Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

I’m one of the original girl technogeeks.

I bopped around the Internet back when it was just a small neighborhood, or more accurately a boy’s dormitory.

So put an electronic toy in my hand, and I’m as swift on the uptake as my kids, and that’s saying a lot.

When I save to my cell phone a number that I expect to call again, I want to associate a picture and a ringtone with it, just for fun.

The photos are straightforward. If I meet a man online then I have a picture of him. Then again, this happens less than you might think. I don’t put his picture in my phone until after the first date, and most guys don’t get a second.

However, once we’ve met once or twice, and I go silent on him—I’m just thinking, Mmm, do I want him to take me out again or not?—his phone number and picture and ringtone get stuck in my phone.

Maybe I’ll go out with them again, maybe not. I can scroll down the pictures on my phone like an electronic menu of men and see what the choices are. I send a text message. He calls, and let the games begin.

The most fun by far is assigning ringtones. Each ringtone costs $1, so I have to at least value the man more than that.

When my kids call from home, I hear Paul Simon sing “Home! Home is where I wanna beeeeeeee!”

My ex and I still talk fairly frequently about kid business, which is the way I want to frame our ongoing relationship. We are partners in this child-raising business but not in any other sense.

I’ve assigned him Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business.” This is a huge upgrade for him over the tunes that came out of my phone earlier in our divorce process, the best being Warren Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” which I now think of as my ex’s theme song.

Prior to that the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil” was the tune that introduced the harangue I was sure to get from him if I took the call.

When she called, my divorce lawyer was also announced by a Warren Zevon oldie: “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” which I now understand as a divorce song.

My ex does the same with his phone and reported to me that he’d brought a recent date to a screeching halt when I called and Joe Cocker began to sing “Unchain My Heart.”

He says the woman looked at him icily and told him that needed to be changed.