I'm not going to tell you the make or model

I love my phone. When it dies, I will absolutely by the same brand, if not the same exact model. There are things wrong with it. Certainly, its not perfect, but for the price and my needs... I love my phone. The best thing about this bad boy is the slot for an 8 gb memory card. I have hundreds of songs, thousands of 2mp photos. I record movies of my adorable kids and kittens. Not so much the dog, because she is more a pain in the ass than cute, but you get the idea. I love my phone. And say what you will about pay as you go plans... I know exactly where every cent of my $30 - $50 a month goes. I never see a lame ass connectivity charge or some uninterpretable bill not even a professor in Sanskrit can translate.

One neato little feature on my lovely phone is the voice recorder. I know most phones come with one these days and lots of smart phones have some memory, but like I said before, for the price and my needs...

Now, if you know me, you know that I am song writer by hobby. If you don't know me, hey, I'm a song writer by hobby! I only grew the balls to do this about 2 years ago. Singing has been a part of me since I was wee. I grew up with my mothers motown and my sisters weird 80s pop and my dad's Wagner. (I'm imagining Devo in shiny suits and Viking helmets right now.) When in gradeschool, I tried keyboard, took 5 guitar lessons, mastered The First Noel on recorder, but nothing stuck.

I'll tell you something right now and save an intense revelatory moment for something I haven't discovered about myself yet. I'm terrified of failure. Terrified to the point that I won't try anything new until I am reasonably sure I'll reasonably succeed. It's a fear that has left me out of a lot of activities I might have enjoyed, really hindered my adolescent development, contributed to self medication of varying degrees and subsequent poor choices.

Gosh, you know this is a lot heavier than I anticipated! I only wanted to talk about my kick booty phone!

Anyhoosey, my phone rocks. Long story longer, as I get over my irrational fears and insecurities, I am taking hold of that musical part of me and learning guitar. I shuffle that together with a boat load of maudlin poetry and TA DA, I have a song. Isn't that grand?

I have days where I do nothing in the way of music, don't touch a pen or guitar. And then there are days where ideas and lyrics and melodies and bass lines and harmonies and hooks just ooze out of me. And, good grief, that is why I love, love, love my phone and its neato little voice recorder and the 8 gb of memory. I have hundreds of recordings and snippets; songs recorded 12 different ways, 40 different versions of 1 single idea.

Now, the suck thing about it is that unless I am diligent, the files save out as "Recording 1", "Recording 2" "Recording 857", and so, when I have time, I sit down and listen to each one and rename them. That is what I was just doing a moment ago. It's tedious, but a fascinating little demonstration of the evolution of a song and my guitar playing ability. (Thank god my guitar from February 5th, 2010 is better than that of June 5th, 2009, (THANK GOD!)) So I do this, I enjoy it, I rename the files, I make new ones. And as I listen to the struggle, I wish I had talent like Carol King and Cole Porter, and Stevie Wonder. Though, come to think of it, they're probably wishing they had my phone.