inseperable

five kilometers away from the house, i realized that i had left my phone at home. i was 16 kilometers away from ortigas, with 45 minutes to spare. i wasn't sure i could turn back, grab my phones, and make it to my lecture at 9am. so, it was decided for me: i was going to have to spend an entire day without a cellphone.

remember the time when people could actually live without phones? that summer between high school and college, my friends and i watched a movie almost every week. at the morning of each designated movie day, someone would call the others on their landlines, inform them of the meeting time, place, and the movie to be watched and we'd all be there, arriving within minutes of each other. i remember no one would dare be more than a few minutes late -- after all, if everyone left the meeting place before you arrived, you'd be stuck in greenbelt with no friends.

now, plans are hardly made, schedules hardly followed, and punctuality is virtually dead. at the very most, you'd tentatively set a meeting place and time, and end the planning with the all-too-familiar line "text-text". if you're running late, you send a text message. if you're thinking of cancelling plans, you send a text message. if you'd rather change the meeting place, you send a text message. nothing is final, nothing is definite.

as i sulked in my phone-less glory the entire day, it crossed my mind that me being without a phone would have been truly tragic if it happened last week -- how would i be able to meet up with che, who i was going to pass by for in shang, and ann, who would be waiting somewhere at the fort for me? i remember something like this happening in the past -- i was supposed to meet someone at mall of asia (yes, the biggest mall in asia!!!) and my phone had died. i challenged my inner resourcefulness and went to the administration office to have my friend paged. she wasn't all too happy hearing her name over the PA system, but as i explained when we finally met, would she have rather searched for me around MOA?

still, even with all the comforts being armed with a cellphone brings, i realized that to a certain extent, being phone-less wasn't, or wouldn't, be that insufferable. rather than rushing home after the lecture, i made a pit stop at sm sucat where i finally bought a replacement dvd player (which i should've done rather than buying that horribly expensive dvd lens cleaner which didn't exactly work :( boo!), a digital weighing scale (to, of course, aid me in my year-long quest to lose all that weight), an optical mouse (which i am okay using my laptop without a mouse, i knew i was going to spend an inordinate amount of time this weekend getting re-acquainted with PvZ, and we all know a mouse is necessary in the endeavor), and a mouse pad (shempre kailangan kumpleto, haha.) i also loaded by sun broadband prepaid wireless (which, for some reason, is working really well these days, good job!). i lingered and dawdled at the mall, checking out booksale, carefully weighing my dvd options, and avoiding all those places i promised not to visit for the meantime (translation: dessert places and clothing stores). by the time i was done, i had spent almost three hours at the mall, and while i wanted to go home already, it was because i wanted to try out the stuff i had gotten more than to check my phones.

of course, irony of ironies -- one phone had two text messages from meralco while the other phone had an info text from globe and a generic text message from the intercessory prayer team of lingkod alabang. clearly, no one missed me as much as i thought they would.