What have we become

In the fall of 1998, I was living in a rented house in a mediocre part of the city of Trenton, NJ. One of my sisters was living not too far from Camden, NJ and the other was living in southern New Jersey and driving regularly into and out of Philadelphia. All three of us were driving the scary piles of scrap metal that seem to qualify as cars when you are young and broke and living in rented space. My parents wisely decided that it would be a good idea if we all had cell phones.

These first phones were about six inches long. There was no way to collapse the long rubber antenna. Even if I had carried a purse, this thing never would have fit inside. I left it home a lot.

Every minute of air time used was charged. It was safer to leave the thing off and pray no one called.

I think in a full year, I made two phone calls from it and recieved another two.

When my unreliable pile of rust broke down one night on a particularly empty stretch of route 29 near Washington's Crossing, I had to walk to a seedy roadside garage to phone for help, because I had left the monstrosity at home.

Two years later, living in Cincinnati, I upgraded to a "sleeker" Nokia phone. It still didn't fold or collpse. It was still about four and a half inches long. It had propensity for dialing other phones without me telling it to.

As of tonight, I'm on my third phone since the haunted one. It's a sleek little LG phone with a sleek little name, Chocolate. It slides up in two pieces and does more things faster than the Apple IIGS my parents spent a lot of money on in 1988.

I'm pretty sure this sleek little black box could launch a satellite if I could just find the correct menu.

Five

Wonderturtle has tagged me again. And she says I have to.

Five things you probably didn't know about me:

1. For a long time, I harbored delusions of becoming a playwright. I even directed an original piece for a drama festival in high school. We lost best play (oddly enough) to a friend of Wonderturtle. Then, in college, I was forced to face reality.

2. Until I was about 6, I was terrified of escalators. I think my older sisters may have played a role in this. I almost got left behind at Newark Airport once because of it.

3. I am obssessed with Abraham Lincoln. I don't know why. I read anything I can find about him. On our vacation to Washington, DC, I dragged my husband to Ford's Theater and the Peterson House. He was bored out of his mind.

4. I can be bought with peanut butter. I let a guy out of a $10 bet for a peanut butter cup. I reworked a friend's grad school candidacy exam with him for months in exchange for peanut butter.

5. I couldn't ride a two wheeler until late in the third grade. It was embarrassing. I could read at two and a half, but I couldn't ride a bike until I was 8 or 9.

Tag: anyone who reads this :)

Interference

I was driving to work the other day and trying to listen to "Morning Edition" on my local public radio station (88.1 FM). Suddenly, Steve Inskie was interrupted by Howard Stern. I grew up listening to Howard, so I wasn't offended. But I was confused. Howard Stern has been on satellite radio for over a year. How was he contacting me?

Eventually, my brilliant father figured out that 88.1 FM is the frequency that Sirius Satellite radio users have to sue to transmit their radio to their car stereo. The traffic where I drive is dense enough for me to pick up transmissions from neighboring vehicles.

Now, it has become sport for me. Every time I pick one up, I try to figure out which car near me I am eavesdropping on. It's fun. There's some guilty pleasure in knowing what someone else thinks they are doing in the privacy of their own vehicle...

It was all fun and games until I got stuck behind the Lexus listening to Fox News.

Celebration

How big a nerd am I? I cheered as the election returns began to roll in last night. I celebrated the demise of many an evil representative and one by one the people spoke and for once weren't tricked by fake non-issues.