Can anyone tell me why drinking seawater when you’re lost at sea is supposed to make you go crazy? Wouldn’t it actually just make you thirsty, like too much beer and pretzels? Is there some chemical in seawater that will induce madness if consumed? (Yikes! The ocean should come with a warning label!) Or is it merely the sight of so much water when you’re so very thirsty that will finally make you snap and lose your shit and start accessorising with dead waterfowl? Somebody please explain this to me, because when I grow up I want to be a pirate and pirates should probably know these things.
I have a new mobile phone. I am slightly saddened by this, as I was fond of my old mobile – not because it was a particularly good phone, but because it was basically a brick with buttons, which I thought was funny (comedic potential wins over practicality EVERY TIME in my world). It was the only mobile I’d ever owned, and it was the oldest, most basic Nokia proto-phone around: no camera, no fancy screen display, no internet capability, no nuthin’. It was a PHONE. I like appliances to be single-purpose. When you start cross-breeding phones and MP3 players I get nervous, by which I mean confused. (“What does this button do? Oops. Shit. Ow.”) I also liked my phone because it was very solid and heavy. I could have used it to pound in nails. (Hammerphone! Now there’s a crossover with potential.) Also, someone once told me that a man had been shot whilst carrying one of these phones in his breast pocket, and that the phone had actually stopped the bullet (probably untrue, but cool). So whenever someone would try to show me how their phone could play movies or balance their chequebook or whatever, I’d brandish my Nokia Brick™ and say, “Dude? Stops bullets. STOPS MOTHERFUCKING BULLETS. Can you top that? I didn’t think so.”
But alas! My phone began to show its age. Over the past week, whenever I received an incoming call, the phone would mysteriously switch itself off (most of those calls were from recruitment agents, so I choose to believe that my phone was actually protecting me. Good phone!). I blame myself. That phone was nigh on indestructible, but I tested its limits one too many times: for example, whenever I got really angry I would hurl it at the wall. It would make a satisfying THWACK! and burst into pieces – very cathartic, and yet easy to reassemble. I killed my phone! I’m sorry, phone!
My new phone is also a Nokia, but it is wee and delicate and looks unlikely to halt the trajectory of a mosquito, let alone a bullet. It is difficult to locate in my purse because it is so small, and it has exactly the same alarm ringtone as SiC’s phone, which causes a lot of strife in the mornings. (“Honey, will you fucking TURN OFF your fucking ALARM, for fuck’s sake? Oh, wait…never mind.”) How I long for my blue-and-orange doorstop! Farewell, sweet phone!