Overly Verbal

Today, I drowned my cell phone. (That’s not so remarkable, unless you consider that I somehow owned this cell phone since August of 2005 without drowning her before.)

The very first thing I thought, after “Crap, that’s gonna be broke,” was “Sing whatever songs are sung / wind whatever wreath, / for a playmate perished young.”* I couldn’t remember the rest of the poem, couldn’t look it up until just now, because I spent my evening going to Target, buying a new cell phone, spending eleventy hundred minutes speaking with a “customer service representative” at Tracfone so we could transfer my old phone number to my new phone, et cetera, ad nauseam.

But now that I have looked it up, I’m reminded of how nice it is. I really, really love Edna St. Vincent Millay, and one of my favorite gifts of all time is an old, somewhat musty book of her collected poems which is not only beautiful inside, but beautiful outside too, in a way it seems only old books can be.*** Anyway, here it is in its entirety:

Dirge
Boys and girls that held her dear,
Do your weeping now;
All you loved of her lies here.

Brought to earth the arrogant brow,
And the withering tongue
Chastened; do your weeping now.

Sing whatever songs are sung,
Wind whatever wreath,
For a playmate perished young,

For a spirit spent in death.
Boys and girls that held her dear,
All you loved of her lies here.

“And the withering tongue chastened”? Brilliant.

Anyway, not to worry, for the transferring of my old cell phone number to my new cell phone was an unmitigated success. Well, mitigated only by the fact that my entire phone book is missing, which is not such a big deal, as the (aforementioned, if you happen to read the footnotes inline, which I can’t imagine you not doing, because that would be silly) OCD requires my memorizing phone numbers the same way I memorize song lyrics, by which I mean with no conscious effort and sometimes disastrous effect.

The untimely drowning death of my cell phone, however, led me to act rashly, purchase a phone of exactly the same model, furnished by exactly the same cell phone provider I’ve used my entire cell phone owning career. So it still takes me 16 pushes of a button to get an open parenthesis into any given text message. I’m hoping the new phone will allow me to purchase airtime online without speaking with a “customer service representative”, which would be a vast improvement over the old cell phone’s functioning. And the new phone is black, where the old phone was silver, which just makes it that much easier to lose my phone in the interior of my bag. All that being said, however, I would just like to point out that although I’m an idiot, and destroyed my old cell phone in one fell swoop,**** I managed to replace her for the low, low price of $15.74, with a disruption in service of only about six hours. I’d like to see someone else pull that off.

Actually, I wouldn’t. I like you people, and I hope you don’t drown your cell phones. It’s cool to be like me and all, but not every single day.

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* And yes, I did think of it with line breaks and punctuation intact. They don’t call it OCD for nothin’.**

** Actually, that’s not true. The second thing I thought was, “Thank whatever whims of fate prevented my dropping her in the toilet. I do sort of lead a charmed life, don’t I?”

*** Dear boys who are secretly in love with me,

Sorry to ruin this for you, but that whole “buying an old book of Edna St. Vincent Millay poems for Jennifer for her birthday to win her heart forever” only plays once. (And, um, it doesn’t actually play as planned, even if you are a (um, Jewish) English major at Columbia, which the boy in question was, in spades. In fact, it ultimately fails miserably, except I do have fond thoughts of the boy in question occasionally, when I have cause to pull the book off the shelf and look at it.) (Maybe that wasn’t what he was aiming for, though, winning my heart forever. Maybe he just enjoyed having a nice smart girl to talk to, thought he’d buy her a book. Who can tell the vagaries of the human heart?)

Fondly,

Jennifer

**** Yup, that’s the noise she made entering the water: swoop! Then she went “gurgle, gurgle”, then she made some pretty Rorschach test-like images on her screen, then some pink goo oozed out of her battery. All in all, it wasn’t a bad death, really.

(With apologies to Edwin Arlington Robinson and Dylan Thomas.)

I really wish that I could breathe.
I want to have no allergies.
All that I can see are trees.

I prob’ly need more saline spray,
the sneezing brings me to my knees.
I really wish that I could breathe.

For Zyrtec I will gladly pay –
hold on a sec, I’ve gotta sneeze.
All that I can see are trees.

I will not like the month of May.
My winter life is one of ease.
I really wish that I could breathe.

Bright green leaves, pure white blossoms gay;
spring’s nice and all, for birds and bees.
All that I can see are trees.

When you think of me, I beg you pray.
(Buy stock in Kleenex, if you please.)
I really wish that I could breathe.
All that I can see are trees.

(Anyone who is under the impression that the word “breathe” does not actually rhyme with the word “trees” can either keep that impression to themselves or take it up with me, in which case I would like to remind you that I am taking medication the side effects of which include irritability and increased physical activity. Not to mention nosebleeds. Might not want to get in an argument with me right now - it wouldn’t be pretty!)

So the first thing I thought upon entering my home this evening was, “Gosh, my carpet sure looks clean!” I think if I wasn’t as easily amused as I am, I would likely have already had to be institutionalized.

And earlier today I was just as amused by a new thing I must have and . . . oh yeah, my birthday’s next week! Remember when I was coveting HC’s computer, which has a barcode scanner right in the built-in camera? Well, this CueCat is only $15, and while I’ll probably have to actually change my operating system to make it work, I would still love to have one, because it would scan my new books right into LibraryThing, and then I would be happy. (Plus, it looks like a cat!)*

And this is the part where it gets less happy. October gives me insomnia. I don’t know why, but it’s true. Last night when I couldn’t sleep I read last October’s entries, and as it happens, last October is when I was so incapable of sleeping that I believed electro-magnetic fields were invading my bedroom.**

And this October is freaking me out. It’s just like last October - I can’t sleep, I need a job, and whole bunches of stuff that happened last year that I was discreet enough not to publish on the Internet seem to be repeating themselves.

Here’s the thing - I’ve got a little bit more of a handle on at least parts of what I was struggling with last year. For example, unless I start dating a man who happens to be an emotionally crippled asshole sometime in the next week, I won’t have to come up with a codename as good as “a prime example of my occasional inability to accurately judge character” to describe the boy I’m dating on my birthday. That’s good. And last year in October I was wishing I had an electronic keyboard. This year I have one (but it mostly collects dust, because, as was the case last October, I am not very good at applying myself). And I was also bemoaning the fact that someone stole my god-damned pants, but since I am right this very minute wearing pants that are exactly the same as the pants someone stole from me, I’m all over the having the right pants thing.

Other parts I’m still struggling with - should I have bangs? Shouldn’t I just up and move to California? These are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night. (Also, Sara still thinks I live in New Jersey, but I recently learned that she also believes that her brother-in-law lives in Maine, when he actually lives in Maryland. That Sara, she’s kooky.)

Either way, you would think that with a whole year having gone by, I wouldn’t be in almost exactly the same place I was then, but would instead be better off. Luckily, last October I was, and I quote, “so pleased in the last few days with the fact that the people I am lucky enough to count among my friends are largely the most reasonable, funny, generous, supportive, interesting, and intelligent group of people ever”. Still true, thankfully, and not a bad rut to be stuck in. (And since then I’ve added a number of new people to the people I count among my friends, and those people are good and noble and true, and I am, in fact, better off for that.)

But it’s not just me who’s repeating my 2006 October - other people are too, and it’s fucking weird. And that’s all I have to say on that point, I guess, and maybe you’ll only know what I’m talking about if you’re repeating your 2006 October again this year, but a) it’s my blog, and I will be deliberately obscure if I want to, and b) parts of last October were really rather pleasant, weren’t they?

So I’ve got an idea, and I’m not sure if it’s gonna work, but I’m willing to give it a go. I’ve already covered the fact that I’ve never been able to keep a journal successfully before, and that I don’t consider my blog a journal in any meaningful way, because I’m not just censoring what you’re allowed to say here, but also carefully choosing what I say and when I say it. But what if I tried to write down everything I didn’t write here, in a little book (a little black book with perfectly-ruled lines), and really wrote what I felt, instead of writing to a punch line about vacuum cleaners or songs stuck in my head or a funny thing my cat did?

I know an awful lot of people who write as if not doing so would kill them, and who feel deeply, and who express themselves well (if haltingly). And I’ve been reading a lot of letters lately. “The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell: 1938-1978”, and “Love Letters: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran to May Ziadah”, in particular. Both are stunning, moving, and other adjectives I don’t even know, as if such a thing were possible. What if I just wrote every day, not in a way that could be chanced upon by any given person with Internet access, but in a way that allowed me to really express myself? What if no one was ever going to read what I wrote?

I hate to do this, but I’m totally going to quote a cheesy thing I quoted last September (which ought to be a thing unto itself, and not just a prelude to this October, but I’m not really in charge, am I)? Remember when I was all about that Marianne Williamson thing about being brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Here it goes again:

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that
other people won’t feel insecure around you.

Damn it. Did I just write to a Marianne Williamson punch line? Son of a bitch. The new writing like you really mean it (and not publishing it on the Internet) thing starts next Monday, at which point I will try to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous in private. Wish me luck.

_____
* Goethe sent me a link to this CueCat thing earlier, and explained that he was only giving me a link for my birthday this year. But just the link was really enough, and I’m sure I can find time to find a link to something cool on the Internet that Goethe wants and I’m not going to buy him before his birthday takes place. (Just after mine, which (just in case you haven’t yet written it down) is early next week.)

** And you know what didn’t happen when I wrote that entry, but did happen when I just now re-read it? That EMF song is stuck in my head. (“Which EMF song?” you might ask? I’m pretty sure there was only the one.)