ONE F

I lost my phone on my birthday. These things happen, although this is the first time it has happened to me, and I blame the drinks people kept buying me as well as the confusing liner in my leather jacket.

You don’t realize how attached you are to your phone until you don’t have it anymore, and this realization is both enlightening and somewhat disconcerting. Realizing there’s no way for people to contact you (instantly) makes one feel strangely isolated, and leaving the house without a phone makes one feel naked.

I took phone-less walk several nights later, and I kept thinking I felt a vibration in my pocket, like a strange phantom limb.

I used Skype to call Verizon to see if I could get any sort of discount on a replacement phone. After casually threatening to switch to AT&T, and repeatedly reminding them that I’d been a customer with them for more than ten years, they eventually agreed to give me an iPhone for $100, and then (without me asking) took $40 off of next month’s bill.

The next day I called the NYC Taxi & Limo Commission to see if my phone had been found in the back of the taxi Franny & I had taken after leaving the bar, and after a somewhat bizarre three-way conversation with the Russian taxi driver (Boris) and the woman at T.L.C., I learned that my phone had, indeed, been found in the taxi. My old phone was a fifty dollar (cheap) smartphone, but Boris said “I never seen anything like it, it look like little computer.” Boris was kind enough to drop the phone off to my work at the beginning of his shift, and he refused to take the money I offered him for his trouble.

I decided to make the obvious choice and sell my old phone and keep the iPhone, so I’m now the owner of an iPhone, which I’ve quickly become fascinated/obsessed with against my will, while realizing that this is probably the point of the thing. I won’t be needing an appointment book next year, at any rate, and I can watch you while you sleep. All of you.

I turn thirty-eight tomorrow, so yeah… I’m getting older. Getting older has, for the most part, never felt the way I imagined it would feel. Mostly, getting older seems to be learning how to play the part of an older person, while underneath I’m still just a kid hoping that nobody will notice. This is obviously something only an older person would be conscious of, and it comes with the realization that maybe everybody is just playing the part of whatever age they are based on whatever they perceived that age to be when they were younger. Or perhaps I’m alone in this perception, and I’ve just revealed something profound about my personality that I should probably talk to a therapist about.

I will say that thirty-seven was generally good to me. I began it as an unemployed, broke, and virtually unknown filmmaker; and I’m ending it as an employed, less-broke, and relatively less unknown filmmaker. It was a good year for my career, and I can only hope that thirty-eight will be even better.

I’m also in love, which I wasn’t a year ago, and I need to get on the subway to meet the object of said love for Korean barbecue right now.