Disconnected

As fate would have it, I lost my cellphone on the evening of D-day (see previous post). I actually have this mental vision of how my faithful little black Nokia must have sailed in a perfect parabola out of my jacket pocket as I ran over soft damp grass to catch a tram (after a session of recuperating in the evening at E and L's place with red wine, cheese and good company, rendering me cloudy rather than misty).

Now I am two days out without my cellphone, and a bit in wonderment over the effects. I feel like I've voluntarily rid myself of a bit of my personality. My mantra before leaving home, "Keys, Money, Cell" is missing a piece. At odd times during the day I keep hearing what I think is my ringing signal (a honking horn) or my text signal (a doorbell). I've even had the sensation of feeling the vibrate signal from what turned out to be an empty pocket. Even if it only takes me a millisecond to realize I imagined it, it feels a bit like my body is too-finely tuned to hear those sounds.

It's like I've been offered an aural-haptic metaphor to the temporary cut-off contact with one of my closest friends. I'm disconnected both by choice and by necessity. It's so in line that it fills me with the sensation of being told something significant (Or I'm just over-analyzing, but then that's what makes me write in the first place). Maybe it's something to do with new starts, getting rid of the old, or some things in life being irrevocable. If my phone did indeed disappear the way I think it did, I've literally run away from it all...

Unlike the last time I was shut off for 3 days from the cellular world, I have nowhere near as much panic about the whole thing this time. Perhaps the prospect of having no possibility at all to a) see any messages and b) make any severely misjudged calls rhymes pretty well with the 'lull' I have asked for, and the panic has been lessened by the emotional fatigue. Maybe sometimes we get more than we asked for, which turns out to be exactly what we need.

Midsummer's eve was an unusual one for me - I spent it out in the countryside visiting J&J, two good friends of mine who, within the space of the past year, have gotten married, got a dog, had a baby Arvid, bought a Volvo XC90 and a three-story house in the countryside. I visited along with 5 single people (all guys except for me), two unmarried couples with no kids, and several married and unmarried couples mostly with kids. About 20-ish people. Since we began the celebrations at 12 noon-ish, I was kind of aurally beat up by the time nightfall came (at around 11pm...). Myriads of little kids make myriads of noise, as do the grown-ups. Especially the parents trying to gain control of their own offspring while not intruding on the upbringing of other people's kids.

One funny thing was the type-casting sensation I had of the guests (of whom I didn't know anyone previously, so I hope I'm forgiven for being a bit snarky): You could really tell that those who were parents were stable and ready for the assignment, while the childless couples and the single guys... well, you could in most cases tell WHY they weren't parents yet. (I suppose that could very well go for me too, in all fairness...). One of the guests was the type of guys who, when drunk, get loud, obnoxious and just WON'T stop trying to drive home a point that you conversationally accepted half an hour ago. Not even if you tell them to their face that they are a tjôtrôv (Gbg colloquial for "incessantly-babbling-pain-in-the-aaargh").

And wouldn't you know it, the dude finally gave me his business card and turned out to have exactly the same name as a certain someone I had been trying not to think about by coming to a party where I knew no-one. Sometimes running don't help none.

At any rate, I will be disconnected for a while more and am pretty much at peace with that. I think it came at the right time.


PS: In a Midsummer's Day fit of restlessness I today went to the movies (alone) twice! I saw 'The Kite Runner' at a matinée, and later I snitched the last ticket to 'S.A.T.C. the Movie' (which I had read a very, very bad review of half an hour before it started). So I suppose I have today consumed the soul-food movie-equivalent of first whole-wheat-spinach-and-tofu and then 3kg of cotton candy. In retrospect, I figured I can use both to put things into perspective. Even if the last movie made shopping seem absolutely vile.

PPS: I should go to bed. I'm teaching tap at (and participating in) a bachelorette party tomorrow...