One Month Sans Cell Phone

The Cell Phone Thief

Exactly one month ago, on the way to a meeting, I got out of the cab, slammed the door shut, realized my iPhone had fallen out of my jacket in the cab a moment earlier, and watch them both speed away into the distance.  Since I hate the sound of a ringing phone, my phone lived on silent, so the cabbie didn't pick up when I called from a friend's cell a few moments later.

I did everything I was supposed to - I kept the receipt, called the garage, even went out to the actual garage (okay - it happened to only be two blocks from my apartment).  I put my phone on lost mode, made sure that a message with Rafael's number showed up whenever it was turned on, and then waited for the good Samaritan who found my phone to get in touch with me.

But that good Samaritan turned out to be more of an Adam Tiler.  Every few days, my computer would buzz, indicating that my phone had been turned on.  It even displayed a map, showing where my phone had been for those precious moments it had been allowed consciousness.  I got to track my stolen phone's whereabouts through New York City.  I imagined it asking it captors to kindly let it out for a brief stroll along Riverside Park, after which they sped over to Spanish Harlem, where it spent a few days on 108th St and 2nd Ave, close to one of my favorite tacquerias.  In all of its adventures, my phone never left the island, but really, I didn't blame it.

A day after I lost my phone, I went on a week-long retreat to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center to finish up teaching my Advanced Directing class for NTI but mostly, to spend a week writing the final draft of my book.  I decided not to replace it before I left, figuring that the tranquility its absence would afford me would be good for finishing the book.  I was right.

Save $200

I go back to the Big Apple on March 28th, and begrudgingly trudged into the Big Apple Store, where I was told that if I waited until April 13th, my annual rebate discount thing would kick in, and I would save $200 on the iPhone 5.  It was the sign I needed.  I decided to spend two weeks sans cell phone in the big city.

It was amazing.

I was so amazing, one week after my rebate date, I still don't have a phone.  And although I feel the experiment coming to an end (I got into rehearsals next week for my PARADISE LOST project and think that it would sorta be irresponsible not to get a phone before that), I have to report honestly to you, loyal readers:

I didn't miss my phone at all.  I've never been happier. 


Here are a list of times I reached for my phone to realize I didn't have it:

1) Every five minutes, to verify that five minutes had passed since the last time I'd checked.

2)  Every time the person I was with got up and went to the bathroom.

3)  Every time I left the person I was with to go to the bathroom.

4)  Every time I heard someone else's iPhone text alert bell-ring-ping thing go off.  I swear to God, the Pavlovian reaction I've developed to that little sound is down right maniacal.

5)  To quadruple-check the address of the place I was supposed to meet someone.

6)  When someone was late to meet me.

7)  Every time I thought about using one of those apps that seemed so great when I downloaded it and like I would just it all the time but then I realized it was just sort of annoying.

The amazing thing was discovering how many times we use our phones unnecessarily.  When someone was ten minutes late to meet, I didn't actually need a text telling me that.  I just waited.

When I was late meeting some friends because I couldn't remember if Fonda (best Mexican in New York) was on Ave A or B (it's B, fyi) and I couldn't check on any of the five thousand map apps,   they just waited for me.

Every thing was fine.  There were no crises.

I hope that after I get that stupid cell phone today, I will be able to retain the lessons I've learned while we were apart.  I hope I'll be able to break the cycle of abuse that we enact on each other, me depending on it far too much, it enabling my mania.  But I doubt it.

It seems innocuous - why not check your email when left alone in a restaurant for three minutes?  Why not shoot off that text as the bus you're on lumbers up 10th Ave?  Why not catch up on those articles in The Times while you're waiting for the subway?

But these individual moments add up, culminating in shattering our attention spans.  We don't need to be able to communicate nearly as much as our phones allow us to.  Now, when I see people emerge from the subway and anxiously check to see if anyone had emailed them in the twelve minutes they were underground, as I always did, I think the same thing when I see people smoking: slave.

I want to write about two more things - they have no direct relationship to having lost my cell phone.

1)  Today will be my fourth day on a liquid diet.  I woke up on Tuesday, decided I felt disgusting, and began juicing.  Here's what my intake basically looks like:

Breakfast - Green Juice: Kale, spinach, parsley, celery, green apple, lemon
Lunch - Orange Juice: Carrot, beets, lemon, ginger
Afternoon Snack - Smoothie: bananas, strawberries, home-made almond milk
Dinner: Home made beefstock.

The first day was hard and I was headache-y.  Since then, I have felt euphoric.  Concentrating on one thing for extended amounts of time ain't the easiest thing in the world, but I led a three-hour meeting yesterday.  And I played soccer.  I don't think I could rehearse a play like this, since I'm tingling and semi-hallucinating the way I always imagined LSD would make me.

2)  My Paradise Lost Project has raised over 7700 dollars!  Our goal is 10000 and if you're one of those people whose thought about kicking in but haven't yet, we've only got a week to go.  The time is now!  Carpe diem!  Give me your money!

The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me

On Wednesday, I lost my cellphone.

By all accounts, it should've been a tragedy.  I was in the middle of an incredibly busy week, on the way to meet a producer, a few hours before four people were showing up to my apartment to be fed.  This also happened two days before I was going to bid adieu to New York.  I decided that the only way for me to finish the final revision on my novel was to leave Manhattan and get the kind of calm and focus that is so elusive for me on the island.  I had arranged a week-long residency for myself at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, where I'm getting married in two months, where I'm teaching an Advanced Directing Class.  And because I was leaving New York, I decided that I needed to get everything done that I'd been putting off for weeks.

I splurged on a cab to the producer's meeting, since it was that annoying kind of meeting in the middle of the day, in a neighborhood I'd already been to a few hours earlier.  Ordinarily, I would've squatted in a cafe and earned the proprietor's ire by reading for hours and only ordering tea, but I had to get home, remove the chicken from the buttermilk brine I'd soaked it in in preparation for frying, grate the lime and lemon zest for my chilled cherry soup, and oven fry the bacon so that the salad I was planning to serve after the entree had a little kick.  I didn't have time to idle in cafes.

I stepped out of the cab, greeted the wonderful writer with whom I was about to step into the meeting, patted myself down, and said half to myself and half to her, "My phone is in that cab."

I had kept the receipt.  I called 3-1-1-.  I gave the medallion number.  They gave me the garage number.  My ringer was off, of course, so the driver wasn't picking up when I called.  I suffered through the meeting, came home, and somehow, had lost the cab receipt that had been in my possession just a few hours earlier.  I remembered the garage number, however, and used the magic of the internet to discover that the garage was just around the corner from my house.  I found it, and across the locked gate, saw the cab (Medallion Number 4P19) where I suspected my phone was hanging out, free for once from incessant usage and checking.  But I couldn't get to it.  And I had dinner guests arriving.  And the deep fry thermometer I had ordered from Amazon to get my coconut oil to the perfect 325 degrees of heat for frying chicken still hadn't arrived.

The dinner party, I'm proud to say, was a glorious success (I didn't photograph any of the food, and even if I did, I'm currently at the O'Neill, where the wireless connection feels more dial-up than broadband).  I started with the aforementioned chilled cherry citrus soup, followed by savory sweet mashed potatoes (I used bacon grease instead of butter), blanched broccoli rabe, Rafael's irresistible smoked salsa, and coconut friend chicken, followed by a salad with arugula, romaine, walnuts, cranberries and chopped bacon.  Then my guests (one of my fav guys from my soccer team, his bf, and a straight couple) humored me by playing Citadels, one of my favorite uber-nerdy board games, which was won by the only woman present (I came in second place by one point).

And through all of this, I didn't have my phone.  I've turned on the iCloud track option, and apparently, my phone gets turned on every few seconds every few hours, then turned back off.  I chart its progress from my computer, amazed at the technology that allows me to do this and befuddled by how it's supposed to help me get my phone back.

The last few weeks had been hard on me - every project I'm working on thrills and delights me, but somehow, with the wedding planning, I'd been feeling manic and stressed, not the creature of joy I'd like to be.  I felt it affecting my behavior, and for the first day or two without my phone, I felt its absence, the way you'd miss a cybernetic limb that had been hacked off.

What time was it?  Had someone emailed me in the last six minutes?  What was the weather in New London going to be like?  Was that a text or just my leg muscle twitching?  How many people have responded to my last Facebook post?

This and many other questions went unanswered without my pocket-sized portal to other worlds.  And although I was going through withdrawal, I also felt liberated.  I told myself that if I hadn't found my phone by the time I went to New London, I would spend the week without it.

So far, it's been great.  I do get scared, thinking about all the people who might be texting me, ignorant of my predicament, assuming that I'm unbearably rude in not responding.  But the impulses to check the time or my email every few minutes are already diminishing.  My dear friend (O'Neill Artistic Director and officiator of my wedding) Wendy Goldberg and I took the train up together, and had a two-and-a-half-hour conversation that wasn't interrupted by beeping or pinging or chirping electronics.  And when we got off the train, she was so inspired that she told me to take her phone and keep it so that she, too, would be phone-free for her week up here (seven minutes later, she insisted I return it so that she could check her email).

I love being phone-free, and feel positive that this week will be more productive without it.  And if I need to check my email, I can just use my computer, the way we used to in the olden days.  Or, I can use the iTouch that my family gave to Rafael for his birthday two years ago, that I brought up so that I could have an alarm clock.