It's Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And four days into midterm week, the most horrible thing that could possibly happen is for my last lifeline to the world outside of Firestone to break. Life looks far too grim without the prospect of distractions.
I'm mortified and totally disgusted. I even contemplate, however briefly, the possibility of leaving the phone. But having to explain that I clogged the toilet by flushing my cell phone down it seems, if possible, even worse than the present situation. Luckily, I'm an Outdoor Action leader: I can pee in the woods, and I can eat macaroni and cheese off a pile of dirt. Clearly, sticking my hand into a toilet is a minor trouble.
What is cause for concern, however, is that my now paper-towel dried phone has ceased to function. There is no way I'm going to survive the night. I won't be able to call anyone to go to dinner with me, so I'll starve, which won't really much matter because I'll have lost my mind in the unbroken silence of the Trustee Reading Room by dinner time. But what will ultimately make this situation so desperate is, when I still haven't figured out the thesis of this paper six hours later, I won't be able to call my parents, hysterical.
My cell phone has long since ceased to be a mere means of communication and instead has become an essential lifeline leading straight to my parents. As a diehard denigrator of cell phones, my dad would roll straight into his grave if he knew the degree to which he and my mom had become synonymous with one. It's not that I think of them as electronics, simply that, as I live in California, I most often hear their voices coming out of that little box rather than out of human bodies. And though my mom spends enough time on this side of the country to be considered bicoastal, I still only see her infrequently, due to some combination of reading, writing and rugby. So even when she's only an hour away, she's still closer by phone.
Moving across the country has had a similar effect on my perception of my friends. Unlike my parents, they have become instant messenger boxes. I have long thought of my friend Teddy, who goes to Pomona and can always be counted on to keep me company at 2 a.m. due to time differences, as the voice of my computer. He's a bigger box than everyone else, but still, he's a box. Pictures on facebook.com are the only way by which my friends can retain a modicum of humanity, but a year-and-a-half after leaving for college, they're all pretty much pop-up windows to me.
It's not that I don't think of my family and friends as people who I know and love. It's just that, once in a while, I have to remind myself that the pink print in the AIM window has a body attached to it somewhere over in Washington D.C. or San Diego.
This dehumanization of my loved ones aside, I'm a big fan of all this technology, even if it has allowed me to lay great strain on my mother's nerves every time I have a paper due. I like that it makes losing touch with friends less and less of an issue, even though I begin to lose touch with their humanity. It's almost weird at this point to see my friends in person. We hug a lot, kind of like we're making sure that the other one is really there, flesh and blood.
That was what impelled me to reach into the toilet in the first place: the fear that the voices of these loved ones might at that very moment be bubbling up from the deep but would never quite reach my ears.
Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu
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