Snow!

Snow!

I don’t know. Ask the roommates.

I.

I am 11. I am going over to a friend’s house for a sleepover. I remember thinking her family must be rich because their house is fairly big and out way, way, way at the end of the suburban snakes of road where they dead-end into the foothills. After dinner, we get to gossip in the hot tub with bowls of ice cream and our favorite music playing on their backyard speakers. Très classy. As we crawl into bed, she informs me that she sleeps with classical music playing quietly in the background because it’s supposed to be good for our brains and math skills. We’re nerds. I shrug – I’ve slept through earthquakes – and we settle in. We talk for a bit and then she starts to drift off. I stare at the ceiling. More time passes. More time passes. It’s that damned classical music. It’s keeping me awake. It’s relaxing, but it keeps my brain engaged. I stare at the ceiling. I count some sheep. I get bored counting sheep (does that actually work for anyone?). I stare at the ceiling some more.

Now it IS unpleasant. I’m frustrated that I can’t sleep and it’s all Mozart’s fault. I wait until I’m sure she’s deeply asleep, creep out of bed, and turn the volume knob all the way down. I’m out in an instant.

II.

My parents buy season tickets to the local symphony. I roll my eyes and off we go to the first concert. We settle into our seats, the lights dim, the familiar somehow harmonic cacophony of instrument tuning commences. Before I know it, the conductor has started his spastic dance and we’re off. My arms are folded and I’m WAY. TOO. COOL to be there. But despite my best efforts, over the course of the evening, I start to settle in. Occasionally, I watch a performer, but for the most part, my eyes start to glaze over. I realize that I may actually be ENJOYING the music. I feel soothed. I feel safe.

Over the course of the season, I will come to look forward to these concerts. They are my, albeit expensive, passive meditation. They put my mind at ease, my muscles relax, and I am left undisturbed in this state for over an hour. As a person whose lifeblood is acidic anxiety, these concerts are my safe haven. They are a godsend.

III.

Fast forward years upon years, through hard rock phases and hip hop phases and indie rock. I am sitting at my desk at work, staring at a file. I have to make a call to a hospital to clarify some billing issues. My brow is tense and the fuzzy, mild pain that often forebodes the deployment of my new talent – migraines – is creeping into the left side of my skull. I pick up the phone and dial the phone number. An automated greeting asks me to wait for the next available representative, and the hold music cuts in. Bach.

My eyes glaze over. If I was Homer, I would be drooling. My mind moseys to the most recent praise-singing of classical music that I’ve come across, however unofficial it may be, and I smile remembering my nights at the symphony and the ease they afforded me…

I’m labeling this one of my ignorant tirades, but I’m just cocky enough on this front to claim that this rant actually stands on solid ground.

My dad was recently humored to point out how ridiculous the ferocity of our (the 21st century, 1st world, affluent type’s) appetite is for new gadgets. He noted the trend towards NEEDING to have the new cell phone with the new games and internet apps and email push functions, and how, interestingly, we are (apparently) willing to forgo the quality of a phone’s original function just to get more shiny features, faster. Simply put, the one thing phones were originally invented to do – i.e. allow us to speak to each other when we are not in the same place – is done TERRIBLY by all these devices. And I am not talking about network coverage – I am talking about the quality of the device itself. The reception is mediocre on a good day. And that is if the phone even executes the call when you ask it to in the first place without falling prostrate on the floor and claiming network malfunction. AND if it then also holds onto that call once it is placed and doesn’t randomly cut you off at a crucial part of the conversation and then giggle maniacally.

I do not need a fancy phone. One time several years ago, my mom and I went to trade in our old phones for free upgrades and together gasped and went bug-eyed when we found out that the VIBRATION feature was STANDARD on all the phones – even the free ones to which we were entitled! Oh joy!* The gentleman who was helping us raised his eyebrow at our reaction: this was several years into the common use of the vibrate function. My point: I’m easily impressed. I could easily do without any fancy features if the phone wasn’t a diva. I prefer my phones sans personality.

See, I had this phone that totally worked (at least as far as I can remember) for several years. One morning on my way to work, I chucked it (accidentally) on the asphalt while crossing the road and the back plate flipped off and the antenna fell out and started rolling down the hill. I chased it and won. But getting it all back together nicely wasn’t in the cards. The screen only worked if I put the right pressure on it, and even then only if the humidity and time and alignment of the stars were just right. This was a problem. I did not have another phone. In this day and age of unhealthy dependence on communication, that is scary. So I didn’t have time to do the painstaking hours of research on CNet and Consumer Reports and what have you to find the best phone. I knew a lot of people with Razrs. If everyone has them, they have to at least, WORK, right? I popped into ATT and grabbed one.

Well, I’ll cut to the chase here and tell you what you already see coming, which is that the Razr sucked monkey balls. I had one, it malfunctioned, I reported it, I received a replacement. It malfunctioned, I reported it, I received a replacement. Pattern? It malfunctioned, I reported it, and they finally conceded that it was time for a new model. These phones weren’t a little buggy; they were miscreants. All three did several or all of the following:

• Randomly turn off my alarm.
• Randomly decide not to heed an incoming call, nor give a voicemail option, nor inform me of the missed call. In other words, deny the existence of callers.
• Cut off every other phone call with a short-circuiting crackle.
• Refuse to make calls.
• And the kicker, the feature that finally drove me to take it in for a swap: deciding at random times that i was in Denver, Colorado. It was 9:00am when I checked my phone, then 8:02am the next time I checked, then 9:30, then 8:45…

On that third swap, I was (finally) utterly impressed with the customer service I received: my replacement phone could be one from any of a list of manufacturers. On the spot, with no time (again) for research, I chose LG because I had heard good things. I was given two device options, looked them up quickly while on the phone and then did an even quicker check on their SAR ratings, and picked the LG Shine. It is very shiny. I like it a lot. And for the first six months, it was great to me. But recently, it’s been getting some attitude.

It started with unbearable static. The kind where you literally cannot hear the other person. Sometimes, it just decides to emit this awful noise. If my phone rings during one of these moods, the static is broadcast through the speakers in my ringtone’s stead. Fortunately, I can get the static to go away by taking the battery out and putting it back in. Irritating, but manageable.

Then it started doing things like, after all this time with my keypad tones off, suddenly they were on. Every time I hit a key, my phone would emit a loud beep. This is not terrible in and of itself. I thought, giving it the benefit of the doubt, that maybe I had accidentally hit a button. I went into the sounds menu, and as soon as I arrived on the screen where one might highlight keypad tones and change the setting, it stopped beeping. It’s as if it suddenly realized what I was doing and thought, “Oops! Caught! Better shape up…” And that’s just creepy.

And now, it turns off when it feels like it. This means that sometimes if you call, I may not know. Moreover, sometimes my alarm doesn’t go off because my phone is taking a nap. Sure, it’s a phone, and not an alarm, but that seems like such an exceedingly easy task to carry out that I just can’t cut it any slack.

So, to get to my point, why can’t we have a phone that just WORKS? I would forgo my pretty blue back-lit keypad, my calendar application, my MediaNet, and even ::gasp:: my camera, if I could just get a phone that would make calls, receive calls, send text messages, and wake me up in the morning. Is that so much to ask? Manufacturers are so excited to produce new fancy gadgets that they throw out the old ones before working out the bugs. It seems no model makes it past the first generation. Why can’t they put some R&D into making one, just one, base model that would do the basics and be worked and worked until it was perfect. Release two, three, or ten versions of the same model and work out the kinks as you go. I’d take that any day over the fleet of high maintenance rookies we must choose among today.

*Don’t be gross. We were excited for thoroughly pure reasons.

1. Whoa.

2. When I first heard of the possibility of piezoelectric dance floors, I was ecstatic. This phenomenon has been a long time coming, and now it’s on the WEST COAST. Can’t wait to hit one up.

When I was in eighth grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Clark. She changed my life. I was very unhappy at that point, as many surly adolescents are. I felt isolated and lost and friendless and impotent to change any of it.

Ms. Clark was a badass. She respected her students. She spoke to us like adults, and we were expected to act like adults. She expected the best work each of us could muster (I received one of my few B’s from her). She challenged me daily.

We wrote response papers on Frost poems and Smashing Pumpkins lyrics. We watched The Eye of the Storm and The Wave. Every reading and writing assignment was specifically engineered to teach us to be radical individuals. At an age when kids are both making choices that will guide the rest of their lives and, at the same time, most susceptible to peer pressure, I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who stressed, over and over again, how vital it was for us to develop our own opinions, use our own judgment, and be proud of the conclusions we came to. She de-stigmatized “Different” and gave me the confidence to devlope my identity.

How many other people out there remember what they did in eighth grade?

Exactly.

Ms. Clark was an incredibly exceptional teacher. I will readily admit that I am and have always been a relatively affluent nerd who had the time and desire to do well in school. Ms. Clark wasn’t teaching in a ghetto (at least not when she taught me). But the fact remains – she was extraordinary in the most literal sense of the word.

And so, the question is, will the school district be all Ms. Clarks if this woman has her way? Because I’m inclined to say that almost any sacrifice would be worth an army of people that powerful. I like people (in theory) who don’t have time for smalltalk and get things done. But on the other hand, test scores used as the sole measuring stick always leave me wary, and dumping a bunch of people out on their asses *might* not be the best way to get things done. I’m really torn on this one. I can’t decide if I love her or hate her.

What do you think?