Author Archives → Jen

I am going on an adventure.

You used to write your words with certainty.  It is rhetoric sprawled across the pages in your line-less notebook, written in the ink of youthful arrogance with the assured handwriting of someone who knew nothing at all.  You pierced the paper with pen, outlined all there was to be in the form of timelines, and lists, and bullet points so fixed, they perforated the pages.  Travel in two year increments, ideas in five year intervals, people sporadically intervening in the white spaces – only when convenient.

You didn’t know that dreams were malleable, you hadn’t realized that philosophies can morph and meander, you could never anticipate that time itself cannot be measured.  And suddenly the words on the page shift, and dance, and wander.  They move on the whims of love, they sift through tribulation, they transform according to people and occasion, they are dangerously susceptible to splendor and sadness.

And all you can do is write and witness, absolving the certainty and embracing what is to be.  This is life outside of the notebook, past the parameters of the page, beyond the imagination that you had thought to be boundless.  You know now, with definitive uncertainty, that you are writing the greatest adventure of all – one that you relish, but cannot to anticipate.

So don’t you ever stop writing.

I am getting a smart phone.

Nothing represents the desecration of human society more than a smart phone. I see only peril in hand-held machines that can communicate, give directions in vague British accents, and allow us to become merry cartoon whales that fly atop rainbows without the aid of recreational drugs. They embody the beginnings of a cruel dystopian world where smart phones evolve into hyper intelligent phones and, eventually, into pretentious, liberal arts educated phones in New Hampshire that pontificate about whether a box of dinosaur shaped cereal featured in a Francois Truffaut film represents the extinction of meaning and feelings.

All of this being said, I am getting a smart phone. It is a decision that I made with scrupulous consideration – and by scrupulous consideration, I mean desperation and hypocrisy.

Why, you ask, has it taken an inordinate amount of time to transition to a smart phone like the rest ofSub-Saharan Africa? I have been in possession of a simple flip phone for over a year – generously lent to me after I literally washed my previous device and failed to revive it even after frantically shaking it in a bag of brown rice.* Like most things that generally suck, I managed to find proverbial and literal silver linings such as:

  • Never having anxiety about anyone stealing my phone – and feeling either greatly humored or worried about the status of mankind at the prospect of its theft.

Alas, endless discussions about pseudo Middle-Triassic reptiles have been significantly outweighed by:

  • Eliciting laughter from someone in a bar after taking out my phone – a kind of laughter I have not heard since I was a little, puffy, otter-like adolescent changing for 7th grade PE.
  • Having my co-workers hear every single letter I punch into the phone when I send a text message.
  • Being forced to put a moratorium on the phrase, “That’s so 2008. And you’re so 2000 and late.”
  • Wanting to express, via T-9, that something, someone, or some situation is “cool” only to send “book.”
  • Not reaching a significant benchmark at the age of 25 – and that is hearing Ah-ha’s “Take On Me” in the morning as my alarm ringtone.
  • Making the following flow-chart documenting the process that I must go through since losing the function of three buttons on my phone:

I am an adult solving pseudo-algebraic equations.

In January, I reached a milestone that, for many, is a cause for elation, despair, and the production of semi-racist television shows: I turned 25. Of course, on the day that I turned 25, my comprehension of the day’s significance was rather minimal – except that I had turned an age that was a multiple of five and, as we all know as fact, any number that is a multiple of five is vastly superior to multiples of two, three, or four.

Alas, I felt such a benchmark to be so trivial that I began to notate occasions that would justify the magnitude of this well-documented, important age. I have come up with five such occasions (this is intentional because, as we all know as fact, multiples of five are quite excellent) and have put them in very simple mathematical equations. The following are inequalities that prove that I have “come of age” – moments so poignant that they indicate my rise in maturation’s cruel, cruel echelon:

  • Using the last five dollars in your possession to purchase beer. < Using the last five dollars in your possession to purchase tampons.
  • Sleeping on a bed with pillow cases of a solid color – a deep, almost brooding violet that supposedly* reflects my disposition on life. > Sleeping on a bed with pillow cases containing cartoon monkeys swinging through a vaguely Hawaiian backdrop as they clutch coconuts – a pattern that supposedly reflects my penchant for…cartoon monkeys swinging through a vaguely Hawaiian backdrop as they clutch coconuts.
  • Wearing a prom dress to a wedding you are attending. < Wearing a Bridesmaid dress from a wedding to a prom that you are chaperoning.
  • Sipping a “Natural” Light in the basement of a dilapidated row house that smells distinctly of urine, marijuana, and assorted Kraft products as I ironically berate over-privileged, private college educated students. < Sipping a Tecate at a dive bar that smells distinctly of urine, marijuana, and locally, organically grown onions as I ironically berate hipsters in a pair of jeans that are, like, really, really (dangerously) tight.

*Editor’s Note: ”Supposedly” means “absolutely not”.