Backgrounds Blurred…
I was robbed. And, months later, I’m still wondering what I really lost or gained from the experience. Let me explain a bit better…
This past summer, I was speaking with my attorney on the phone at the grocery store while picking up the essentials. Call completed, I placed my phone, as always, at the top of my purse situated in the metal child seat area of the rolling cart. I can’t describe in words exactly the feeling when a faceless person slid past me, but there was an inexplicable sense of something. It wasn’t as strong as what’s described by amputees when they lose limbs, you know, that phantom feeling, but, by the time I got home, I knew something essential to my being was gone forever and it made me feel a fool.
My phone had been stolen and for a weird beat, I wondered how I would manage…it’s a phone, for Oprah’s sake…how could I have been so idiotic to assign it so much importance…
Not lost, not misplaced, just taken from me to live its best life with the perpetuator, all confirmed on the ap that traced my iPhone making its way from The Palisades to Canyon Country. For days, I watched my once expensive attachment travel all across the greater Los Angeles area, enjoying the city and its best life while making me feel both foolish and vulnerable in the same instant. You know, like how a young girl feels when she’s dumped? Maybe not as serious as heartbreak…I’m paid to be dramatic, I am a screenwriter, after all…
I was fortunate enough to have a friend, Ellie, who had a replacement phone to lend me, one I still need to return. Communication not lost, personal crisis averted. Or was it? Through the snatching, I gained an important perspective. What the hell was going on? Suddenly, I felt so dumb and unabashedly dependent on that phone as if I was like ET holding up a sad index finger hoping my phone magically had the wherewithal to phone home, the same phone I would resent as an old, dated model when Apple or Mac or whatever it’s known as these days (when I was a child, I called my computer a Macintosh) just a few months later revealed a newer model with all sorts of promises before hitting the hungry for more market.
I was strung out on my own blah blah blah, not even realizing I perceived my phone as a necessary appendage to my world. Something drastic had to be done.
So, in that moment, I decided to break the dependence on interactive technology I didn’t completely realize I had until a part of it was gone. The good news? I see my old phone as been taken places I wouldn’t have indulged it, so I am happy my stolen phone is being used to its full advantage. But, I wasn’t going to play the patsy again. I switched gears and went the other way. Steve Jobs would have been proud I was embracing the older forms of his ingenuity. I replaced the jazzy, bells and whistles phone with one nobody would want to steal. And frankly, one I wouldn’t care to lose.
It’s small. And it’s such an old model that my tech savvy friend, Gia, looked at it and marveled that it retains that button known as the assistive touch button on the face of it, revealing how ancient it actually is. I depend on it, sure, but not with the same fervor or passion I did on its successors. But, I can hear clearly when my father’s nurse calls with updates on his health when I am down the street at my place. I can articulate what my needs are without static or threatening dropped calls on Sunset Boulevard. And the bs spewed by this nameless cute in a Peter Pan kind of way guy (who failed to mention he’s married) sounds crystal clear when he speaks to me and God knows how many other women. So, the way I see it, I’m covered.
I am a person that came of age in the last century writing everything from my diary to my high school papers by hand. I was considered fortunate to type assignments when I went to my father’s office where he had a fancy typewriter that could make corrections without the use of White Out. On a side note, did you know Michael Nesmith of The Monkees’ mother invented that, calling it Liquid Paper originally? Hey reader, are you old enough to even know who The freakin’ Monkees were? In my teens, it was a big deal to have Atari with which to play on our clunky television set, even though the graphics were painfully simple. Getting the aforementioned Macintosh for UCLA freed up my life as I used to depend on the campus computer lab to print things while advancing academically. The first cell phone was anything one could call sleek, taking pictures on the follow up iterations of phones was the novel idea that killed my camera’s spirit and will to live, and Skype changed my life for the better across so many time zones…
And yet, sometimes, I think it’s a small tragedy that we can blur our backgrounds on Zoom with pretty suggestions made by them or with pictures and images we choose ourselves. Maybe, there was something vulnerable and real when we couldn’t blur our backgrounds. We were forced to be authentic and terribly tidy when we let people into our worlds/offices/personal spaces who weren’t really in our midst, but rather trapped in our computers. Seems one of the only ways we are connecting these days is online, I mean who wants to come for Sunday brunch anymore? I, for one, don’t want to blur my background moving forward, even if there’s something on the floor I really should pick up before getting on a call. I don’t want dependency on my phone or anything else at the start of this new year and I’m making that a resolution along with more time with battle ropes and kettle bells. I will never employ ChatGPT if I want to continue my vocation as a professional writer with any shred of dignity and let’s hope I hold out on the iPhone 17…it does look promising in a AI generated less than human way…Yeah, should I? They say there is a model that even folds like in the old days…Maybe not…