationship is, isn’t it? It’s two people trying. Without the effort, why bother? Why even have a relationship if you’re not going to put something of yourself into it?”
I want to say “Yeah, but I don’t get that from you,” but instead I just say, “Yeah.”
“Besides,” she says. “I am absolutely that girl. You already have her.”
In that moment, I knew we wouldn’t work. Not because she wasn’t that girl. She probably was, but if I was that blind to it the entire time then I didn’t deserve it. But how do you ever know if you’re with the right person?
I asked her.
“Because I love you,” she says. “That’s how I know.”
I asked her if that was good enough for her. She asked me if it was good enough for me.
“It isn’t,” I says. “I need more than that.”
“Well, that’s on you,” she says, sighing. After a moment of silence, when it was clear I had nothing to offer, she says, as if reading, “Words may be false and full of art, sighs are the natural language of the heart.”
“Is that from something?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’ve got to go.”
I wait for an afflatus.
I learn how to program my phone better. I read the manual that came in the box and then I throw it away. I begin to run, ten minutes at a time until it became twenty, then thirty. I do a lot more laundry. I winnow down the parts of my time so I will have more for her. I don’t remember to update my website. I do all the things a single man does when he preps for a big comeback. I am Tyson, lacerating medicine balls with my knuckles. I feel like this will help.
My lover meets me in her car. She puts her phone in between us, just south of the stick. We kiss in private where nobody can see, but then the damn phone rings. She swipes it open and stops me. “I have to get this. It’s him.”
My lover’s phone is her boyfriend. I don’t know what I am.
I’ve never seen my lover’s boyfriend, but I hear his faint voice through the speaker next to her ear. He is suspicious. He wants to know where she is. For years, long after I’m no longer in her car, he will call her and ruin her fun. Even when he is a different guy, he will do this. There will always be a guy in her life ruining her fun. This is unfair, of course. He doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t get that there are guys like me, and girls like her, and that he isn’t like us. He’s just the guy on the phone. At least, this is what I tell myself to try to justify it, to draw it a little out of vetanda and back into just a thing I can type into a digital calendar.
I put my arm around her shoulder as she hangs up. “Hey soldier,” she says, burrowing her head into my chest. This is taking its toll, but she holds onto her phone.
We need these things because we can't be alone. You can be without a lover but not a phone, and you can be without a phone but not a lover. Neither choice is ideal, but both can conflict. It’s worse then both tug at you, dividing attention, creating plateaus, shearing the curated you and leaving the you that is.
I tell her that I want to do right, but not right now. She asks me if that’s from something. I nod. She’s getting married, she tells me. This changes nothing, she promises. She doesn’t break the promise. We meet in her car a month after the marriage and it seems easier, somehow, that if we’re going to have an affair we might as well have a marriage to go along with it.
I know more about her phone than she does, and I know how to shut him up when he calls. She isn’t as good at lying as I’d like and I wonder where I got these ideas. I can’t blame this on anyone I know. Why do I want my lover to lie well? I know she’s already lying to me better than she is to him. More than that, I know this is on me. She may have fooled around with someone else at some point, but I drove her here quicker and rougher. I like that she comes to me because she doesn’t like her husband, but I can’t consciously do the math without getting sad.
All affairs are temporary. Ours fades to an anticlimax, which is maybe the recommended route. We get away with it. It’s Christmas and I call her, my phone cold aluminum in my hands. She holds hers, plastic and rounded. She gets to play better games than I do.
“You’re my favourite,” I say. “I don’t care what anyone has told you.”
“Nobody ever told me anything about you but that you were bad news, soldier.”
I drank. “I wanted you, you know? I really did. I threw a lot away to just have a shot with you. I could have made it work and I could have been good to you. All you needed was some faith.”
I could hear a door close, my lover walking down a hallway and maybe some stairs. “What do you want to hear? That I’m unhappy? I’m not. He’s very good to me. We have our problems but you don’t need to know about those. You’ll just like them. You’ll think about them too much and try to convince me that they’re bigger than they are. They’re just the same problems everybody has. I’d have them with you, too, eventually. I can’t uproot my life just because you might be more fun. What happens when that goes away and we’re just living together, in each other’s lives all the time and not just a couple times a year? What happens then, when you’re annoyed by me? There will have to be another girl. I won’t know where you are.”
“You don’t know where I am right now,” I say.
“Yeah, and right now I’m okay with that. But I won’t be. Call me girlfriend, wife, whatever, in the future and I won’t be okay not knowing where you are. You think he’s jealous? I’m jealous. I’m possessive. I’d be worse. I know a don’t have much of a right to be but there you go. I wouldn’t let you go. And you need to be free. I don’t think you work well when you aren’t. I hope you find the kind of girl who can handle both of you.”
“Both of me?”
“You’re a bastard,” she says. “But women can handle bastards. I can handle my bastard husband. And I could handle you. The bastard part of you isn’t so bad. It’s the charming part. That’s the tough one. I don’t have the defenses for that.”
It feels like a compliment but I know it isn’t. I try to tell myself not to think too highly of being insulted correctly.
Still, I say “Thanks for that,” and we talk about nothing for twenty minutes before she has to go back to him. I don’t process this conversation for years, but even then the advice is invaluable. We all should be so lucky. Most of the time we all just lie to each other, and these lies are weak hooks to the next monkey bar. Even though this is a lie, that none of this ever happened and none of these people are real, this lie needs to cut me again, as it did back then.
Part 4
My lover is fast. She slinks through the world, and I strain every muscle to try to keep up. The Obstacles, insecurities, bruises, cuts, mighty blows, and knockouts of the world don't phase her. Nothing keeps her down. There is no fist that can really strike her.
There is a juggernaut. In this new world, there are fiefdoms. She chooses one out of spite. She hates the big dog and finds her closest ally and holds tight. My lover is loyal to her phone. She cares so much more than anyone I've met about purposefully spiting a brand. I do not know if its connected to her stealth, but she never once disputes her choices. She never once feels like she made the wrong call. I take that to mean she never second guessed her decision to make it happen with me. She went with a model that's slower but just fine. Every choice is political.
My lover chooses me. I’m not like the other guys. We shouldn’t work. We shouldn’t fit. We make enemies. We turn people off. For a long time I’m not sure if we’re good for one another. These days, you second guess things like phone choices. You wonder if you got the right thing. You wonder if there’s maybe something better out there. God knows there are people out there making a living trying to impose this feeling on us. It’s embarrassing to admit but these things are effective. I’m not immune. Who is? Who can fight millions and millions of dollars? Who has that kind of fortitude? It used to be, you needed something, so you got it and so long as it worked, you didn’t really think about it. My lover has the iron to ignore all this. She chose me. She doesn’t worry about new innovation every day. She doesn’t worry about competition. She just wants me.
My lover’s phone is perfect. I get the same one and I’m not as happy, but I try harder. That’s how it stays equal. What’s easy for her isn’t for me. Every day, it’s a bit of a struggle. The phone is beautiful and falciform and made in a way I can’t really comprehend, inspired by design principles I study. It makes me want to make beautiful things. I want to make beautiful things for her. She’s tough to impress, but that’s what makes it worth it when I finally break through. There are no easy battles. I never feel like I’m being given a free pass. But I also never feel like she’d be better off without me. I make this situation better, but only if I try.
My lover’s phone sits on a shelf or sleeps in her bag and I don’t see it for days. She is present and views it as a distraction. I’ll paw at mine for hours, the phone in my purlicue, rubbing glass, indolent. I am an addict, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t the best thing there is. The addiction proves that maybe it is. Maybe it’s the best thing I could do, and that’s why I can’t stop. She sits next to me, silent. She is patient but I’ve been rude. I chose and have chosen and continue to choose the world over her, believing I have her already, believing a person can be had.
My lover has cooled, aged and hardened. She cannot be coerced, but I’m still here and in that I can only think that I haven’t done the worst job. She isn’t loyal. She doesn’t forgive. She never, ever changes her mind. But I am here.
She says…
I listen. I really listen. I hold the phone to my ear and let her in.
December 27, 2013
New desktop arrangement
Not pictured: Microsoft Arc Mouse on the right. Purposefully pictured, my new awesome Wacom pad.
Interesting realization: being left handed, with ports on my PC all on the right, can be frustrating.
Life magazine, 1945: Why it was the greatest magazine ever published.
No contemporary magazine could duplicate Life’s success, and not just because 1945 was such a monumental year. No modern magazine has remotely close to its influence. The most popular magazine in America, Life circulated 4 million copies a week, and was read by 13.5 million people—10 percent of the population. The largest weekly magazine now, People, has a smaller circulation than Life even though the U.S. population is 2.5 times as large as it was then. And in an age before TV, Life’s photographs were a dominant way that Americans saw the world.
Can't argue with that. What stunning layouts on this thing.
December 24, 2013
Report: Everyone Starting New Exciting Stage Of Life Except You
“Our study proves that, unlike yourself, all of your peers are enriching themselves by experiencing the triumphs and failures associated with any new personal journey, a journey that will ultimately be looked back upon as the most fulfilling part of these individuals’ lives. Meanwhile, you remain trapped in a state of perpetual—well, our researchers would have to call it ennui, as there is really no other word for it.”
