That time I accidentally listened to a sex call.

BY bonnie

This is an entirely true story.

Sunday night on January 16th 1994.

No, really. I remember the night.

See, cause it was going to be the world premiere of the new Smashing Pumpkins video, “Disarm,” on 120 minutes that night so we were staying up. And I know the specific date because I woke up a few hours after falling asleep thinking a cat had jumped on the bed, but it had actually been the Northridge Earthquake. (This is life in California where you mistake earthquakes for cats sometimes.) (This is because I am several hours away from Northridge. I am fairly certain the people living in that area were able to tell the difference.) (But since the vast, vast majority of earthquakes are small ones, I really do often think it’s just a cat or a really big truck outside.)

But the point is that it was the 1990’s and I had not yet developed phone phobia (although answering machines gave me panic attacks) and so I was on the phone ALL THE TIME ALWAYS. And I had a cordless phone very similar to the one pictured above. It had different “channels” so that if you got a bad connection you could try a different channel and hopefully it would be clearer. And it might be. If you were within 6 feet of the base. Life was hard in the 90’s okay?

Occasionally, when I’d change the channel I’d accidentally switch to a neighbor’s channel and hear their conversation. 90% of the time that this happened to me, it was to a Spanish conversation which I could not understand.

Except this one time.

120 Minutes was one of the few worthwhile things on MTV at the time. There was also Daria and… No, those might have been the two. I think VH1 was arguably cooler than MTV even as early as 1994. And this particular night was an important 120 Minutes and because it was the Sunday night before a school holiday, I was allowed to actually stay up to watch it and not set the VCR to record it onto a tape. I mean. I totally ALSO recorded it. But staying up not only allowed me to watch it live, but also to press pause during commercials and therefore optimize my recorded copy.

So Kathy and I chatted all night. We usually told each other stories about how we’d meet Natalie Merchant (me) or Morrissey (her) after a concert some night and become besties. Somewhere around 10pm my phone started to go fuzzy so I told Kathy to hang on and I’d see if I could change the channel and get a clearer connection. Only when I changed the channel, instead of Kathy, I heard, “Press 1 if you want to talk to a sexy girl.” And because I was 15 and extremely innocent and naive I definitely did NOT want to hear someone talking to a sexy girl and this is where this story becomes anti-climactic and I am very sorry for that. However, if you followed my cordless phone drama on Facebook while I was writing this post I hope this will help ease the lack of resolution here. This is almost exactly the phone in question:

I found this image in a Google Search and it originally came from an Etsy item that’s already sold so I can’t link to the source. If you own the picture and want me to link it (or remove it!), just let me know and I happily will!

And these, my friends, are the things that I remember instead of what my kids’ first words were.

Edumacation, Geek, The Zebra

Where I say the word “literary” too many times in one paragraph.

BY bonnie

I sometimes get frustrated with my daughter when I recommend a book to her knowing she’ll like it, but she brushes me off or otherwise ignores the suggestion. Have I mentioned my daughter is an ornery Taurus?

But then, if I’m being honest, I have to admit she gets this trait from me (and I’m not even a Taurus). It took me at least 25 years to finally read Anne of Green Gables even though I knew I’d love it. Instead I reread The Ghost at Dawn’s House 647 times.

The interesting thing about the internet is the impressive nerd community. We are in our element here. We can connect with other nerds and correct the grammar of non-nerds while bonding over our intense and sometimes life-destroying love of fictional characters. This is accomplished via various means such as Tumblr, or image posts on Facebook, or Tumblr posts made into image posts and then posted on Facebook. It was through these that I gradually became aware of the fact that normal people, apparently, don’t get overly attached to fictional characters. I assume this must be true based on these posts themselves loudly proclaiming they’re sorry-not-sorry about loving fictional characters. In my personal life most of the people I know have just been like, “Oh you have a crush on Ford Prefect? What? That’s normal.” But I assume that if an entire community online has to support each other in this sense, then we must be alone in this trait.

And so I started examining why I sometimes avoid reading new books and it finally hit me: I have enough fictional friends already. My heart can’t always take the vulnerability of meeting new people who might get hurt and will, at the very least, definitely leave me by the end of the book. And I know I can always reread the book, but that is a different experience which is wonderful in its own way. In any case, that is sort of the point, isn’t it? That I keep rereading the old ones rather than new ones. This isn’t to say I’ve been reading the same six books my whole life – I do read new ones, quite often even. This is just the reason that I find myself magnetically repelled from books I know I’ll love.

When I was in high school (during the 90’s when everyone was a shitty beat poet in Doc Martens and thrift store flannels) my favorite English teacher sort of crushed my soul a little by declaring that you can tell a literary person because they are always in the middle of a bunch of books at once. But I never was. I’m extremely monogamous with books. I think it’s due to my attention issues. And maybe loyalty. I can’t cheat on a book, you know. So I assumed I must not be literary and my occasional hesitancy to avoid good literature reinforced that opinion. Now that I’m an adult I know better (although my inner self needs constant reminders). Literary people can read however the fuck many books they want at once. And the reason I avoid new books sometimes is, I think, an incredibly literary reason. After all, who else by shitty beat poets in Doc Martens and thrift store flannels becomes so attached to fictional characters that they literally cry at the words “the end”?

I mean. Except I don’t write shitty poetry anymore. I mean my inner 90’s grunge hipster teen. And yours, too. You know you have one.