Saying Goodbye to SIM...

I admit it - I don't like technology. I want to toss my cell phone into a lake, just to watch it sink. But I'm realizing it's hopeless, this quest for digital isolation, and so today I sucked it up and opened the box containing my new cell phone.

I've had the same cell phone since high school. It was my first - I chose it myself, against the advice of most everyone I knew. It was tiny and bronze, long before tiny and bronze were popular. It didn't take pictures (hell, it barely did text messaging!) and that's how I liked it. Maybe it wasn't fancy, but it was cute. It fit in my pocket, it stuck by me despite being dropped, lost and once, forgotten in a strange Puerto Rican restaurant. It went everywhere with me. If that SIM card could talk, it would tell stories that would leave your hair standing on end.

So of course, I felt nostalgic letting go. I wouldn't have been able to do it, I wouldn't even have wanted to do it, but my old service provider has terrible coverage in NYC. It was necessity that drove me into the arms of Sprint, I swear!

But the most difficult part wasn't switching my phone number from one to the other. Sure, I felt like a traitor when the first time I thought, Hey, this keypad really is more comfortable than the one I had before or At last! I can send text messages directly through my address book! The most difficult part was transferring my list of contacts.

I subscribe to a web service that makes this process easy - at least physically. But I had more contacts than I had time on my hands or energy in my fingers, and besides, there were people in there I didn't even know, or had only talked to once or twice. Who was going to go?

I set myself an arbitrary limit: if I could see myself needing to talk to them again, they were in. And so I put in my roommates, my sister, my parents, my relatives. I tossed in my professional contacts – references and bosses from the past. But the moment I started on friends, the process got gnarly.

There are those people I talk to regularly. Some of them I love, and will keep on loving, at least in the near future. And then there are the others. The for-the-sake-of-old-times friends. One time at the beach we licked whipped cream off each other. And took pictures of it. We told dirty jokes in the back of history class. We hiked the Appalachian Trail in the rain and slept together at the ‘Milford Pla.’ And I love many of them. But there are others I can't bring myself to tell the truth to: that the love died long ago, and now it's just habit and history that are keeping us going. (Some people might argue, of course, that habit and history are love, especially as you get older. This kind of thinking makes me sad.) The point is, what do I do? I’m at this crossroads, because I know that at some point, we have to break up, but if we break up, what do I have? Maybe they can stay in my phone book just a little bit longer...

And what about the almost-friends? We'd really wanted to hang out, really really wanted to, but somehow we'd just been too busy. Or maybe we had hung out, once or twice, just not often enough to get really close. And now, looking at their numbers, I think, it can't hurt to leave them in a little longer! Who knows, next quarter might be the quarter!

And then there were those people, the never-friends. We didn't hang out. We never will. But something about them – personality, charm, ambition, good looks – makes me want them. Maybe I got their phone numbers through some shady exchange. Perhaps we worked together, or were in the same study group. I can leave them in my phone book, right? That's not strange, or creepy?

And what about the useful friends? The girl with the ID that looks just like me, or the really nice apartment, or the attractive older brother? Let's be honest – this isn't what a real friendship is made of! But it's so hard to let them go. Who knows when I might need an emergency drink/party/date? It might be wise to keep them around...

In the old days, before contact lists, you kept phone numbers written down. And because you needed to take your physical phone book everywhere, and because it could get heavy, you were constantly in the process of prioritizing. Tossing people out, adding people in. You had to. There was no other way to keep your phone book from taking over your purse.

And most of us – myself included – eschewed the heavy phone book in favor of memorization. That's right – there was room for no more than 20 numbers in my head. The people I called most often. I was my own traveling address book and phone list. It was heaven!

They say that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. Nowadays, I suspect, it's not your life at all, but every contact list you ever made. A parade of digital grotesques. It's all there – your personal history of pride, lust, ambition, success, unrequited love and misery. The people you called, the people you called but didn't want to, the people you wanted to call but never got around to, the people you wanted to call but never had the balls to, the people you forgot to call, the people you wish had called you.

In the end, I chucked everyone I absolutely didn't recognize and left all the others in. It's just too complicated. It raises questions about what I really want in life, and that's always awkward. It's strange that I can't do the same thing twice, but for some reason, I still can't stand variety.