I never meant to be a holdout. College Grads in Urban Areas Without Cellphones is a sorry club. I imagine a bunch of tweedy middle-aged men with Objections. What's a perky twentysomething (fifty-nine days left on that claim) doing with those old sods?
It was an accident, I assure you, not some statement of principle. It wasn't that I didn't want a cellphone. I just never wanted one. Like, not paying-money-every-month want. I'm a part-time receptionist. I can't buy things just because.
Now when it comes out that I'm not carrying, I have to go all explainy, and hear expressions of astonishment, and perhaps even get congratulated on my contrarian pluck. All of which is possibly worse than shelling out monthly and being all *reachable*. And I'm wide open to accusations of dinosaurism. You're not on Facebook. And you don't have a cell. Oh my God: and you have CHICKENS. They start building a Theory. They think I have Objections.
So let me be clear: I'm totally going to get a cellphone one day. I daydream about it, even. My phone will do every damn thing those Japanese phones do now--for less! Print cash, perform voodoo hexes, all that. See, because I'm going to leapfrog. That's how sophisticated I am.
However, technology for its own sake does irritate me. I don't want a bunch of neato shit that's only going to drain and distract. Yes, I have a plog. That does not mean I want to Twitter. I plog because I like to write (do I vainly hope this is apparent?), not because I'm a connectivity whore. So leave me and my hens alone.
Was what I was saying. But then Crim became part of the Blogoaksphere. His wunderkind, Oakland Streets, won the warm embrace of linkage from every other cool Oakland blog. That had the incidental effect of creating readership--a whizbang concept I hadn't considered. Here was a connectivity I could get behind! I realized that I would do anything to be part of the Blogoaksphere.
At an Oscar ceremony a few years back, Steve Martin introduced Gael García Bernal (you know, the muchacho guapo from Y tu mamá también) by saying: "I would do anything to look like this guy. Except, of course, eat right and exercise."
So Clebilicious will do anything to be part of the Blogoaksphere. Except, of course, be more accessible and stick to a topic.
1 comment :
Cleb -
Hey Hey Hey - calm down.
Listen there's nothing wrong being a foucauldian (I admit to looking up the spelling on that) chicken - loving Seventh Day Adventist. I love Seventh Day Adventists. And I love your chickens.
Having known you since your Spruce Street days, I think I that I owe your readership and the Blogoaksphere an explanantion.
It's not Cleb's fault. Its her parents' fault. If they had let her have plastic packed Lunchables and a TV in her room like the rest of the kids, she might have been happily posting to her plog from her PDA, like the rest of the well-integrated nearly thirty somethings among your ranks.
But no - at a tender age, Cleb was routinely denied simple pleasures like Squeeze Its! On environmental grounds! I mean - this was barely the start of the 90's! People weren't even cutting up six-pack rings to save sealife yet - but there she was force to be different based on principles!
Sure, it's a lot of single-use (beautifully colored) plastic - but it was 100% fruit juice, people! All the kids had them in their lunch boxes!
All but Cleb. Ostracized and left with no other choice, she gradually assumed her difference as a badge of honor. She embraced the daily tofu sandwiches.(Okay - occasionaly she lucked out and there was a cream cheese sandwich, instead.) She said she LIKED her K-Mart jeans better than LA Gear. Vaseline was a multi-purpose cosmetic - while strawberry Lipsmackers was so limiting!
So you see, its no suprise that Cleb is a woman frought with the contradictions of the archaichly frugal and independently minded...
but does that make it right to exclude her?
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