While I’m sure the box concept was more radical when it was built in 1998, I think it’s more relevant now, as our obsession with watching other people live their lives has reached an almost-predatory level. The box is supposed to be the physical embodiment of this obsession, of watching someone live her life. It’s supposed to be voyeuristic. But with the emergence of the Internet, this concept seems dated. And perhaps, in a quaint way, that’s what makes the box even more interesting today than it was in 1998. Maybe in this age of over-sharing, that’s its most unique asset. A voyeur can see some stuff, but not all your stuff. And unlike on Facebook or Instagram or anywhere else on the Internet, I am incapable of over-sharing. If anything, I’m under-sharing. Leaving something to the imagination. Someone can Google far more information about any person on the planet than anyone standing fifteen feet away can find out about me.
True Facts About a Box Girl9
1.I hope that someday my best girlfriends and I outlive our husbands so we can move to Miami and live like The Golden Girls.
2.I have never met a Gemini, a Canadian, or a person from Maryland I don’t like.
3.By some freak chance, I won a free throw contest in the fourth grade by making nine out of ten baskets. My picture was in the local paper. (Small town; it must have been a slow week for rabid raccoon sightings.)
4.I once drove off with the gas nozzle still stuck in my car; ripped the thing right off the pump. There are conflicting theories as to whose fault this actually was. There are three potential suspects: Me because I was driving the car; Rachel because she was pumping the gas; and Heather because she accidentally forgot to pay for her bag of chips inside the gas station. The prevailing theory is that it was Heather’s fault because of karma and all.
5.In college, I once drank an entire bottle of hot sauce for $500. Under no circumstances do I suggest doing this. I wasn’t right for weeks.
6.Heather and I used to have a pet goldfish named Tuna, but not for very long. Apparently we were feeding him too much food because he popped. Literally exploded. There were bits of poor Tuna all over that fishbowl.
7.I have always wanted to know: Who put the cat in the bag?
8.I want to know what the hell ever happened to The Food Pyramid, when I was encouraged to eat six to eleven servings of bread a day.
9.When I was a child, I used to find it wildly amusing when my older brother would pretend he was retarded in public places, and, at say, Toys“R”Us, would throw himself on the ground screaming and flailing around until my mom couldn’t take it anymore and would grab him by the arm and yell, “Get up! Get up, damnit!” and strangers would be like, “Oh what a horrible mother treating her retarded son like that.” He was really good at this.
10.I am sorry if the above offended anyone. Now that I am closer to child-rearing age and have friends with special-needs children, this isn’t that funny anymore. But man, in 1989, this was pee-in-your-pants hilarious.
11.I am terrified of what kids can do on computers these days. I don’t trust anyone under twelve.
12.I have no idea how the Internet works. I would love for someone to explain it to me. Until someone does, I am going to accept “magic” as the explanation.
13.I have no idea how dry cleaning works. I believe that, too, is magical. I don’t care for an explanation.
14.My personal purgatory would be looking for my car in a never-ending parking garage with John Mayer’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland” playing on a loop.
15.I hope heaven is a giant breakfast buffet.
9 I am aware that “true fact” is redundant.
Sometimes I Wish a Blackberry Was Still Just a Fruit
In the pre-Internet age . . . there came a moment when you turned off the TV or the stereo, or put down the book or magazine . . . You stopped doing culture and you withdrew—or advanced—into your solitude. You used the phone. You went for a walk. You went to the corner bar for a drink. You made love . . . You wrote a letter.
—Lee Siegel, Against The Machine
It is important to understand that I am the sort of button-fearing technophobe who, given the choice of figuring out how to use someone else’s remote control or staring at a wall and picking at my fingernails, will invariably go with the latter. Thus, iPhones were my worst nightmare. It’s like an airplane cockpit with all those buttons. One mis-touch and I might prematurely eject the landing gear. When I lamented this to a friend, he said, “Actually, the iPhone doesn’t have any buttons.” Whatever they are—buttons, magical touch-screen non-buttons—I don’t care.
I didn’t want a phone that was smarter than me. I just wanted a simple, relatively portable contraption that would make calls, send texts, and give me my email. For many years, that device was my Blackberry. I loved my Blackberry, so sturdy and dependable. If it were a human, its name would have been Steve. It never dropped calls—not even in elevators or parking garages—and was built like a Sherman tank.
Steve was dropped, stepped on, and drowned on more occasions than I can count. Many times, after it slipped from my grip mid-conversation, I’d watch proudly as it did a double backflip, with a twist, and stuck the landing. Then I’d simply pick it up, brush off the dirt, and continue my conversation.
I’m not sure Steve appreciated the abuse, though. After it landed in my toilet twice in one month, I decided it might be trying to tell me something. While the first time was an accident—it fell from my sweatshirt’s front pocket while I was cleaning the bathroom—the second time was clearly an act of suicide: It vibrated itself right off the ledge.
My relationship with cellular technology was rocky right out of the gates. In college, on one of my first trips to the Verizon store, I managed to get into two car accidents in five minutes. I hit a patch of ice in the parking lot and rammed into the back of a parked truck, and as I pleaded with the mountain man in the truck, a mom in an SUV hit the same patch of ice and slammed into my car’s rear end. Two fender-benders later, I still hadn’t gotten my cell phone taken care of, which had also been the victim of a recent accident. (This one involved being dropped into a Solo cup.) The salesperson at Verizon would only give me a new phone if I promised to keep it in a jazzy black leather case. “You can clip it to your belt” was actually one of the selling points.
The truth is, back then it didn’t really matter if there was an embarrassing leather case holstering my phone because no matter how hard I tried to buy a “cool” cell phone, I always ended up with something huge and blue. Melissa told me one of my phones looked like a giant blue nose. I diligently kept it hidden in my purse and, when its public use was absolutely necessary, buried it under my hair while talking. When someone would say, “Let me put my number in your phone,” I pretended I didn’t have it with me.
“Oh I’ll just jot it down the old-fashioned way on this Dentyne wrapper,” I’d say. Invariably, at that very moment, the blue nose would start ringing, and I would have to reveal it. “What do you know?” I’d say, digging through my purse. “It’s in here!”
During a summer internship in 2003, when my boss asked me to pick up his Blackberry, I thought he was talking about a muffin. How could I have predicted that, ten years later, the word “blackberry” would no longer conjure images of homemade preserves, the term “cell phone” would be considered passé, and technology would have essentially taken over our lives?
In 2006, I wrote a magazine article about a guy who directed movies shot specifically for viewing on a cell phone. I sat there, bulbous blue flip phone with a Nintendo-green screen vibrating in my purse, and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He wasn’t kidding me. The opening paragraph of that article read, “Movies on your cell phone? Really???” I wasn’t trying to be ironic. I honesty could not fathom watching a movie on a phone. “But the screen is so small,” I objected, during the interview. “Why would anyone do that when they have a TV?” I asked.
When I started working in the box in 2007, I had the aforementioned blue flip phone and a Hewlett
Packard laptop, which weighed approximately one hundred pounds. Since then, the evolution of the electronic devices that have joined me in the box is as follows:
Blue flip phone
Hewlett Packard laptop
iPod: giant, white, with the gray, Apple II-E font and the click wheel
White Apple MacBook
Blackberry: all black with the scrolling wheel on the side
iPod Mini: green, still with gray-and-white screen
Blackberry: silver and black, the side scrolling wheel replaced by a center scrolling ball
Kindle: white, second-generation
Silver Apple MacBook Pro
Blackberry: black, with the flat, touch-sensitive scrolling pad
iPod Nano: square-shaped, black, color screen
iPad: black, first-generation, hand-me-down from Peter
iPhone 4
My dad once sent a blast email to the family, announcing, Not to worry everybody; he’d reserved a Gmail address for his grandson, my nephew. He was six months old.
By eighteen months, that same nephew thought a golden retriever named Ace lived inside the computer because he so often Skyped with his other aunt and her dog. By two, he had his own iPad, which was covered in dinosaur stickers. He knew how to swipe to unlock it, select the icon of his favorite game, and play. I watched in awe one Christmas as he stood over his iPad, his fat, alligator arms masterfully swooshing across the screen like a painter over his palette. It was impressive. And intimidating. I did not, at the time, know how to do this.
Sometimes I dream about the days before Facebook and G-chat, before Instagram and iPhones. Before iPads and iEverything. Back when an Apple was still an apple, The Cloud was just a cloud, and Siri was just the misspelled name of Tom Cruise’s daughter. Back before Twitter and Tumblr, and before phone conversations were so taboo. Before texting and not talking & abbrvting everything. Back when OMG and WTF were just someone’s initials. Back when Thursday was not #tbt, and we did not LOL at our own jokes. Back when we were forced to pick up the phone because we didn’t know who was calling.
Sometimes I am nostalgic for the ’90s. Back when I thought “The Internet” and “America Online” were the same thing. Back when I could actually figure out how to operate a remote control—Power, Channel Up/Down, Volume Up/Down. There was still TV on TV, music on MTV, and The Real World was the only reality show in town. Flannels were cool for the first time—worn open, with a T-shirt. Rappers didn’t want to be anybody’s role model, and the only kid in high school who had a cell phone was the kid who sold weed. And even then, it was probably a pager, not a cell phone.
That was back when you had to drive into town to find out what your friends were up to. Back when you never knew who you were going to run into. Back when you were only concerned with living the moment, not documenting yourself living the moment.
It was a time, for me, of heady naiveté and fierce metabolism, when cellulite was something only old ladies had, terrorism was something only in faraway, hard-to-pronounce countries (or Will Smith movies) and the term recession was some abstract concept I learned about in Social Studies class, something that sounded about as likely to someday affect me as The Potato Famine.
After my Blackberry killed itself, I considered not replacing it out of respect. Like when a beloved family dog dies. I also contemplated following in my dad’s contrarian footsteps. He has never owned a cell phone in his life, and this never ceases to impress me. He is a very hard man to get a hold of. People call him at home, and if he’s not at home, then they don’t get to talk to him.
I knew I’d never do it, though, as much as I was dying for one of those old-school answering machines with the mini cassette tapes. (What would my outgoing message be? Would I do the one where I pretend I answer? Maybe sing a song? The options were endless.) I thought about getting another Blackberry, but it was getting kind of embarrassing. Plus, my mom had gotten an iPhone. I’d been leapfrogged. After much agonizing, I finally capitulated: an iPhone it was. Before I left the house, I hugged my waterlogged Blackberry goodbye. “It’s been a good run, Steve,” I said, and threw him in the garbage can.
I took a moment to psych myself up for the dreaded trip to the Apple store. As if Apple stores are not terrifying enough, the only one within miles of my apartment was located on the Third Street Promenade, in Santa Monica, a pedestrian shopping mall teeming with tourists in Tevas and teenagers making out in front of movie theaters. I decided I’d make the trip in the mid-afternoon, while everyone else was at work. What I forgot was that LA doesn’t host a traditional workday. It took me almost an hour to find a parking spot. I wanted to kill myself before I even got into the store.
When I finally got my hands on an iPhone, my fingers fumbled. I just didn’t have that deft, touch-screen touch. It was like André the Giant attempting to needlepoint a purse. Poking bluntly at its lack of buttons, I asked one of the employees if there was an instruction manual. He shuddered a bit. “Oh, it doesn’t have an instruction manual,” he said. “We just encourage people to play around with it to learn.” What a load of crap. My toaster has an instruction manual.
Eventually making my escape, iPhone in hand, the first text came from Peter, forever the Monday morning quarterback: “You know you could have just gone to the Verizon store, right?” I would have liked to write back: “Thanks for telling me after I spent two traumatizing hours in the Apple store.” But all my bumbling little fingers could muster was: “Shit.”
To use a phrase from the ’90s, let’s fast-forward a few days. I’m sitting in the box, cradling my iPhone like a beautiful baby bird, stroking and swiping its angelic little feathers. I coo at it like a newborn baby. “How did I ever live without you, you sleek and brilliant thing?” I whisper to it. “What a wonderful addition to my life in the box you will be.” It’s just so handheld, like my own mini computer! Now I don’t have to be hunched over my laptop to surf the web. All of this stuff, right at my fingertips! No, it’s not quite as easy to navigate as a toaster, but it’s a lot more intuitive than a remote control.
I will forever have a soft spot for the ’90s, remembering envelopes, phones with cords, before infants had email addresses. But I don’t think it’s the absence of technology that draws me to that decade. I think what I really miss is the certainty and the security, even in my naiveté. It was a moment in my personal history when I felt impervious to all things bad. When I could pull the covers over my head and sleep soundly, knowing that we were all going to be safe.
The Big One
The front pane of glass shakes. I knew there would be an earthquake while I was in the box. As with most situations that require me to take some sort of action, I freeze. I have neither fight nor flight: I just stand there, dumfounded, like a kid who just peed in his pants.
I’m going to be buried alive in a pile of concrete and glass while sitting in the box. What a way to go. I can see His Majesty now, manning the pearly gates with a clipboard and a headset, like a bouncer at a nightclub, making his final judgments. “Well,” he’ll say, giving me the old holier-than-thou once-over as only He can do, “Based on that getup, I think we’re gonna have to redirect you downstairs for reassignment—way downstairs.”
I finally look up. I was wrong. It’s not an earthquake at all. It’s the concierge. He’s cleaning the glass with paper towels and Windex. I should point out that he is doing this very aggressively. Does he have any idea how startling that is in here? Is he trying to hurt the glass? This guy’s a little firecracker, bald and compact. He stands at his computer with his legs far apart, like a football coach, or a male cheerleader. Next to his computer is a hot coffee with a straw, and beside that, a pack of Parliament Lights.
Since I took my first steps into California, I have been certain The Big One will come for us at any minute. Because of this, I am constantly hatching disaster preparedness plans. Every building I enter is assessed for structural soundness, and the first thing I do when I walk into a room is survey
the furniture to determine the safest place to hunker down. I always move my water glass away from my laptop whenever I step away from it, for even a minute, and I will never go more than one floor below ground level in a parking garage.
My neurosis about natural disasters no doubt has something to do with my dad, who fancies himself something of a recreational meteorologist. He is fascinated by weather and other terrifying natural phenomena. In college, he used to tell me I needed to drive up to Yellowstone “before she blows.” He would remind me, “It’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when.’” This wasn’t particularly comforting considering I went to school only five hundred miles south of there. “Oh, that wouldn’t matter,” he’d say, and I’d feel momentarily relieved. “If she blows, it would be the end of mankind as we know it.”
I called my parents after I heard an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier was supposed to hit Earth later that day. Not supposed to, but could have. It was closer than any other asteroid since 1976—only two hundred thousand miles away. The “Near Earth Objects Scientist” who was being interviewed on NPR said if it hit land, it would take out all of Los Angeles, and if it hit sea, it would create two-hundred-foot waves. Either way, in the words of our former governor, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
My mom answered the phone as I merged onto the 105 East. “Did you hear about this asteroid that’s supposed to hit earth today?” I asked.
“No! What?” She then shouted, “Bill! Have you heard about this asteroid that’s supposed to hit earth today?”
I waited a moment for her to come back to the receiver. “Your father just smirked and said we’ve got at least another hour.”
Box Girl Page 13