down

I parked my car in a downtown garage yesterday, in anticipation of driving to the other county, and when I went back to my car, I had a briefcase and a bag on my shoulder and a cup of coffee in my hand.

The exit of the elevator on the correct floor was on a little bit of a raised platform, which I did not notice in my hurry to get to my car. I stepped forward as if there would be ground beneath my foot. 

There was no ground beneath my foot. Not, at least, at the level I expected. It was about three inches lower, and by the time my foot hit that level, I was already toppling.

The grooved pavement was not kind to my knee, nor to my non-coffee holding hand.  My coffee sloshed all over my other hand (fortunately it was not too hot). 

There on the ground, I looked up as three cars passed without so much as rolling down their windows and asking if I was okay. (I go through life expecting people to be reasonably nice and generous. It doesn't usually bother me when they aren't, but when I am in pain, it does. A kind word would have soothed me greatly.)

I was wearing fleece lined leggings (don't knock this until you've tried it), so I couldn't see the state of my knee, and I was now worrying about being late, so I climbed off the ground, licked at my coffee-covered hand, and stumbled to my car. My non-coffee hand was red but no skin had been broken.

It wasn't until I got home that I peeled the leggings off my knee and saw the sort of knee scrape I used to get when I was a kid - the kind that takes off a whole round chunk of skin several layers deep.

Then this morning I noticed that the missing chunk of skin sits on top of some weird-looking lump that does not normally exist on my knee and is turning funny colors.

I am... probably never going to learn to walk properly, am I? I think it's a little late now.

Also, pro tip: fleece-lined leggings. They will survive when your skin does not, and you will not have to stumble into court with a hole in the knee of your tights.

door frame

Coming home from a conference, I dropped various baggages just inside the front door, and turned around to get the rest of the stuff out of the car.

I pulled the door shut behind me, to keep the warm air in.

Unfortunately, I pulled it shut without first extricating my left pointer finger.

That'll sting.

There was swearing.

It's been about an hour now, and the tingling has dissipated. A blood blister has formed. I can even bend it again.

But wow.

I will remove my finger from the door frame before closing the door next time.

thumb-shaped hole

"One of the times I fell, I jammed my thumb," I said, on the ride home from cross-country skiing, "on nothing but snow."

"Do not tell anyone that," the driver said.

Oh, reeeally. Clearly he does not know me very well. My ability to jam my thumb on nothing but snow is exactly the sort of thing I tell the entire world about via the internet. Mostly because I find it hilarious.

I mean, I fell down into SNOW, and jammed my thumb, on SNOW. I even checked to see if there was anything else there, but no, it was just snow, with a thumb-shaped hole. (Well, an hand-shaped hole, with a thumb-shaped hole at the bottom.) There was still fully three feet of snow below that, too.

I have a special talent for accidental self-injury.

the weapon

A friend of mine is currently between housing situations and staying in my guest room.

While I was procuring the wireless code for him, he said, "Uh, why is there a knife next to the wireless router?"

"I don't know," I said. It was a paring knife. "I assume M. was using it to open a box or something."

"I assumed it was to stab someone," he said.

He handed me the knife and I went off with it, not to put it away, which would be the logical thing to do, but to put away a few pieces of clothing of the chaos that is my return from the Mitten. When I picked up the knife again, I ran my thumb over the blade and cut myself.

"I just cut myself with that knife," I called to A., and he said, "I should have just taken care of the weapon myself, shouldn't I?"

"Yes," I said. "Probably you should have."

scrape

I took a load of party goodies out to the car, and came back inside for another. My arms were piled high with cookie trays and cookie containers as I walked out the door.

There are about six steps down to the decking that constitutes our driveway, and I only made five of them.

The cookie containers landed face-up on the decking, and I landed on my knees. My knees hurt.

I was running a few minutes late (I got to the party 4 minutes late), so I salvaged the cookie containers, packed up the car, and went to the party. It wasn't until I unpacked the cookies that I realized that some of them had cracked into pieces from the fall, even though they had not fallen to one side of the container to crumble.

It wasn't until even later that I realized that I had to pull my tights away from my knee to detach them where blood had stuck them to my one scraped knee.

The last time I recall doing exactly this, I was eight and carrying my baby sister. She was fine. I still have the scar.

figures

My beer cheese bread turned out perfectly, two days ago. I needed that candy thermometer, though.

Today, as I started out making the official Thanksgiving Beer Cheese Bread, I knocked the thermometer against the pan of hot water.

"Oh, that would be just like me," I thought, "to break the thermometer as I start the actual batch of bread."

I didn't really think it was broken, though. It was a very gentle tap.

But it was broken, and now I am about to run out to the store on Thanksgiving morning to get another thermometer. I didn't want to make this bread on time, anyway.

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving if the beer cheese bread went smoothly.

roller derby

I went to watch women push each other around on roller skates last night. It was entertaining. It was also confusing.

So there is this thing called roller derby. These women are hard-core. You think I'm hard-core because I get myself beaten up for fun? No way. I've got nothing on these women. These women knock each other off a track with their hips. At high speeds. While on roller skates. Wearing very little in the way of clothing.

Roller derby is a whole bunch of women wearing hot pants - much - shorter than the top of the pattern on their tights. The main official was wearing fringed hot pants over torn fishnets. Her butt cheeks were on display. And she knew it, and she reveled in it, and there were children present, and no one seemed to notice that the women were wearing very little and everything was an innuendo. I kept expecting her to whip off her shirt.

I think I experienced some culture stress. We just don't... do that... where I'm from.

Her shirt stayed on, by the way.

It took most of the evening to figure out what was going on, despite having watched a youtube video describing how it all works. The teams kept changing who wore the star on their helmet, and we never could tell why a person got a penalty. (The video said you can only knock people around with your body, not your limbs.) The points were even more impossible.

All I know is that there was a lot of shoving, and every player should have, by rights, been damaged by the end of the night, but they all seemed to be fine, and I was awed and impressed.

I would try it, but have you ever seen me on roller skates? I don't even need other people running into me in order to fall. It would be a bad scene, and not because of the sight of me in hot pants. More because of the blood and broken bones.

week in review

Tuesday:

The evening sun shone sideways through the window - I always forget how quickly the evenings get so very long here, come spring - and we sat talking about how to know when things are dangerous, and what you should know before you travel. S. is going to Liberia soon and so was asking me about the country, and the other S. looked at me shrewdly after a few minutes of conversation.

"You want to go back, don't you? You aren't going to last here long."

Wednesday:

Fighting class, kung fu, I don't know.

Thursday:

Advanced fighting class was canceled, and I took my bike out for the first time this spring, in that same sideways evening light. I wanted to go to rei, and I remembered how I used to use my bike for transportation instead of just for riding in circles, so I pumped up the tires and checked the lights, and off I went. It was easy on the way there, all downhill and smooth. I spent far too long studying hiking backpacks, and then finally I paid for one (it is to arrive in the mail soon) just as the store closed, so I had to ride back uphill in the dark, on the long, unending, winding road to my house. I stopped for a car. I started again, so slowly that I ran into the curb. I started again, and again. Finally, at the turn onto my street, I walked my bike for a few dozen feet, lungs and legs screaming, before climbing back on to finish the route.

Friday:

I almost made the girl cutting my hair cry. (In fairness, I almost cried myself when she chopped three or four inches off a huge chunk of my hair that I did not want cut so short, or so much of it short.)

"Um," I said, "I am kind of panicking over how much you just cut off. Didn't we say long layers?"

I made up for it by giving her an obscenely large tip.

Saturday:

I needed a kleenex, and the bathroom was full - the whole living area was full, in fact - so I darted into the K. parents' bathroom to grab one. On the way in, I slammed my knee into the footboard of the bed, and crumpled over in that can't-breath-nothing-exists-but-pain manner to which I have become rather too accustomed since beginning fighting class. (Usually it is my toe; the sensation is the same.)

I spent some time contemplating the fact that I run into things constantly, my general clumsiness, as it were, and I reached a conclusion: I am rushing through life. I need to slow down.

My knee is an awfully vibrant purple with little darker dots.

Later, over cigars to celebrate B.'s graduation, F. told us how he had accidentally sent a message, intended for S., to the man he had just met with about a contract. It said, "Ask Princess to recommend a good contract lawyer."

I'm not even fighting the Princess thing anymore.

Sunday:

Just as the sermon started, I handed N. a zot in church, a pink one. It was watermelon flavored. A few moments later, he jumped nearly out of the pew, and I couldn't look at him for five minutes, because we were both laughing so hard we almost couldn't sit up.

"I knew it was going to fizz," he said after church, "but I didn't expect so much fizz so suddenly."

I tried ribs for the first time ever at lunch, and everyone watched me taking little nibbles off the forkful of meat. "Delicious?" someone asked. It actually was, as long as I could forget that it was pig on my fork.

On the drive back to Universe City, I almost missed the county line, where usually I despair over the fact that I am returning here, because of the rainbows appearing and disappearing and reappearing again over to the east as the sun set through the rain.

Monday:

I have grown accustomed to checking my car for flat tires just about every time I get in it. I live with a constant suspicion that something is wrong with one of the tires, and as they say, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Another one was flat today. Not, fortunately, the one that I just replaced three weeks ago, for there would have been swearing, but the other rear tire. I drove slowly to the tire place and once again - once again! I've only had this car for seven and a half months! - spent my lunch hour contemplating racks of tires while the tire guys fixed my tire.

Apparently it had taken on a piece of metal.

I am beginning to despise my tires.

(Random side note: in the middle of typing this post, I had to restart my computer. The v, c, and h keys had stopped working. Try typing without them. It's harder than it looks.)

table

A group of us went to dinner on Friday night at a seafood place on the coast. It wasn't a fish-and-chips sort of seafood place, but a gumbo sort of seafood place. The four people at our table, a table that swung out from the wall so that we were sitting on three sides of it, all had big bowls of marinara or gumbo or cioppino in front of us when the table fell off the wall.

It was my end of the table that fell off the wall, and my marinara sauce spilled onto my leg and arm, but the bowl didn't fall. The guy next to me got a full plate of pasta right in his lap (photos were taken), and the two people at the other end of the table were fine.

We got free dessert, and the pasta-in-lap guy got his dinner for free, and later on one of the people at the table said, "That has never happened to me before, that a table just fell like that."

"You haven't gone to dinner with me enough, then," I said. "Things like that happen to me all the time."

inanimate objects reach out and attack me

I think this world is trying to kill me.

I just reached into the fridge and a vase fell off the top of it onto my wrist. For a few minutes, hopping around and tearing up, I thought it was broken, and I was not at all sure how I was going to get to the hospital on my own.

It's not broken. I don't think. It is just a very painful lump that hurts when I move my hand.

See also: knee pain from kung fu (I'm doing it wrong), general not-over-a-cold, non-allergies that feel like allergies, the massive hole I grated in my thumb with the cheese grater the other day that keeps oozing.

ouch

Since I put the milk crate on my bike, I cannot swing my leg over the back anymore (I have a boy bike, with the high bar), and I have developed a bad habit of swinging my leg over the front, so both legs are on one side while I'm still moving. Every time I do it, I think, this is a mistake, but I do it anyway, because it's so convenient to just jump off. Literally.

Tonight, as I pulled into my driveway, I did exactly the same, and I wobbled, somehow, to the right and then over-corrected to the left and then back right, and my foot wasn't all the way over yet, and the bike and I went crashing in to the potted plants. It hurt. Badly. I scraped all the skin off the lower part of my shin, and my other foot is already a big bump.

The good news is that I did not destroy one of my landlady's precious plants. Just myself.

my own pea

We all know the story of the princess and the pea, right? In the story, a princess shows up at the door of a castle. She tells the inhabitants that she is a princess, and the queen in the castle tests her by putting a pea under 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds. The princess is so sensitive that she cannot sleep. The pea, under all those mattresses and feathers, bothers her.

I have never gotten that fairy tale. In fact, I've always thought it was silly. Who wants such a sensitive princess? I want that princess who is grabbing her sword and leading the troops, not the one who has to be coddled.

That may be partly because I'm not at all sensitive to such things. I can sleep almost-but-not-quite anywhere. I can sleep through morning noise in the tropics. I can sleep on foam mattresses with slats poking through. I can sleep in rooms that smell bad. I am not sensitive enough to be a princess. Then again, I've never claimed to be one.

Last night, I washed my sheets and I was making my bed, when I lifted the mattress higher than normal and pulled out... my arm brace.

I've been looking for that thing for months, but it never occurred to me that it could actually be under my mattress. I knew that I might have put it along the side of my mattress (the frame is bigger than the mattress), and I've checked along the edge of the mattress several times, but I did not imagine that it could be all the way under my mattress without me noticing. After all, it is made of hard plastic. It is almost a meter long. It is probably two inches high, when lying on its side. How could I not feel it under my mattress?

I've been sleeping on a hard plastic object for months, and I never noticed.

I am so clearly not a princess.

they should not allow me to have nice things

I have long coveted a headlamp. A colleague who worked in a more developed location lent me a headlamp in Sudan, and it was very likely the only thing that gave me the courage to go out to the pit latrine at any time after dark, let alone in the middle of the night (although, as we all know from reading this post, going to the pit latrine in the middle of the night was a mistake). It was so bright, and so stable, and it stayed right there on my head while I used the squatty-potty. I looked at them online while I was there, but they were around 90 euros for the kind my colleague had lent me, so I gave up on them completely.

This evening, I was in r.e.i. with a friend who was on a mission, and, having nothing I particularly need and two trips planned to non-U.S.-type places, I meandered over to the headlamps. I do this often. I look at them, and admire them, and then fail to buy them, even though they are much cheaper and more varied here than on the 90 euro website. Today, though, a salesperson came over and pointed out that last year's model was on sale. And then I found out that I had store points, making said headlamp very affordable. I bought it.

I had ridden my bike over to my friend's house, so on the way home I looped my new headlamp around my helmet and took off. I have a light that blinks on the front of my bike, but it doesn't really illuminate the road. It is more intended to alert cars to the fact that I am there, so that they do not kill me. Thus, it is pointed in a more, I guess, forward direction rather than down at the road. The headlamp, however, lit the street in front of me quite perfectly.

When I got back to an area with streetlights, I turned off the headlamp, and then, adjusting it while stopped at a stoplight, I flipped it right off my head and onto the road, breaking off the clear plastic piece that covers the lights.

This is the story of my life. I break things. I break things that I just bought. I break everything, it seems sometimes. Clumsy.

So I parked my bike on the sidewalk and scoured the road with the headlamp, over and over. Nothing. A bus stopped for me, although I was not at a bus stop, but I waved the driver on and kept looking. Nothing. (At least I did not hear crunching as the bus passed.) I wanted to cry, the way one does when a shiny new thing breaks, a shiny new thing that you value far more than you ought, just because it is new and shiny and you have wanted it for almost two years.

At long last, a possibly-drunk older man came by. I could tell from his demeanor a block away that he was going to offer to help, the way you sometimes can. Anyway, he did not smell of alcohol even if he was drunk, and he was not scary, and so I accepted his help, and it took him all of 30 seconds to find the little plastic bit. It was in the second place he looked.

I snapped it back on and the headlamp was good as new, save for the little nick in the top that I choose to regard merely as proof that it is used and useful.

Seriously, though. They should not allow me to have nice things. It should be forbidden.

broken glass

I was washing one of my double-walled cups this morning, and I dropped it in the sink. It broke into about 14 pieces, which, after a moment of staring and a little pang of sadness - I love those cups - I collected and threw away.

A long time ago, when we still lived in our old house in Michigan, I remember my mom telling me a story. Two little girls from our church were over, and one of them dropped a glass on the floor. It broke. The little girl looked up in terror, clearly expecting anger. My mom, in classic practical Dutch fashion, said, "Let's clean that up."

I am grateful that I've never had to be afraid when I broke a cup. In fact, when we cleared the table when we were little, my brother and I used to balance the Corelle plates on our heads while we walked across the cement floors. (That might not have been the smartest move ever.) The point is: we didn't have to be afraid of the consequences if we accidentally dropped them.

for wallace

My long and beloved friend Wallace has fallen into the depths, from whence there is no return. We labored long to save him, but all efforts were for naught. He has passed beyond this world into a realm where none of us can follow.

In other words, I’m a *&^% idiot who, when heading to the latrine while listening to music, thinks to herself, “Maybe I should take the iPod out of my back pocket. No, it will be fine,” not realizing that the back pocket of jeans, when using a squatting toilet, GET TURNED UPSIDE DOWN. There was a horrible moment of realizing he was falling and watching him bounce and then watching him fall down down down into the depths of the latrine. One would think, having lost TWO phones through dropping into toilets, I would think more clearly now when approaching sources of liquid with electronic devices. One would be wrong.

We tried. We really tried. I could see him standing upright, his shiny little back with the Strawberry Shortcake sticker sticking up out of the goo. Only the very bottom was in the mess. We made a shovel out of a Pringles can and attached it to a long flexible plastic pipe (first we tried a metal pipe, but it was too tall to get into the latrine without bending). We used one more flexible pipe to try to pry it into the shovel. The pipe broke. We tried again, with two pipes, but Wallace just sunk further and further in. Finally, he was almost invisible, and we gave up.

I sat on the floor of the latrine and cried. There are parts of the latrine, like the edge of the hole, that I scorn to touch even with the bottom of my shoes. Now I was sitting in them, and resting my hand on them. The smell of the stirred up hole was terrible. My three colleagues, gathered around to help with the hopeless retrieval, said, “It’s not a person! At least it’s not a person!” and I looked up and said, teary-eyed, “His name is Wallace. We’ve been through a lot together.”

I looked down at him, the tiny remaining visible bit of him, one more time, and then said, “Is there a plane tomorrow? I want to leave.”

Of course I’m not leaving over a lost iPod. But it’s a sore loss. Wallace kept me sane many a night when I couldn’t leave the light on to read because the bugs would swarm. He kept me sane through all the long airport waits.

I cried for a while and then I got into the shower and washed myself thoroughly, including my hair, which I had just washed. I pushed my clothes into a pile and then washed again. I felt dirty from head to toe. But I would have taken Wallace back, for all the filth. I would have washed him carefully and prayed that he would work again.

Now I have only my computer. I am listening to music on it now, trying to be okay with losing Wallace, but I remember again every time I reach down to change the song and there is no lovely little spinning wheel on a shiny little body. There is only my bulky computer.

His last song was World On Fire, by Sarah McLachlan.

I miss him.

in which i almost step on an unidentifiable dead rodent

I’m not going to write anymore about the Blogger’s Bane: Work, for a while at least. (I have been rereading the Lord of the Rings books. Can you tell? Although I use the word bane a lot regardless of what I’m reading. I just like it.)

So then all that’s left, BASICALLY, is my evening walks. Almost. There’s also the fact that I broke the door off the girls-only bathroom. I’m not quite sure how it happened, except that you sort of have to lift the door in order to move it open or closed, and as I pulled to open it, it broke. And it really broke, not just a little bit of broke. The hinges and the one side of the frame that is attached to the hinges stayed in place, but the entire rest of the door broke off in my hand. I sort of propped it up, and then I left it. Now it’s propped outside, which is bad because it means I’m using a bathroom with no door.

Oh, and also, in other breaking news, I broke my colleague’s Ramadan fast. Because I break things. That’s what I do. I offered her some chocolate sitting out in the sun after I had eaten lunch and before either of us knew it, she’d eaten it. Fortunately, mistaken eating doesn’t actually ruin the fasting effort, otherwise I’d feel terribly bad.

Then there’s the daily walk. It’s all snippets of loveliness and chaos, like Africa generally. Today was something like this: walk, greet people, walk, greet people, notice at the last minute that I was about to step on a dead rodent, manage to avoid rodent carcass, walk, ask people if there were oranges for sale anywhere, get a no, walk, turn back before the river, meet a young teenage girl who walked with me for a mile or so, walk.

The girl, after we talked for a while in the clearest, most precise English each of us could manage, said to me, “I love having this good body, but I don’t like this,” as she pulled at the skin of her arm. “Your skin?” I asked. “You don’t like your skin?”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Yours is very smart.”

That led, of course, to the requisite, “God makes us all colors, and all of them are good” conversation. (And I told her about sunburn. Because, frankly, the lack of natural sun protection sucks in this climate.)

At the duka of the day, I bought mango drink and apple juice boxes. Apparently Uganda allows a company to label its juice “Pure Fruit Juice” when the ingredients are apple juice, sucrose, citric acid, malic acid, and vitamin C. I’m okay with four of them, but sucrose? Let’s discuss.

The duka guy didn’t have enough change, so in lieu of the final anticipated 10 piastres (the cents of the Sudanese pound) / 100 Uganda shillings, he gave me three gumballs out of a plastic bin. They disintegrated upon chewing and I was picking bits of blue gum out of my teeth for an hour.

…

If I had to live in a mud house, I think I would pick one in Elsewhere. They are not just mud houses, they are works of art. They are painted. They have windows (no one bothers with windows back where I come from; I mean, where I’ve been living), and neat little doors of metal or wood or cloth. The yards are wide and swept clean, with patches of bright green grass. The fences are made of a living plant that I’ve seen before in Rwanda. I’m not sure how to describe it – it grows up entwining its branches with its neighbor into a perfect fence. It doesn’t have leaves, or it is all leaves, depending on your perspective. I would compare it to a cactus, without prickles. Clearly I just need to take a photo, because this is impossible to describe. Anyway, I like the houses and the yards. They look homey to me.

the end of the end

I am so excited to be almost done with my paper (31 pages, just needs some corrections and footnotes), that I cannot actually write it. I think that might be a problem. Fundamental flaw.

I almost crashed the tiny car today, out of sheer stupidity. I tried to throw a popsicle stick out of the passenger window, found myself on the shoulder, overcompensated getting back onto the road, hit the brakes too hard, and skidded around for a while. As I was skidding, I pictured my car tumbling over and over into the ditch and was furiously annoyed with myself for the whole thing. But I managed to think to myself, "Overcorrecting! Overbraking! Stop!" and coast to a stop on the side of the road. Fortunately there were no other cars around for me to hit, or to hit me. Then I was all tense and shaking for a while driving here to finish the paper. And all glad to be alive.

The best thing about this town is a very particular cocoa drink at a local coffee shop. It's a spicy hot chocolate, but it has the following amazing characteristics:

1. Perfect amount of cayenne pepper.
2. No cinnamon. (Because in hot chocolate mixing pepper + cinnamon = bad. Although I'm sure this place could do it well. But they don't, which probably means it shouldn't be done.)
3. Great chocolate as the base.
4. Homemade whipped cream.
5. Inexplicable extra goodness.

Okay, that's maybe the best culinary thing about this town, not the best THING. I kind of want another one.

apparently one does not grow out of clumsiness

What I meant to do was pick up the chair and put one last staple into the fabric I had just covered it with. What I did was pick the chair halfway up and then drop it directly onto my big and second toes on my right foot. And then jump around shouting at the top of my lungs, likely waking the entire building.

One day later, I got to do something I never imagined was possible. I held a needle in the flame on my parents' stove and then burned a hole in my toenail, because the throbbing, the throbbing. That tiny little pinprick hole bled for 32 hours, 32 constant hours. My nailbed is no longer black with blood but is returning to its normal pink. I almost dare hope that I won't lose my second toenail ever.

I limp, though. Slowly. It's a sight.

In other news, there is no damage to the nerve in my right arm. Probably just an inflamation. Prescription: the ever-lovely ibuprofen and ice. Oh, and rest (hahahahaha - law school).

Current song obsession:

It's a long way home
When all you're left to carry is a heart of stone
And the weight of most the world

I have learned a little bit about a heavy load
All that gleams and glitters is not worth its weight in gold

And I want to
Lay it down a little
Lay it down a lot
I don't want to hold it anymore
Lay it down in pieces
Lay it down in whole
Everything I've carried on my own
Lay it down
Lay it down

(nn, of course, as always. What can I say? She gets it.)

Believe it or not, the doctor who checked out my nerve conduction this morning said I seem much happier than most lawyers he knows. And he treats a lot of them. So happy not to have succumbed to corporate.

disposable

Last Sunday, I came to school around 5:40 p.m. to do some reading and preparing for my always-crazy week. I stopped in the bathroom because I had just come from eating lunch and then having coffee with some friends and I did what I apparently do about every nine months: I dropped my phone in the toilet. At least this time I didn't watch it gurgle. My reflexes were a little better. I snatched it out and washed it and it was working perfectly until I took the battery out to dry out its little compartment and then it wouldn't come back on. For some reason, this made me frantic. Last May when I dropped my phone into a toilet, I was calm. I lived without a phone for a few days. This time I needed a new one. Immediately.

I ran ran ran over to the nearest store, which was to close at 7 p.m. What I wanted from them was not a new phone but a little screwdriver to open up the back of the phone and dry things out inside. The two behind the help counter looked at me blankly and said, "We don't open phones."

"But," I said, "surely you have a little screwdriver?"

The woman looked up my phone number and said, "You have insurance. You could get a new phone."

"Doesn't that still cost $50?" I asked. "Because I know this is New York and $50 may not seem like that much money to you, but it is a lot of money to me and if I can avoid paying it by fixing this phone, I would rather fix this one."

They kept looking at me without expression. "You could try [big chain store selling electronics]," the guy finally said. "I know they sell little screwdrivers."

I ran to the big electronics store, where multiple people informed me they sell nothing like little screwdrivers. I tried a drugstore. Then I went back to the phone store, where I am afraid I was slightly testy because I felt like they had sent me to the chain store just to get rid of me. "They do not sell little screwdrivers at [big chain store selling electronics]." I told the man.

He looked at me blankly. This blankness is a particular talent of customer (dis)service in New York and it is infuriating. Maddening.

Essentially, I had to get a new phone. I was eligible for a free one because my contract was up, so I got a new one. It can be returned within 15 days.

When I got home, I put the old one on the heater. After a day or two, it started working again.

Unfortunately, I love the new phone. I had always hated the old one. It was the cheapest one they had and I bought it at full retail price after the previous phone-in-toilet fiasco. The menus on it were terribly illogical and the display was hideous. I kind of want to keep the new free one.

But as I was walking to school today for (once again) studying and preparing for the insanity of the next week, I started thinking about how disposable things are here. In Liberia last summer, I broke my sandal and instead of throwing it away, I gave it to someone in the office, who took it off somewhere and reappeared an hour later with a fixed sandal. My phone stopped working and I bought a new one, but I gave the old one to a coworker, who got it fixed for $10 and then had a phone. I miss being in a place where people bother to fix things that break.