glossolalia black

T-Mobile phones are known to commit suicide. Mine did about a year ago, my husband's did just last night. "It makes a slick looking paperweight!" he quipped, knowing that his ability to contact work and myself was just severed.

We aren't all that rich right now. We had to go to the county for assistance with rent this year, a first for us, and a long time since the last time for me.

Communication is a human right, yet the technology to do it efficiently lies in the hands of corporations rich enough to put satellites into space. It's a bummer, but even though Misha's got a free upgrade coming, it'll be to a phone so new that it has to change both of our plans, which will bite into us for the cost of upgrading both our phones and signing on to a plan that incorporates the new features of our twin Sidekicks.

Yet, we're struggling to make the rent.

It is a common idea that when you buy into a plan, you're retaining your citizenship, and that you will be treated accordingly. But you are only a consumer, a customer in relation to the empire that provides you with instantaneous communication with your very important loved ones.

Yet, communication is a human right. Access to communication is a human right. Yet it costs money to put them satellites into space, to maintain the network, to make the cute advertisements, to crunch the numbers and make the big lumbering corporations move across the landscape like giants of yore.

We're gonna be okay with rent, hopefully, if both of us can maintain our health and good fortune.

I am fortunate that I don't live in a society that would have my skin cut in order to have the right to call myself an adult, or a grown woman. I am glad that I live in air conditioning, I am thankful for western medicine, clean water, and the right to bitch.

But this phone shit is amazingly complex, more than it needs to be.

(His phone was a piece of shit, anyway.)