I hate my cell phone.

It gets hot when I use it too long, and the speakerphone option is not loud enough for me to set it down and still hear the person.

While my mom and sister's identical, newer, slimmer cell phones may get hot, everyone in the room - or car - can hear both sides of the conversation, while on mine, I'm lucky to hear both if I'm called from a cell.

Yesterday, it shut down twice in a twenty minute conversation - important! With a friend of my mom who's married to a dean at the U of M. I finally made the sacrifice and got offline to talk to her from our house phone, which won't die on me.

When I was in Washington, I would keep it charged all night and it would die if I called my mom (since it was a Memphis cell phone calling a Memphis cell phone, it wasn't too expensive).

I keep that thing charging all day and all night, and it still dies on me if I have the gall to use it for more than a few minutes unplugged. Oddly, it doesn't shut down when I'm texting, or trying to.

I've been taking the charger to the Crisis Center with me, since I work at a computer with a mostly empty surge protector, I can let the bastardly thing charge all day.

And then there's texting. I hate hate hate hate hate texting on a phone pad. I always swore I wouldn't text unless I had a traditional QWERTY keyboard.

But I have to, because texts are better than voicemails for my family, and texts can go places that calls can't.

Like into my mom's high school. Her job's babysitting with no fridge privileges, because the student will sleep for hours due to her meds or just do nothing because of the meds and the illnesses.

So she has plenty of time to text me.

And it is the only way to tell her something during the day - we had a doctor send her a fax to the school (the same letter being sent to the U of M to say why I've been home this past year.) and the lady who gets the faxes threw it away, because "We don't have a student named Kaitlyn Monkey Trumpets. Or one named Pennie Monkey Trumpets."

Anyways, I hate texting, but I have to.

We have 'emoticons' to use - they're pretty cool.

And a thing called T9word, where you hit 223 and get the word 'bad'. It has an odd vocabulary - it recognizes Dixie, Becky, and Mikey, but not simpler words - I can't think of any right now, I'm in horrific pain. So sometimes it's harder to use than hitting the key until you get the letter you want.

I hate text messaging.

My mom's a tech dinosaur - she hunt and pecks at the keyboard, while I can type this looking at the computer screen. She's the dinosaur, and she loves texting!

Of course my sister does, she's a normal teenager.


Oh man, I'm in a lot of pain. I don't like this.