stupidphone

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(Maude update: She’s doing a little better these days, actually. She’s less lethargic, more playful and active. Not puppy playful and active, mind you, but an improvement over the last few weeks. I definitely don’t think it’s time yet. Here’s a video of her playing with Moki awhile back. You can see she’s not super active, but she still gets involved! Looks like Brendan was watching Portlandia.)

So, I don’t have a smartphone. I know, I know, I’m the last person on earth without one. Even my sister, who lags behind on most new technology, has a smartphone. Brendan has a smartphone, his parents have smartphones, everyone I know has a smartphone. Except me!

(Well, and my parents. I mentioned once that maybe just one of them should have a smartphone in case they get lost on one of their road trips, but my mom said, “We have a GPS!” and I let it go. I don’t feel bad about not having a smartphone, but if my parents get one before me, I might.)

Well, I do have Brendan’s old iPhone, but it’s not set up as a phone. It’s just an internet device I can use whenever there’s wi-fi. My friend Suneet calls it my iPhone Touch, which amuses me. My actual phone is a Nokia candy bar. I bought it a few years ago when my third flip phone crapped out on me. I walked into T-Mobile, handed them the broken phone, and said, “I want the dumbest non-flip phone you have. If it has texting, talking, and an alarm clock, that’s what I want.” And that’s what they gave me. It’s worked perfectly for at least three or four years now. *knocks on wood*

Why don’t I activate my iPhone Touch already? There are a couple of reasons. One, it’s an AT&T phone and I have T-Mobile. Do I want to switch carriers? Get the phone unlocked and keep my current carrier? I can’t decide, and it bores me to think about. My current phone bill is impossibly low, which is also a factor. I have unlimited texting and 200 monthly minutes, and that’s all I really need. Adding data to that would raise my bill, and I’m not made of money right now.

The main reason, though, is that if I got a smartphone, I’m afraid it would change the way I wait for things. These days when I’m in the auto shop waiting room having my oil changed, I read a book. If I don’t have a book, I check out some of the old crappy magazines. If there aren’t magazines, I surreptitiously look around at the other people, or watch the mechanics at work. When I’m not the driver on car trips, I look out the window. When I take the dogs outside to pee, I watch them sniff the grass and amble around, or I watch the people at the nearby bus stop.

I think that if I got a smartphone, I would stop doing all those things. I’d stop being in the moment and use my phone instead. I hate that phrase, “be in the moment,” but I think it applies here. It’s during those little moments of down time that I get my best thinking done. When would I get my best thinking done if I had a smartphone to pull out instead?

I was going to write a paragraph here about how I think it’s so rude when people are on their phones all the time! Do you actually want to be out at dinner with your friends, or should you just have stayed home and played Candy Crush Saga or whatever the fuck you’re doing while waiting for the appetizers to arrive? But you’ve heard it all before, right? I know you have. I’ve written it before, too.

You’re going to tell me, why don’t you just get a smartphone and then not pull it out while you’re waiting for things? That’s a good point, but I don’t think I could help it. I’ve never been much for self-control. My staring-into-space time is precious to me, and I don’t want to jeopardize it even a little.

I’ve had this post in the back of my mind for awhile, but it came up to the front of my mind when I went tubing over the weekend, and one of the girls in our group was using her phone! In her tube! On the river! She had a beer in one hand and her iPhone in the other. Holy shit, was that ever ridiculous.

a maude update

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(First, a job update. I continue to apply for jobs and go on interviews, and in my spare time I’m working on starting my own business. No details for now in case it doesn’t pan out, but I figure one of three things will happen first:

  1. I will get a full-time job.
  2. My business will become profitable and support me.
  3. I will go broke, get evicted and live on the mean streets of Austin.)
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this blanket came from a bluishorange reader a long time ago

So Maude isn’t doing very well. Her arthritis and kidney failure have combined forces to render her back legs tricky and unreliable. One minute she’ll be standing up, the next she’ll have sort of rolled over into a sitting/laying down position. She has trouble going up our front steps after we’ve taken her outside. We built a little ramp for her to use, and she uses it when she remembers it’s there, but otherwise she does this sort of clumsy scramble up each step. Sometimes when she drinks water, she falls into the bowl a little and gets water on her face.

I can’t imagine any of this is much fun for her, but for me to watch it is terrifying. I’m reminded of a time several years ago when I was holding her in my lap on the sofa. I was scratching her ears and I felt something fall and hit me in the arm. I picked it up and saw that it was one of her teeth. I was horrified, and of course I freaked out. “OH MY GOD, MAUDE, ARE YOU OKAY?” I cried. She wagged her tail and looked at me like, hey, when can we get back to you scratching my ears?

But that was 2005. Now it’s 2013 and she’s 13 years old, at least, and I don’t know how much time she has left. There is still tail wagging, thankfully. She gets excited about food and treats and going outside. She likes to explore the yard, albeit very, very slowly. She likes to sit next to me in bed and lick my forehead. She likes when I give her little pieces of vegetables I’m chopping. She can’t go on neighborhood walks anymore, but we put her in a little secondhand stroller and wheel her around, and she likes being out and about with us. Of course I don’t know this for absolutely sure, but she seems like she isn’t in any pain.

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best $5 I ever spent at the Texas state surplus property store

But sometimes there is no tail wagging. Sometimes I put her down on the bed, and instead of moving around and getting comfortable like she usually does, she lets herself sort of fall down wherever I’ve placed her. Sometimes I tell her it’s time to go outside, and instead of standing up and moving towards the door, she just lies there and stares up at me.

The decision of when it’s time to let your dog go is one I’ve never made by myself before. We had to put our childhood dog to sleep when she was 11 and the vet discovered that she was positively riddled with cancer. My sister and my dad were driving to St. Louis to take my sis to college at the time, and since this was before cell phones, my mom and I couldn’t call to consult them. But that decision was an obvious one for my mom and me to make, and we did the right thing. The hard part was later that day, when we flew to St. Louis to meet my dad and sister, and we had to tell them that the dog they’d said “see you soon” to that morning was dead.

This decision is different. First of all, it’s mine and Brendan’s to make. We are not 20 years old, and there is no medically-trained mother here to tell us what she thinks we should do. We’re 34 and 35, and she’s our dog, and second of all there is no obvious, hard-line evidence telling us what to do. Some days I see her lying there listlessly and think, it’s time. Other days I get ready to give her treats and she jumps up and down on those tricky hind legs like she’s 4 years old again, and I think, how could I ever have thought it was time?

Maude is my best friend. I know she’s just a dog, and I know I have another dog, too, but that’s just how it is. No disrespect to her sister Moki, but Maude and I are close in a way I’ve never been with another dog, not even my childhood dog. Maude and I lived alone together for years, with no boyfriends or housemates or other dogs. Just us. For a while in my mid-twenties, Maude was the only reason I could think of to get out of bed. If I didn’t get out of bed, Maude wouldn’t be able to eat or go outside, and I loved Maude, so I got out of bed. I don’t know if I’d say she literally and definitively saved my life, as I was hardly suicidal at the time, but she definitely saved my living. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to feel Maude’s breath on my ear, her face buried in my hair, and think, I may not have much going for me, but how could I ever not do right by this dog?

Also, Maude is not just a dog. If you’ve ever met her, you know she’s got a certain gravitas about her, a seriousness that to me indicates a bit of depth. I’m sure I’m projecting some of that onto her, but not all of it. My friend Sarah says that Maude has the je ne sais quoi, and I think that’s the best way to describe it.

I have plans for what to do with her after she’s gone. I’m going to have her cremated by herself. It’s a more expensive option than having her cremated with other dogs, and before I researched this I didn’t know they even did that. I guess they have that option for people who don’t want the ashes back. But I want her ashes back. I’m going to save most of them in an urn, and put a little bit in a brass screw-top canister that I will hang on a chain along with the tag from her collar. I don’t know if it’s something I’ll wear around my neck forever, but I’ll definitely need it for a little while.

I wish that deciding when it’s time to let her go was as easy as deciding what to do after. Obviously if she seems like she’s in pain or she takes a definitive turn for the worse, it’ll be a less difficult decision, but right now I’m really struggling. The thing I’ve heard people say the most is that they’ve regretted waiting until it was too late, but they’ve never regretted maybe doing it too soon. I can understand the first part, but the second part escapes me. What if I did put her down too soon? What if she had some good months left and I took them away from her?

I still wake up in the night and feel her there next to me, but now I check to see if she’s still breathing. How could I ever not do right by this dog?

the chaos

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I have lost my job again.

Yes, again.

For the second time in a little over a year, I am unemployed.

To describe how this makes me feel in detail would require me to give lots of information about my last job, so obviously I can’t do that here. And my two job losses are of a piece anyway, since they occurred so close together. I guess I can describe how it feels to be let go from one job, get another one a year later, and then get let go from that one the year after THAT.

I feel out of control.

The one detail I can share is that in neither case was it my particular fault. I was a good employee in both cases, and I didn’t do anything wrong. I know this intellectually, and most of the time I know it emotionally, too. But even if it wasn’t my fault, what could I have done differently? Surely there was something I could have said or done that would have changed things, right?

And that’s where the emotional part gets to me.

I am applying for other jobs, of course. Lots of other jobs. I have phone interviews and in-person interviews and all that. I weed the yard and clean the house and sew myself some new clothes. I do laundry. I go for walks. I apply for yet more jobs. I do everything I can.

My boyfriend was laid off on the same day I was. That didn’t matter much, because he had another job lined up, and there were only three days between when one job stopped and the other one started. He likes this one better already, and we’ll still have health insurance, so that’s good.

Two weeks after my boyfriend and I were both let go, my sister was laid off from her job. Then one of my boyfriend’s family members had to go to the hospital. Then a friend’s dog got a brain tumor and had to be put down.

4380159995_01e2e0e7baHang on, that doesn’t really describe that situation very well. How does one indicate that one was close to a dog? The dog’s owners are old friends, and my sister and her husband used to take care of the dog whenever they would go out of town, which was often. He got along well with Maude and Moki, so my sister would even bring him over to our house sometimes. He was in fact one of just five guests at my sister’s wedding, and I made him a flowered collar for the occasion. So how do I say that? A dog friend of mine had to be put down? A close dog friend died?

He was the same age as Maude is (thirteen), so that’s not great either.

It’s got me thinking about what people deserve. As an atheist, I don’t think there’s an entity that doles out things to people based on merit or anything, so it’s a strange line of thought for me to have. But all I want is to have a job that doesn’t suck and makes me enough money to live on, travel on (good god I miss traveling so much), and maybe buy a house with someday. That’s really all. Don’t I deserve that? Is that too much to ask?

Ask who, you say, and you’d be right. There’s a separate post in there somewhere about how, despite what most believers would say about atheism, I find mine to be enormously comforting. Most of the time.

So that’s how I feel about it.