Don't Travel With Me

I'm lucky in life and love. I'm not lucky in tech or travel.

Extraordinary things happen to me when I travel. I've woken up in the middle of the night in the deserted, uncoupled last car of a train in Germany. I have lost my obsessively-checked passport between airport gates. My luggage has been abducted by aliens. I'm bad at this.

Same thing with technology. If I try to set up or fix a device, something bizarre will happen. To the degree that when I surrender it to a young person, they start tapping away with confidence and then get this funny look on their face and squint and tap some more and then say "Huh," and hand it back, all sheepish. When it comes to travel or technology, apparently I'm the gremlin.

So I wasn't eager to set up my new iPhone when it arrived. Transferring my stuff from my old phone to the new is supposed to be a snap once I download the "Move to IOS" app, which I did. But things involving an iPhone are a snap only if they do not also involve a developmentally-disabled old Android and, of course, me. I set it aside for a full three weeks before tackling it.

But everything did go smoothly. I don't use a lot of apps and I'd already unloaded all my photos on the old phone to relieve its chronic indigestion, so basically I just wanted my phone contacts to sail over. Per instructions, I plugged the phones in, clicked on all the right things, put in a code, politely averted my eyes while they rendezvoused, and after a while both phones said the transfer was complete.

Somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, my passport caught a passing zephyr and appeared briefly in the real world.

 

It was a while before I checked my contacts on the new phone. There were a whole bunch of them in there. More than I thought I had. And almost no phone numbers. And I didn't know who a lot of them were. A little more sleuthing and I discovered these were my sister's contacts. 

My sister's been dead for thirteen years. She's the type that could come back and send a message from beyond the grave if anyone could, but this was just mean. Upon further review, I recognized a lot of my own contacts too, again mostly with email addresses and no phone numbers, and eventually realized that although I put my "Move to IOS" app in the old phone, it ignored all my phone contacts and instead vaulted over to my abandoned desktop computer, Old Sludgy, in which my sister's contacts were stored, and took THOSE contacts. How could that happen?

"It probably got them from your bluetooth," my friend Leslie said.

"I don't think I have a bluetooth," I said.

"Yes, you do," she said, and I never argue about things like that, because I'd be wrong.

I'm a big girl. I took the phones to the fix-it shop around the corner and asked the nice man to make them talk to each other. He said he could, but he just knew I could Google the answer myself, and save some money, and I felt ashamed and went home and Googled.

There are lots of ways of transferring contacts. But since the "Move to IOS" app is the slickest, I decided to do it again, after first (deep breath) wiping the new phone clean. After all, whatever was in there had only been in there a few days. This time I turned my desktop computer off and sent it to its room, and went in a whole 'nother room. "Your contacts have been transferred," my phones both agreed, and I felt a little lift.

Somewhere near Roswell, New Mexico, my luggage dropped to the desert.

I checked the new phone. Same damn contact list as before. No phone numbers. Okay, maybe the sucker scavenges contact lists from everywhere, but shouldn't it include the ones from the phone it was shlorping data out of? Huh?

Second method: Export contacts from old phone into a VCF list. I followed instructions and did that. VCF list created. I don't know where to find it though.

Third method: SIM cards. I looked it up and I still don't know what or where the hell my SIM card is.

By the time I researched the fourth method, and considered the shame of going back to the fix-it shop, I was worn ragged with the sort of despair only tech challenges can put me in. It wasn't healthy. I went for a fast walk. And when I came back, I decided to put the phones side by side and type in all my phone contacts by hand.

I thought about the time I wanted to paint salamanders and frogs on the floor of my studio using a stencil only to trace, and then fill in the paint with a tiny brush by hand. It's the kind of project that never gets off the ground if you think about how long it's going to take. But I came home from work and put in one salamander a day, and before too long, I had the whole thing done.

And you know what? While I was typing in all the phone numbers, I felt calm. I knew what I was doing. Yes, it was taking a long time. Two hours in, I was only up to the H's. But I feel better than I have in days. I can do this. It will get done. One salamander at a time.

Forecast Calls For Fog

Many of us have started to suspect our minds have done some economizing. Downsized on neurons. We just don't seem to have that same snap we used to, and it's harder to learn things, remember things, or even pay attention. It's particularly obvious when we hang out with younger people and discover we're not really tracking what they say at all.

Younger brains need to work faster because no matter what they're thinking about, they're also thinking about sex, whereas once we've made a note of where the nearest toilet is, we're all set, thought-wise. It's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact many spiritual seekers in the world struggle for years to achieve the same kind of blankness that we maintain effortlessly. Still, it can be concerning to discover that your mental acuity took the same bus out of town your hormones did.

Fortunately, you can exercise your brain in the comfort of your own home. Let's take a common scenario. Just to up the ante, let's assume you are in conversation with a young person; one of those annoying polite ones who is looking at you in anticipation while waiting for you to finish your sentence, even though maybe you weren't planning to finish it just then, thank you very much. You have both glanced out the window as a bird flies by. "What kind of bird is that?" your young friend says, which is just typical--they know everything about the Internets but they don't know birds! Unfortunately, you don't either, so you give it a good squint and then get up to look in the field guide, which is in the next room, twenty steps away. Now you have arrived at your bookcase and are facing it, but you don't know why. It's a puzzler! So let's solve it. Let's make a brain game out of it.

First, let's assume your feet had a perfectly sound reason for bringing you to this spot, and let's further assume that what was on your mind thirty seconds ago is in fact related to something in this room, possibly something right in front of you. What could it be? Let's look for clues. There's the dictionary. This is a promising start: odds are always really high you were about to look up "hegemony" again. You pull out the dictionary and it opens right up to "hegemony" and your missing tweezers fall out. Awesome! You tap your face to see if your main chin hair is long enough to pluck, and it isn't, but there is a bump you don't recognize. You go to the bathroom to have a look in case it's cancer, but it looks more like dried oatmeal, so you wash your face, and take the hand towel to the laundry room to toss it in the washing machine, and darned if the machine isn't full of damp clothes already. Which obviously is what you meant to do: hang out the laundry. The rack is already full so you fold the dry clothes and take them to the bedroom and on your way back to take care of the wet clothes you pause by the bookcase again. Hmm. There was something about the bookcase. You stare at it for a while and then go back to the original room, where your young friend is holding up her phone and saying "Wilson's Warbler?"

For some reason.

You peer at the phone and sure enough there's a picture of a bird of some kind on it and you shrug, but it's irksome, trying to make sense of these non sequiturs all the time. And does she ever get her nose out of that thing? Kids. You, on the other hand, have folded laundry and put it away, plus there was that other thing you were going to do, which will come to you eventually. What the hell is she smiling about? She probably needs spell-check to spell "hegemony," which you really should look up sometime. Little shit thinks she's so smart but she wouldn't recognize a road map if it came up and bit her on the bloomers. Honestly, the whole generation: show them a card catalog, they'll be looking for the cup-holder. And ain't none of them knows how to drive a stick, do they? Huh! That's what I'm talkin' about.

Pretty sure that's what I was talkin' about.

How To Make Money On Your Ass

Viggle has created a new app for the iPhone that rewards you for the time you and your fanny spend parked in front of the TV. And I say it's about time. We're not doing this for our health, you know. The phone recognizes what shows are on and awards you points for minutes spent watching--more for certain shows, and bonuses for commercials. Accumulate enough points and you can win a five-dollar credit at Burger King. The Sloth Fairy slides the credit right into your phone, and you can redeem it if you ever scrape yourself off the sofa. To thwart people who cheat by leaving their phones in the TV room by itself, the app will be triggered by a methane detector. Viggle is hoping to increase the size of the TV audience, and this should do it.

I spend more time than I probably should watching TV. My intellect is too weak to overrule my body, which overvalues physical comfort, and whenever I'm comfortable I do not care to be dislodged. If I'm stretched out on a recliner in a quilt with a lap mammal and a remote, torpor ambles right to the top of my list of virtues. I also have a real hard time getting out of a hot shower, where you don't even really need to leave to pee. Bed is the best of all. I won't get out of it until I have to. I sleep in a cold room under a stack of quilts high enough to press a diamond out of a briquette. I can ignore a sense of duty for hours before removing myself. The last time I felt as good as I feel in bed, I was in a uterus.

We don't use any fancy devices and have only an old-fashioned cable TV, so our habit is to find a show we like and a channel that syndicates it and schedules it hour after hour for months on end. The Boston Legal years are a blur. Next up was the House marathon. We've seen every episode of House three times but keep thinking there might be one we've missed. I began to suspect I had spent too much time in front of the tube the day our neighbor's basement flooded. A committee convened, but nobody could figure out where the water was coming in; the walls appeared dry; it seemed possible it was coming up from the sewer through the bathroom drain, but there was no good explanation. Things were getting tense, as they always do when men are equally confounded but don't think they can pitch a hissy fit in front of each other. After about a half hour of batting around possible diagnoses, I found myself thinking:  it's sarcoidosis. It's always sarcoidosis. Except it couldn't be sarcoidosis, because we'd only been there a half hour. In another fifteen minutes it would look like rhabdo or a rare tropical infection. I poked at the wallboard thoughtfully, with an air of engagement, and let the men puzzle it out, confident that the solution would arrive at the 55-minute mark.

The morning I woke up with the theme to Two And A Half Men going through my head, I knew I had a problem, but that I'd think about it after logging another couple hours in bed. Things are often clearer in the light of day.

But that night, in the blue television light, I realized I have no problem at all. I'm going to get me an iPhone with a Viggle app and go for the grand prize: ComaDoze, the memory-foam recliner with the built-in Cheez Doodle dispenser and insulin pump. Don't bother me, I'm working.