From flip phone to iphone

I’ve had more cell phones than lovers. 5 cell phones; 2 lovers. I use lovers in very strict terms, as I always have. To me, lovers are boyfriends, nothing else. Not a one-time date, or some guy I kissed once. They are guys that have fixed my car or my computer just because they wanted to. They call me or text me late at night, and early in the morning. They add me as a friend on Facebook. These are the guys you don’t want at first, the ones that talk you into liking them. I’ve never been talked into getting a cell phone. Those I’ve always sought out with great purpose and determination.

Back in the day it used to be AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I spent middle school weeknights in front of a computer screen “talking” to my friends. Since we were only between the ages of 11 and 13 during middle school, we were confined to our dens on school nights after being strapped to the kitchen table for hours doing homework. I’m sure my mother would have liked to attach some sort of apparatus to my head that detected off-topic brain waves and shocked me whenever one made its way into my thoughts. The digital realm was our only way to get together and defy our parents. Sure, they wouldn’t let us out, but that wouldn’t stop us from stoking the coals of our flaming teenage love affairs. I once started “going out” with a guy on AIM and broke up with him in the same 4 hour conversation.

That’s when I first came up with my killer break-up pitch. “Do you ever think we were just better off as friends?” Who can say no to that? I would never have come up with that on the spot. Were it not for the fact that you can take minutes to respond online rather than seconds in person, I would never have had the thinking time to come up with that winner.

This was all pre-cell phone of course. If I’d had a cell phone I would have undoubtedly sat on my bed or in front of the t.v. texting, like I do now. We did have a family cell phone when I was that age, but it didn’t text. We got our first Motorola when I was about ten. It was the size of a small clock radio and had the same digital numeric screen. It’s hard to recall the time when cell phones didn’t have cameras, let alone an actual LCD screen. My parents shared that phone with me sometimes, like when they let me go to the mall with my best friend who was also a Mormon, whose parents were almost as strict as mine. After all, I’d need it to call them when I was done so they could pick me up in the family SUV. I must say that even the embarrassment of the roof of my mother’s Tahoe sprinkled with Teenie Beenies Babies (they were sewed to the ceiling, my mom thought it would be cute) even that humiliation was somewhat balanced by my hip cell phone. Sure my mom was decorationally and socially challenged, but I had a cell phone. It helped a little.

Then, my friends all got cell phones, of their own. Talk about being shown up. I still shared the brick with my uncool parents. So, when I began high school my parents decided I needed my own phone. My own phone !!! This phone had a little screen with an address book, and text messaging. It was probably one of the first text-able phones. It was another Motorola. It pictured a cute little envelope flying in from invisible cellular space every time I got a text. I still remember the first text I got from my friend Leah. She asked if I was going to meet everyone at the volleyball game.

In those years I was lucky to get more than one text a day. Even better, if I got one text from a guy in a day. Between my braces and raging acne, I was better off in the digital realm. So I continued to develop my texting finesse. It was easy because I grew with the trends. As emoticons and shortened words made their way into text vernacular, I was on the forefront of the movement.

“Wat r u up 2?”

“n2m, jc, u?”

“hw, bball game l8ter”

“k ttyl l8ter”

That’s what my life consisted of. After a couple years I wasn’t happy. I needed a new phone because mine was broken, or because my mom had dropped it in the toilet. Mostly, that’s what I’d tell my parents. In reality, I hated the fact that all my friend were now getting flip phones. I wanted one badly. The level of poshness in high school when someone looks at their phone’s screen and flips it open with their thumb is comparable to having the “Rachel” hairdo in the 90s. You wanna be the Jennifer Aniston in your high school you better get a flip phone and a pole to lean against in a very public place. It’s best if someone calls or texts when you’re in the middle of large circle, from which the conversation will take you. Otherwise, your popularity will go completely unnoticed. But if you’re truly popular, this will happen so often that inevitably some large herd of lemming will be present for a few of them.

So after my flip phone got me no popularity and no more texts than usual, I got another. I put my SIM card in a friend’s old phone and used it for at least a year. It was a fatter Motorola, but it was cool at the time. It had the air of the Nextel phones that could walkie talkie people. (I think it even had that function, but I never used it.) It was the same shape, almost the same size, and it was like wearing Target jeans and trying to pass them off as Sevens. A little obvious.