8.12.11

i reach out from the inside.


















If you know me at all, you probably know I don't like telephones.

Illustrative anecdote: It's 10am, I just came in from a long hot shower (our shower is out in the hallway). From upstairs I heard the sound of the white noise generator aka Taifun aka loud-as-hell antique-looking black metal (!) fan, so I assumed the Mara was still asleep.

Suddenly the house phone rings (vs. one of our mobiles), a semi-shocking, impolite, and unmodifiable sound. Roughly five people on earth have this phone number, and at this hour it can/should not be anyone we know unless they've just been shot or stabbed or otherwise intruded upon, but the idea of someone calling us as an emergency measure is pretty tragically misguided.

It rings again, jolting me out of my "who could this possibly be" thoughts. Instead of continuing to think, I immediately execute my default pre-noon phone-ringing behavior, which is to deftly remove the phone cable from the phone, thus returning The Pod to its preferred state in one swift antisocial motion.

A beat of silence, and then from upstairs I hear, "You dipshit, it's me."

This would be an artifact of days gone by, when our house used to be of a size/shape where the person just waking up in the upstairs bedroom would call the already-awoken person downstairs in the kitchen to request delivery of one or more breakfast items (or tiems, as I just typed).

So: pleeeeease. Don't feel bad if you call and I don't answer. It's so not personal.

+++

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

so who called on the phone?

MEM said...

so i guess i need to edit for clarity. mara called me from her mobile while she was in bed, i was downstairs unplugging the home phone.

vegetarian said...

so who called on the phone?

Zora said...

As a fellow phone-hater, and someone who is occasionally summoned within-house on the land line: Like.