I don wanna but I'm gonna

4th out of 30

 I have not had a good day so I didn't want to blog. I wanted to do a thing on altars, and I went into my digital photos and collected pictures from my vast collection of altars I've made. Some on purpose, some totally by accident. Some were my mother's vignettes that look like altars.

But I'm not feeling altar-y. I'm grumpy as hell and I don't want to take it anymore. My phone ate all my contacts, and after struggling to find a way to re-load or recover or reincarnate, I found that I had backed it up in august of 2011. So I hooked it up to the computer and clicked whatever I needed to click and then went down for a grumpy nap.

THREE hours later, I had a full set of contacts and was starting to get happy....until I saw that my phone life stopped in august 2011. Duh. So my family and old friends were there, and all kinds of people from my life in California were there, but NO ONE from my new life here were there anymore. Job contacts, for instance. MAJOR job contacts that I need for the current crisis in my employment prospects. Missing. Gone. Eaten.

To top it all off, I had a horrible dream in my short nap where my most recent ex appeared. The abuser. Whose phone number WAS restored, of course.

I'm tired of being at the mercy of electronics I don't understand. Somehow, behind all these cute little icons is a vast, writhing sack of ones and zeroes that cause things to happen...or not. I can't see or touch my files of writings or pictures or people's phone numbers or my notes or my lists or my schedule or all the other things I've become dependent on my phone for.

I want an address book. A cute little Hello Kitty address book with all the phone numbers I'll ever need. I want a Hallmark pocket calendar with corny pictures where I can write down "work" "choir practice" and "dentist appt." I want photo albums with yellowing pictures. I want letters with the unreadable handwriting of people I love.

I feel like I'm living in Disneyland where only happy things are allowed to show, but behind the scenes, the friendly electronic babysitters I've allowed to do my remembering for me are unhinging their jaws so that they can swallow more and more of my memories.

And it's not like my little grey cells remember the way they used to. I have hung on to old memories of my school days from 4th to 12th grade in such a way that when I met up last week with my old friend who moved away in the 8th grade, we were able to take up where we left off. But the names I found in my phone after recovery that had California area codes were names I don't ever remember even hearing. Obviously I had taken and possibly used those phone numbers, but who the heck were those people? I've deleted them and now my contact list is very very short.

Call me. Write to me. I'll put your name, phone and address in a little address book.
And I'll use the phone for phone calls.
And write in my pocket calendar "lunch with a friend" after we make a plan.
Or send you a letter in my unreadable handwriting.
Can we go back to that time again? Just a little?