i've gotten a new phone. i finally decided to just do it, to just give in to my materialstic whims and fancies. i'd like to be the sort of person that hangs on to her nokia 8250 for all it's worth. but i'm not that person so i'm facing up to it. it hurts a little to know this phone cost 2/3rds of my cedele pay for last month though. ugh.

i feel a little sad now, because i realize i didn't backup the data in my phone like i thought. a hundred over contacts were erased because the sim card can't store all the contacts i have. and because i traded in, all the information i could keep was economically kept in the sim card. which really wasn't much.

i switched on my new phone to find 3 messages stored. they read:

from stephen: one of those cheesy bear thingos made of symbols and then 'a cute little bear 4 u. happy birthday'
from sw: hey happy birthday mel! you're seventeen now, and it's time to rock nj! have a great birthday on sunday k
from carol: Happy birthday mel! you're 17! Live and love lots!

you may ask why i have messages from close to two years ago. the answer is: i'm lazy and i'm also a sentimental fool. because as it is, i don't read these messages anymore, it's just nice to know they're in there somewhere. you only start missing them when you know they used to be there, i guess. none of yours were saved. but what's the point, anyway? why are we always collecting things.

i could continue expounding on this but i'm being ill-disciplined as usual. i wish i could force myself to write but i'm not in the mood to and writing about the phone so often is pathetic because it's so self-indulgent and proves how integral the phone is in my life. it's terrible, really. i'm pretty annoyed with myself because i've lost a whole bunch of important contacts i made this year, but i guess if we're meant to keep in touch i'll end up with their numbers again somehow. for now i'll just lay this to rest by thinking of the cyberspace graveyard all these messages and contacts end up in, for various reasons. and it's really quite beautiful in a tech-geek sort of way. i imagine numbers floating about, 'i love you's that started to ring false and 'goodbye's that were too painful to keep and all the easier to delete.

delete, delete, delete. i think it's a function we've been blessed with to ease our subconsciousness. i used to think if i deleted certain people's numbers and messages i wouldn't have to think about them anymore or bother with things anymore.

i've got to learn not to be so sentimental about things and not to take daily technology so seriously. i mean, it's just a phone. in a way i'm glad motorola has little memory space, it will force me to not centre my life, relationships and emotions around my phone and the messages received.

i reckon that's why we like messages so much - they're like birthday cards at our fingertips that we can read anytime, anywhere when we feel we need a little something to get us through a crap day.

anyway, while walking around today we met ms ma, our sc lit teacher. it was really nice seeing her again. i have to say she's one of the people i've met who's had a lot of influence in my decision to study lit and also helped me to realize how i felt about words and books and everything. for some reason she thought i was going to study business and that really irked me. i don't know why i get so annoyed when people assume i'm going to study something i'm not. actually i don't mind other people making assumptions, but her of all people, who knew me as a lit student at heart when she taught me. i suppose she recognizes that things might have changed ... and i think i'm more or less someone who's stuck to the same 'interests' (interests sounds so flippant) after many years, with many people i'd never expect taking law, medicine or business now (celene for one. who knew.). i take things too personally. tomorrow's her last day teaching at sc and in her own words, 'i need a break' (meaning 'i'm sick of it'). she's starting as a business development person (or something, i can't remember the term exactly) at Temasek Holdings. she made us all take down her new number, and it was nice. i didn't really have a relationship with my nj teachers, and i think that's kind of sad. it's not like we'll all ever really text her or call her the very next day, but it's nice that we can keep in touch if we choose to one day talk to her again.

she talked about the new batch of sc girls leaving for their uk trip tomorrow and how this time they're watching Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus. and from the way she talked about it (i was excited too - julius caesar! we never got to do that), it was like we were back in the classrooms and we were reading julius caesar. to her, shakespeare wasn't just a text that she had to teach - it was literature, it was art, it was beauty, it was life. i loved that about her. and i remembered when i started loving shakespeare.

+ posted by M @ 11:31 PM