First You Invent the Universe

I got my first cellphone in 2013 after a comedy of errors about meeting someone at a Go Station resulted in wasting half a day. I had never thought I needed to be constantly reachable and I still don’t, but after that, I resolved that occasionally I do need to be reachable on the move and for the rest of the time, it could just be a pleasant convenience.

So: I got a cellphone very late, and in some ways, I never fully adapted. I still answer it sometimes without looking at the call display, as if it were a plastic wall phone in my parents’ kitchen in 1988. This is a fun form of phone roulette that mainly results in me telling duct cleaning services I don’t have a house or any ducts (one service guy said “Oh my god!” and another said, “I love you!”), but occasionally I answer a political survey to the caller’s GREAT surprise and delight. (sidebar, the other day I was at my mominator’s and she was making dinner when the phone rang, and it actually IS a displayless plastic house phone, so I DID answer it cold. I also just said hello, completely baffling the caller, who turned to be my brother, who thought he had misdialed and called me by mistake.)

I’m also not great at texting. I LOVE texting. I love texting in all its forms. I’m not bad it the same as people who say they are bad at texting in that they never answer. I will answer you thoughtfully as soon as I have time to sit down and compose a message. I’m bad at the physical act of texting. I use a single index finger—my friend Kendall said I looked like I was casting a spell when I text, which is better than the alternative, which is that I looked like someone who was learning to text. Often if I have a lot to say I’ll use the messenger app on my computer so I can use a QWERTY keyboard and touchtype properly. The rest of the time, my messages tend to lack detail, capital letters and punctuation. I CAN do better but it’s tiring and, as I proofread carefully in all other formats, it’s nice sometimes to think of texting as a little bit of a free space, like the centre of a bingo card. Sometimes I can put together a professional sounding text but a lot of them sound like a I can haz cheezburger post. Here is a recent dialogue, again with my long-suffering brother:

It’s relaxing, really, to know I can’t text properly and therefore am not going to try. I recommend having one area of your life where you just totally give up—whether it’s making the bed or filing receipts or sending nice texts or what have you—just one thing where you can just be chaos. It’s pleasant.

In other news, there was a multi-day, multi-person fight over bagels. I am working up to having a few of these newsletters be a bit more serious but, this is not that.

Rebecca: These blueberry bagels are terrible. They just taste like nothing. But they have blue spots.
Mark: You don’t have to eat them.
Rebecca: We’re low on bread.
Mark: Ok, well, I like the bagels.
Rebecca: I have a recipe for bagels. I’m going to make bagels. Then we’ll see.
Mark: You know how Carl Sagan would say you make a bagel?
Rebecca: No, how?
Mark: First you have to invent the universe.
Rebecca: What?
Mark: I’m paraphrasing.
Rebecca: Um. But also I can buy you better bagels. We are in the bagel hub of the Toronto.
Mark: I’m more of a Montreal bagel person. I know those are hard to come by here.
Rebecca: So the ones that are around the corner, the best of Toronto, are not good enough. But the $1.99 No Frills blue ones, those are good?
Mark: Why can’t I just have what I like?
Rebecca: Because you are wrong. Also J is getting you Montreal bagels. We had a whole argument about it.
Mark: Why are you arguing with someone besides me about bagels?
Rebecca: Because she’s in Quebec right now and she’s coming back through Montreal and she said she’d get us bagels and I said that’s great and she said what kind do you want and I said Everything and she said I was jeopardizing the friendship and I said is it because of the dried garlic and she said yeah and so now we are getting sesame.
Mark: I see.
Rebecca: I don’t even think those are real blueberries.

<3

RR