Last week I was telling my boss about someone I worked with years ago who I just couldn’t seem to figure out. We did great when we were on our own but when we had to work together it was always a big mess.
I described it like this, “We’d get together and it was like a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich. Great on our own, but terrible together.” We both laughed at that image and kept laughing over who would be the mayonnaise and who would be the relish on our current team.
A little part of me was laughing even harder on the inside because while my boss thought I was a brilliant improviser, the real reason I had the PB&T image in mind was that I had looked at a note with that phrase on it the night before. For the last month, I’ve been gathering all the notebooks and scraps of paper I’ve written notes on for the last 15 years and transcribed each thought onto separate notes so I could catalog the ideas and find them later.
So far, I’m up to 800 notes and counting. The stack of 4×6 cards is almost 7” high. If my ridiculously complex alphanumeric bottom-up relational organizational index system works out I’ll have instant access to every joke, pun, story idea, and inappropriate thought I’ve had since 2010. Crazy to not use a digital system to keep track of all this? Crazy like a carnivora canidae I say.
Six months ago, after another sleepless night thanks to the siren glow of my smartphone, I ordered a flip phone. Not only was I spending too much time on Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/Etsy/eBay/Amazon/Craigslist/OfferUp/TypewriterClubLive/FountainPens4Sale/HowToGetRidOfMoles.com, but even worse was that I wasn’t spending any time writing new stories. Unacceptable!
So I hid the iPhone, got a flip phone, and went back in time to 1995 when you were doing great if you had a pager and a Palm Pilot. And you know what? The first morning I woke up without a smartphone on the nightstand, I rolled over and found 31 notes I’d written on little slips of paper in the middle of the night. Thirty-one new ideas to think on and write about!
I couldn’t wait to tell everyone. I’d just solved not only my sleep problem but also the world’s attention deficit crisis. Chances were good my face would be on the next quarter. “I am the Jonas Salk of the 21st century! I’ve cured polio of the mind!”
Turns out not everyone was thrilled with my new lifestyle. In fact, no one was thrilled about it. Not a single person. My girlfriend was upset that she couldn’t text cute Boston Terrier Instagram stories to me anymore. Some people were put out by having to email me links instead of texting them. Others were embarrassed to be seen with me text-yelling into my phone (only elves and fairies have small enough fingers to use a flip phone keypad). My girlfriend’s daughter said, “I’d like to send this funny photo to your phone but then I remembered you don’t have one.” Brutal!
But I stuck with it. Maybe because I knew it was helping. Or maybe because I wanted to show everyone that I was right and they were oh so very wrong.
I kept the iPhone for when I needed to answer emails and look things up, but most days I left the house without it. Slowly, friends stopped telling me to end the joke and get back under the digital yoke of despair. My son got used to me emailing him links instead of texting him. Marni the Girlfriend stopped rolling her eyes when I’d ask her to Google the “average airspeed of an unladen swallow.”*
There were definitely times when I wondered if I could go back to a smartphone and just not fall into the scroll hole. Every few weeks I’d take the iPhone to bed with me to “do some research” and end up spending three hours on Reddit reading the “How can I stop my Boston Terrier from farting in bed” thread. The next day I’d wake up after fours of bad sleep, and go back to Flippy the Monk Phone**.
I was still on the fence about Flippy and The LIfe Analogue until our show last week. If you’ve ever been to the show, you know that in between tellers, I spend a 15-30 seconds or so talking about the story we just heard, and then bring up the next teller. Last week, when I talked about how much each story moved me, I remembered three notes that I’d written years ago and managed to connect each one to a story I’d just heard. If those notes had been on a screen in a cloud somewhere I never would have remembered them. But since they were on index cards that I’d been flipping through that week just for fun, I did remember them. And I got to say something sweet and meaningful about some stories that deserved to be acknowledged that way.
So I’m sticking with Flippy. I’m on the internet eight hours a day at work and streaming movies and whatnot in the evening, but not being able to jump online when I’m bored for two seconds has been good for me. Having to crank up the laptop or pull my creaky old tablet out of my bag to get online is just inconvenient enough to make me think twice. I’ll let you know in a few months if this mindful life of exasperation has led to more stories.
And that’s the kind of story we’re looking for this month. Come tell a story about a time when your life changed directions. Was it a big change like applying to NASA after majoring in poetry at Vassar? Was it a small change like taking the bus to work instead of driving and making a bunch of new friends? Maybe it was just a change in how you see yourself. I can imagine a great story about a time when you went from fearful to confident and never looked back. Whatever it is, we’d love to hear it.
Whatever story you tell, remember to practice it out loud on as many people as possible and time yourself when you’re doing it. Please don’t get onstage if you haven’t practiced your story. The audience is giving you their time and attention. It’s not fair to them if you get up there and try to wing it.
All stories have to be under 8 minutes. Stories can be as short as you want but not over 8 minutes. Stories also have to be clean in both language and content. Send me an email if you have any questions about that.
The rest of the rules and guidelines are below:
We have a free monthly online workshop that’s a great place to get feedback on your story.
I’m also happy to help anyone with a story they’re working on. Send me an email and we can set up a phone call.
Last week, I gave a small notebook and pencil to someone at the show who was struggling to come up with a story for next month. I’m going to keep doing that. From now on, I’m going to give a small notebook and a pencil that says, “Write more, scroll less” to the first person in the audience who raises their hand. No need to ditch your smartphone. It’s just something to help you keep track of all the great ideas you have during the day when you don’t want to open your notes app to write them down.
See you on Thursday, February 20, at 7 pm, at the Chabad of Queen Anne – Magnolia. 1825 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109 (Remember, no non-kosher food in the building)
Paul
Freshgroundstories at gmail dot com
* https://www.sleke.io/faq I stole the line about the swallow from this site, where I just ordered a new phone that lets me access email and a few other communication apps.
** https://sunbeamwireless.com/ This is the phone I’m currently using
**** This no-smartphone thing is definitely a struggle. I don’t want anyone to think I’m telling everyone to do this. I’m doing it out of desperation and with the full knowledge that certain things, like parking in Seattle without an app, are a nightmare. I have to bring the iPhone with me every time I drive into the city. I also have to bring it with me on show nights because I need to see messages people send me through Meetup.
**** Since it is a pain in the tuches to not be able to access links, I’m getting a different phone in March that will automatically forward texts with links in them to my email. So send all the IG puppy videos you want. I’ll just see them when I get home 🙂
***** https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/587 In case anyone didn’t grow up with their mom dropping the occasional Yiddish word into a conversation
Fresh Ground Stories 