I worry about my life, not only because of the content of this post, but also because of the fact of it.

So I didn't do a post last week.  MY BAD.  So I'm going to do a real post later this week but I have to post something and right now I'm in the write mood (PAH!) which actually may be the entirely wrong mood to publicize my thoughts but here you go and I'll probably strongly regret this in the morning. 

I think I should be concerned about the state of my life, and I'll tell you why. I cannot have a nice phone.  I've realized I am not grown-up enough for that.  I bought a nice(I mean not that nice, but it wasn't a free phone.  It was like a quick upgrade but I knew even then, instinctively, that I needed to not get that fancy slider. Even though I REALLY wanted it.  But I think everyone knew I hadn't earned that privilege.) phone that was a little soldier and I loved it.  It got lots of chips in the paint, of course, because I regularly hurl it to the ground- not in rage, just in carelessness. I gesticulate wildly a lot and then before I know it my phone's across the room and I'm crawling under strangers' chairs hunting it down.  Anyway, the final straw was pretty much when I dropped it in a pitcher of pink lemonade. After drying out, it would turn on, but it got zero service.  I thought, 'Welp, best thing I can do is try to wash the lemon and sugar off.'  So I took it apart and tossed it in a glass of water, figuring that at best it would help and at worst i'd be back where i started with a phone that didn't work (I did NOT consider that if my phone wouldn't turn on anymore I would lose all my numbers, but that ended up happening later on anyway). Lo and behold, that crazy move enjoyed some measure of success. My sweet phone limped along for like six months,brave in the face of slow death by terminal water damage, which the girl at the Verizon store claimed was pretty common, but I think she was just taking undue credit for my phone's Indomitable Spirit and also Love of Me.  Anyway then I got a phone that was seriously from like 1995.  It had a *blue screen.* Legit.  I was amazed it could text.  It was ginormous and people frequently asked me if it was my home phone brought out into the world by mistake.  No, friends, it wasn't.  It was my Frankenphone.  I somehow went through a couple of phones after that and then had to go back to the Frankenphone, and now I have my current phone which was given to me by a friend.  It's been serving me faithfully for like five months, but as you can see the paint is seriously chipped.

This is due to the aforementioned Casting Aside Dramatically.  Also I pick at it sometimes when I'm nervous.  (Yes, I'm wearing my choir dress. Get over it. It's like a nightgown.)  So by now you're probably saying, so what, Janel, get over it. You trash your phone. No big deal.  But you know what? It IS a Big Deal.  It is a Very BIG DEAL.  And I will tell you why.  (This is where I probably start my sassy side to side head motions that I cannot explain. I usually also put my finger in the air at this point.) I LOVE my phone.  If it was like, you can have your phone with you or you can eat today, I don't know what you would choose but I know what Sharon Stone and I would do.  We would keep our damn phone.  Sharon Stone LOVES to text (probably) and SO DO I.  I love texting more than the average person for sure and am uncomfortably addicted to it.  When I'm having a serious conversation with a friend about life problems but my phone buzzes, I have to do that leg-shaking thing that sometimes people do that you're sharing a couch or lunch table with and you're like STOP SHAKING THE TABLE, ASSHOLE. But you can't help it because you have to get rid of all that nervous energy, wondering who's calling or texting you.  And once it buzzes three times and stops then you know it's a text and so you're like, okay it can wait, but I still REALLY want to know what it is and respond pronto.  But then if it keeps buzzing you're like oh man somebody's calling me and it *might* just be the love of my life, how am I to know? But even so I know that if it's a number I don't have saved I am pretty much never going to answer it anyway.  What if it's that guy who kept calling in every night during closing when I worked at Victoria's Secret? That was a creepy man that I hope I never meet in real life.  The thing is, I don't know his name so I could actually meet him at any time and NOT EVEN KNOW IT.  That man is roaming around loose somewhere and making creepy phone calls to innocent lingerie salespeople.  RUDE.  Anyway the point is I really want to know who's calling or texting me.  My closest relationship in life is probably with my cell phone (because the pickins are slim, folks... but at the same time of course I'm not saying my phone is a backup, I love it for who it is).  So, okay, you're probably still a little confused. Like, okay, you destroy your phone.  Okay, you love your phone and destroy it anyway.  So what?  I'LL TELL YOU SO WHAT. I am REASONABLY CONFIDENT that this is the way I treat all the things I love best- I destroy them.  Isn't that a charming thought? I mean yeah, I also do lots of nice things for people I love such as feed them and tell them I love their sweaters.  But also I destroy them with my inability to Handle With Care.  This is why I really need an LG phone, because I hear they solder their parts instead of glue which allegedly makes the thing more durable, but I'm not sure what kinds of friends are the most durable.  Bubble Boys?  But then at some point you know that bubble is going to get a hole or something and you know those people are super vulnerable from not growing any antibodies and all of a sudden the immune system is compromised and guess what?  You just gave your best and only friend chicken pox or some such shit which doesn't sound that bad but if your body has never been sick and has no idea how to fight that off, you just KILLED your best friend.  Via chicken pox.  Good one.  I bet it would be embarrassing to die of chicken pox in this day and age.  Or any, mostly because who wants to be killed by a chicken? They're like the most retarded, dirty animal of all time and if you put them on one side of a six foot chain link fence and some food on the other side, they will just keep walking into that fence imagining that one of these times they'll be able to walk through.  They can't just walk around.  They're dumber than a fly.  And you just made a chicken kill your best friend so not only is your friend itchy and then dead, but also humiliated. *Good one.*  (This is where I snap my fingers in Z-formation as if to say, 'Mischief Managed.)

UPDATED:

I forgot to mention, one of the biggest things I do to my phone is text in the shower.  That has led to the demise of many a phone.  It's because I love it too much to leave it alone for half an hour.  Make an analogy of THAT, if you can.

I probably shouldn't be allowed to talk.

So today I was standing around, talking to some Unsuspecting Normalsons.  They were like, what's up with that new Fantasia movie? And I was like, you mean the one that came out ten years ago instead of fifty? And they were like, yeah. What's even in that?  And I was like, well, that terrifying Mickey Mouse one is shown again right in the middle.  And they were like, yeah, that Sorcerer's Apprentice is really stupid.  And I was like, Yeah, I KNOW, right? And totally scary! Like, every time Mickey chops up that broom and then it COMES BACK TO LIFE I'm like FFFFFCK!!!! I kinda had a dream like that last night! And they were like, ....

And I was like, 

I was working on an early steamship, and everyone was really impressed with the technology that made it go.  I think I was a waitress, and my friend Grace was going downstairs to clean the pipes out (like you always have to do mid-voyage on your steamship). (It should be noted that I don't actually have a friend Grace, she's a dream-friend.  Like most of my friends) (But then why aren't they better friends, if I just make them up? I need to start imagining friends who don't stab me in the back all the time...) So then it turned out there was a sea serpent in the pipes and I ran down to the basement of the boat just in time to see Grace flailing helplessly as the creature cruelly dragged her back to its pipe-labyrinthine-lair.  I hauled her out and even though she had been hopelessly clutched in the serpent's fangs, she didn't seem to be too much the worse for wear.  I grabbed that serpent and took it up to the kitchen, where I put its head in the garbage disposal (like you always have on your early steamship).  As I realized that this was the best plan I've ever come up with, I decided to grind the whole thing up in the blender.  My brother helped me.  When I was finished, I had a little tadpole of post-blender-sea-serpent goo.  I felt like the right place for that goo was the bowl in which my faithful goldfish, Buckaroo Bonzai, resides.  This later became a problem because, you know how some things can kind of regenerate?  like lizards' tails, or things in a dream?  Well, it turned out the sea serpent just regenerated and my brother had to grab it by the back of the head and put it in the blender.  Then we had the bright idea that if it regenerated but wasn't in water, it would just suffocate since it's a SEA serpent.  As in fish. As in needs water to breathe.  As in why on earth did we put it in that fish bowl anyway?  So we put it in a bag and took it out to the garbage cans out front.  As we got there, we were greeted pleasantly by a friendly but bumbling (like most of my brother's real-life friends) neighbor who I knew had caused this mess in the first place.  After a brief montage of all the ways I could help him see the error of his ways, I just decided to get over it. I put the remains in the garbage can, smiled at the neighbor and went into my house.  LEAVING THE SEA SERPENT UNATTENDED.  I could hear the Jaws theme playing as I walked away.  Even in my dreams, I make Very Poor Life Choices!  And then I was making out with this guy I met in choir but it was actually a little scary. *exhale.*

They exchanged a few perplexed glances with one another and said, ...welp, choir's starting...

The interesting thing about all this (I can hear you say, "Really? Really??) is that this Sea Serpent was really the same monster as the Giant Eel pursuing me and my cabinmates in a dream about two weeks ago:  roughly the length of my driveway, with GIANT fangs.  Kinda Basilisk-esque, in a Harry Potter kind of way.  

A Fairy Tale.

Once upon a time, there was a Princess who lived in an old castle, in the middle of a meadow, in the master bedroom downstairs, with a bathroom/shower directly adjacent. After two Princess Years of living in that room, the Princess grew tired of dirty peasants tromping in and out of her bedroom to use that shower. And also coming in 'to chat,' but really just wandering off and leaving their things on her floor and the door wide open. So the Princess decided to take action and move to an attic room upstairs. She was confident that the relationship between Princesses Who Live in Attic Bedrooms and Princesses Who Are Virtually Enslaved by Fairy Tale Antagonists was correlational and not causal, and, with just a little trepidation, she moved all her furniture up there.
This move resulted in a few changes in the Princess's life. For one thing, she loved having a room that was really and truly her own. She loved that it was a little less accessible to the General Populace (her loyal subjects loved to seek her wise advice), and she loved that her little room had a lock on the door. But, rather unexpectedly, she found herself having to ratchet up her levels of efficiency, because climbing rickety stairs that are slanted and not in the way they're supposed to be (that way too, but also to the side) and aren't big enough for an adult foot to step on unless it's sideways is not something Princesses like to do that often. For another thing, she had to be a lot more conscientious about turning the fan off when she exited the shower, because when the Princess got up to her attic room, the fan sounded like a helicopter beneath her bed. She also learned how other Princesses came to befriend local birds when she discovered the nest in her wall. It didn't come into her room, because this isn't the Dark Ages, for heaven's sake, it's the Twenty-first Century, but those birds sure did wake that Princess up in the morning with their twittering in the nest and scrabbling around. The Princess assured herself (with some difficulty, and a teensy bit darkly) that the birds weren't intentionally waking her two full hours before she was due to get out of bed. And on particularly difficult mornings, she wondered, a little belligerently, to herself, what kinds of girls these other Princesses were, making friends with such noisy and obnoxious animals. But, she inevitably concluded, you really couldn't expect anything else from girls so desperate for a little attention that they'd kiss a frog or move in with a house full of unsavory miners. So, to make a long story short, there were some adjustments to be made.

One day, the Princess had places to be, countries to rule and lives to save, and she had to take a shower before any of that could happen. She had grown pretty used to her little attic room, and normally she brought her clean clothes down to the bathroom and changed into them there. On this occasion, however, the Princess was in a hurry and didn't worry too much about the idea of running back upstairs in her towel. But as she opened the bathroom door after her shower, she suddenly remembered that the Court Music Tutor was teaching a beginners' class for some of the toddler nobility of the surrounding country. 'Oh, well,' thought the Princess, 'the Queens and Nurses might be in the castle, but I don't mind MUCH if they see me in my towel, and after all I haven't much choice at this point.' She stepped out of the bathroom, looked to her left, and saw, to her surprise, the door open and her own former Music Tutor and the father of one of the pupils, Bruce Hamilton, sitting in a wicker chair in the throne room. He smiled a little awkwardly and the Princess stared for a second, looked down, then around, then up, then gave up. She shrugged and trudged upstairs. When she got up to her own little attic bedroom, she realized she was clutching her magenta bra as if presenting it to an award-winner. She sighed, and decided to forget her evening's obligations. The Princess got back in bed.

THE END.