Wired existence

Gave up my old phone for a phone-walkman that my partner bought from Singapore. Existence has never been the same. There were those bright, warm days when coming out of the house, and with Sandwich’s Butterfly Carnival playing in my ears, I would have futuristic visions of electronic chips implanted in my brain and blasting out rock n’ roll tunes in my head. The new earphones are so different from the ones we had in high school. The latter went into and hang from your ears like stiff cotton buds.

The new earphones have these soft rubber caps that fit snugly around your ears’ holes and seal them like wax. The result: you can barely hear anything other than those mp3s playing from your phone, and you feel like your whole reality has just been sucked into an extended music video. Prudence would often remind me though that I shouldn’t be always living like this. So I’ve listed down situations that called for a wired existence:
 

• You are late for work again. For the third time, you've chickened out from getting into the train full of people who are all squeezed together like sardines in a can. You need to know when your irate boss will call or send an sms to ask where the hell you are. So you decide right then and there to just relax and meditate on what the Dalai Lama calls your own “insubstantiality”.

• You’ve been asked to finish this big training proposal before the day ends, from rationale and objectives, down to the outputs and possible discussion topics. Your boss volunteers to write the cover letter and the resource persons' profiles. And you feel like banging your head against the concrete wall behind you.

• You’re on the bus. And wallah, they’re playing that old action flick featuring (tantararan) Dolph Lundgren shooting (shouldn’t he be doing all those round kicks instead) at this guy sporting a Pancho Villa moustache who shoots back before scampering away from the scene. Lundgren later kills the guy.