Sexting the Cherry

By Maria Padhila

Communication technology, too often my lifeline and love connection, has not been my friend recently. I guess that’s the instant karmic payback for making anything material a lifeline. But is there anything like that zap vibration of an incoming text from a loved one, especially if you keep your phone in your pocket?

I lost my phone, most likely in a cab, after a party a few days before Halloween. It wasn’t even that much of a party. It was an artists’ party in an unused, cement-dust strewn and carpet-glue-reeking office space, and there was one really good artist there and probably some more interesting mayhem around, but it was hard to get into things.

Our daughter was at a friend’s house, and I’d put together a dinner at Isaac and my place for both the guys, and it was one of the nights of that freak snowfall, and all we really wanted to do was stay home and lie around, but we’d bought tickets, so… and there was the other issue of who gets to lie around with whom, which could have disturbed the general good vibe of the evening, so… off we went. Since the snow had stopped, we walked on the way there, and there were some funny moments with our costumes that started getting me into the flirt/play/Situationist mindfuck mode (that I find most often at Burner events).

There were some people I was happy to see there, but I just felt kind of blah. And after about an hour there, I went into the bathroom, and it was full of drunken young women, staggering and even puking. I was frankly worried about them — but it wasn’t the kind of context where I could help strangers. Dull, disturbing, depressing, cold. All in all I’d have rather been in a tent at Occupy.

And I found myself checking my phone. Until after the cab ride home. When I couldn’t check it anymore.

In the 13 days that followed, our home internet and cable and phone lines went out for two days, my work email went down for four days, other email addresses flaked, email and phone messages went undelivered, and the internet went down at various friends’ and acquaintances’ homes and workplaces.

I also can’t get to the email where I ask people to send me ideas and stories, and I was trying to get some info on dealing with poly and the holidays. So if you have a story — about the holidays, or anything relating to polyamory — you can now send it to polyamorystories [at] gmail.com. Thanks for your help. I hope this one will work.

There have been solar flares, after all. And I’m having a Saturn square.

Are we reaching the point where you start to wonder what this has to do with relationships and polyamory yet? Please hold the line — I’ll get there, I promise.

The first phone-free day I made it OK. The second was too busy to worry — but in racing between work and children’s Halloween festivities, I couldn’t call anyone or let them know I was running late, did I need to pick up this or that, etc. The real telling moment came later.

We were hanging out at a friend’s house while the kids sorted the candy, talking to a couple we’d just met who happened to have kids in common with someone else’s kids. Conversation was labored, but I can usually get things moving. And then the guy reached for his phone.

You can do that in the DC area, probably other places too. People’s jobs really are that important, and really do go 24/7, sometimes. I don’t begrudge anyone choosing an internet scan over talking to me. If I’m not interesting to you, go for it, baby. Life is too short for me to force you to make small talk.

But for myself, I’d find it character building to avoid hiding in my phone. I even did a spell to try to separate myself from this behavior, at the summer solstice. I want not to be a shy and skittish person. There’s the off chance that I might run into someone exciting, someone even who will piss me off, and there’s always a poem in either alternative.

The trouble to me is that it doesn’t take a dull night to make me look at my phone. The least little bit of discomfort, and I whip it out. It’s worse than a cigarette. I’ve pulled it out while in bed (just chilling, not in medias res) with either of my loves. We know it’s addictive; we make jokes about CrackBook and CrackBerry. When I’m weakened by boredom, overwork, lack of sleep (which is most of the time), I can be like a lab rat hitting the bar for another bump, pushing until his paws are bloody.

And yet… and yet.

On my poly email lists and discussion groups, people talk about the beauty of getting a text from one love while with another. How good it is to know that, even when one you love is with someone else they love, they’re still thinking of you, that it’s magnifying the good feelings, that they care whether you’re doing OK with them away. Most people say they text or email all loved ones about once a day, and take care to do it equally. One man, when his love was traveling and didn’t have access to email, wrote anyway, and put a book together to give her when she got back.

Skype, texts and emails are a boon to those in long-distance relationships — one thing Devon, whom I wrote about a few weeks back, told me is that she and her love occasionally fell asleep with the cameras on, so it was as if they were sleeping next to each other. This to me sounds beautiful and romantic.

I like to use my blogs and status updates and such to send not just the apparent message, but secret messages only some people will understand, to create layers of hidden meanings, just as I do in my poems. Writing for me is an artifice of seduction, one we’re given to have fun with, like costumes or toys or scenarios. Without giving away the game too much, I wonder: Is communication my fetish?
I know you could do all this without the technology, but you wouldn’t have the instantaneous quality. There’s also the aspect of visual communication enabled with the phones and computers.

Isaac and I, being primarily verbal creatures, mostly wisecrack around with words in texts. I am one of the clumsiest texters around, and regularly damn autocorrect. But occasionally he’ll send a photo — of a pair of shoes he particularly likes, for instance — and he often sends links to interesting or funny news or columns. Chris is a very good photographer and sends me several photos a day. I’m a terrible photographer, and I love getting them.

Of course, the sine qua non of modern romance is the personal nekkid cell phone shot, though the members of my personal V are rarely so bold. Members of Congress appear to have no such reservations. I’m hoping that the smart, liberal and hung Anthony Weiner makes a comeback; his healthcare and women’s reproductive rights support are way more important to me than his romantic life.

But the best texting scandal so far has to be Scarlett Johansson. First, the photos are beautiful. But when they were hacked and posted for all to see, she showed no shame (and had no reason to), but simply went after the person who had invaded her account (which we all have good reason to do). Isaac and I were talking about it the other evening while our daughter was doing her homework. She piped up, with that unerring instinct to find out what is hushed and forbidden: “I want to see the pictures!”

“They’re for grownups, and you need to be doing your homework now,” I said.

“But I saw a naked lady at the art exhibit the other night!”

“I know, naked people show up in art all the time. But these were supposed to be private photos, not made for art, so they’re not for you to see.”

“I just want to see what they look like,” she insisted.

“They look like mommy,” Isaac said, thereby earning eternal love.

I can’t really get into the expectations of privacy here — in short, don’t have any. Government groups clumsily attempt to spy on all kinds of their own people, and have from the time someone climbed a tree to check out the tribe over the hill and realized they could see what was going on in the women’s hut, too. What we have now is a network of surveillance whose precision and breadth is unequaled, and it’s being used to aim drones at whomever someone who pushes the buttons has decided to get rid of. It could just as easily be aimed at any group in particular, any house, any person right next door, or right at you.

But it’s still clumsy. Look at the drivers. They’re always three curves behind. Check out the saggy-pants, curved-spine office drones being shot out of the Pentagon Metro station daily and you’ll lose your fear of the government. Some civil servants are just like my loved ones, indeed. Evil geniuses are pretty few, and I fear the mob over the mastermind. Conspiracies come crashing down on the back of a silly drunk or a man with a crush on a stripper.

If you’re a very smart and brave person, maybe you can figure out how to disable the surveillance. If you’re part of a movement, maybe you can, too. But the easiest thing to do is to detach yourself from its power.

For myself, I find it more useful to try to either confuse the fuck out of it, or turn it against itself. That’s why the Occupy camps have live streaming and a half-dozen people walking around holding up iPhones, their hands raised as if waiting to be called on, or as if they’re testing which way the wind blows. It’s a cliché that holds truth that the Arab Spring would have been impossible without Twitter.

Two — no, three — of the communities that mean the most to me — Pagans, polys, and Burners — would not be able to have grown and functioned without the rise in the Internet and communication technology. We can now meet each other. I feel it’s the same for the LGTB communities. Even if you’re out in East Boonies, you know you can talk to someone, meet someone, get resources, hear the news.

And I envision a spiderweb of messages from people sharing love letters, photos, bits of video and music, composing, collaborating, having cybersex, playing, pondering, researching. I see filaments of love and the desire to ‘only connect’ playing over the globe, countering the spying web and sapping its power. Even if it’s small yet, it can be a homeopathic remedy.

As in many activities, awareness makes the difference.

Isaac got me a new phone, a used phone, one that is a few models behind. I’m happy to have it, because the issues with landfills and conflict minerals were bothering me. This feels a little bit better. I’m aiming to detach myself from its power. One of the first things I watched was the Pop Quiz on Israel posted on Planet Waves, which depressed the hell out of me. Sorry.

I changed the text and mail alert tones on my new phone to something ominous: Noir, one is called, and Suspense, the other, which sounds like a sample from a Hitchcock/Hermann collaboration. I think I’m reaching for the instant gratification a little more often. If nothing else, the change has made me more aware of how often I go to the tech default, and keeps the potential dangers in my mind.