Alas, but today’s update is a tale of woe. It was the worst of times, the age of foolishness, the epoch of incredulity, the season of Darkness. Dare I say, even the winter of despair, with nothing before us, and we were all going direct the other way. This paragraph was written for the literate among you.
Why all the overstated drama? I have taken the first major step toward true Borg assimilation. I am now the owner… gasp… of a cell phone. I can see my would-be friends around the world wringing their hands and cackling at my disconsolation. “Finally, he’s become one of us...”
My cousin Fred told me, “Wait as long as you possibly can to get a cell phone.” It isn’t my fault, Fred, really. It’s the Kyivian phone system. They forced my hand. I haven’t had a working phone line in four months. How can a world class city of 2.5 million people not have a cooperative phone company? But it’s true. I told people they could contact me through email or through skype. But to no avail.
You may not have experienced my unbridled hatred for cell phones (it’s okay for Christians to hate cell phones, just not the people who use them). It stems back to a distaste for regular phones. I remember hearing about the first car phones and thinking aloud, “What gives? The car is supposed to be a place you can escape the phone.” Then, like cancer, cell phones began appearing everywhere. First with drug dealers and divorce lawyers, then to day traders. Finally it invaded the lives of regular folk.
On our missions base, our prayer times and services continually pastiched with the telltale chirps of self phones*. Just this morning, after worship I stopped playing the piano and the first sound was not a prayer, not an amen, but the electronic ditty of a mobile that I’m sure was an emergency. (sarcastic italics not available in all email formats) It happens in church on Sundays and in restaurants on Saturdays and every day in between. These are people I love who love God too but can’t give Him priority over their ringers.
I’ve been reluctant to join in this sort of cacophony. So after I gave up on our line being repaired, I relented aloud that I needed to buy one. Tim, a good friend, told me, “I have an old self phone you can have. It’s not reliable and shuts off sometimes when you walk around with it in your pocket, but you’re welcome to it.”
Free phone? Beats throwing money away for something I didn’t want. I accepted the offer. My roommates were delighted that I brought the beast home. But the phone didn’t work at all.
“No, this is perfect.” I told them, somewhat relieved. “I can honestly tell people I have a self phone without being bothered day by day by the noise of it.” And I dropped it in my coat pocket.
Later I was walking home one of the girls (don’t get goofy ideas. We live in the city and I walk home all the girls) and pulled out the gizmo. She told me, “Oh I have a self phone just like that, except the back keeps sliding off so I bought a new one. You can have the old one if you want, it really does work.”
So now I had not one but two cell phones. I took the back off of Tim’s phone and put it on Krista’s phone and it stays fine. And while Krista’s phone worked but she couldn’t find the charger, Tim had a charger but no working phone. So I created one working self phone from the two cast offs, a virtual Franken-Selfphone.
And so I’m making the best of a necessary evil. All the same, I feel like I’ve violated some sort high principle. What if this is the first step toward spiraling down some moral abyss, where next I’ll start drinking coffee, then start eating tofu, then at the very bottom, I’ll buy a Macintosh computer. Just keep me in your prayers.

* “Self phone” is a brilliant spelling variant of “cell phone” that I recently saw on a memo written by a non-English speaker.

¶ 4:51 PM

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