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Jan 11, 2007

I have this recurring daydream that I will lose all my
memory and will have to use my cell phone to figure
out who I am. And I try to imagine what people in my
cell phone would say if I called them and asked them
who I was. I've been thinking about this a lot.
Maybe it will become a play.

I recently put in my parent's phone number into my new
phone under "mom and dad" even though the number has
remained unchanged for all my life and there is no
sane reason for me to have that number programmed into
my phone. I'd like to think that when I get amnesia I
will call them first. Of course they won't be home
and I wouldn't know to call K. I may change her
number in my phone to say girlfriend. If you had
amnesia, would you dial the number programmed into
your phone as significant other or would you assume
it's a business or something?

what is your recurring daydream/fear?

5 comments:

parabasis said...

adam,

i think that's a pretty great idea of a play. The interplay of identity and technology is (in my mind) too frequently ceded to film. I think Ruhl plans a similar exploration in her upcoming play DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE at Wooley Mammoth this summer.

My recurring daydream is horrible-- what I would say giving the eulogy of X loved one, usually my dad.

Adam Szymkowicz said...

Mine would be like that and like fuddy meers too. I might write it anyway.

Malachy Walsh said...

It was the basic premise of an ad campaign I shot over a year ago - "It's your life in there" - that in this day and age, these stupid electronic devices we carry with us actually carry us.

Several commercials have since been made in which a man and a woman accidentally switch cellphones and fall in love with each through the information they find within - not only phone numbers, but videos, emails, text messages, other "documents" of life.

And i've seen a couple of tv shows and movie scenes where information from a found or forgotten phone and/or a dead person's phone was instrumental in discovering the identity of the killer.

On a more personal note, I got a call from someone recently from a cell phone that had been left in a cab. The person calling me was trying to identify the owner by going through the contact list. There were only 4 people on the list - I was the only one with a "regular" name. The others were all nicknames - I think "Bone" was one of them.

I was no help in discovering the identity of the phone's owner. Their number had not been programmed into my phone. Which means I was on someone's call list, but they weren't on mine...

Hmmm....

Erik said...

Adam, I've never been afraid of losing my memory--my fear has always been that I'll die of a heart attack or something in a remote place and my body won't be found for weeks.

Malachy's phone anecdote reminds me of two things:

(1) I got a generic "Happy New Year" text message from someone who obviously just sent the message to everyone programmed into their phone, but I didn't know the person's number because it wasn't programmed into MY phone and I found it beyond frustrating not knowing who the text was from, but I refused to call them to ask because of the awkwardness of it.

(2) A few months ago, I drunk booty-texted an ex of mine, and then I found out that my phone number obviously wasn't programmed into his cell phone anymore because he called me back to tell me that I must have booty-texted the wrong person because he didn't know who I was. Mortifying.

Adam Szymkowicz said...

I got a new phone and no one is really in it yet and that happened to me on new years too. twice.

Malachy, you need to make it your mission to find Bone.