Why I hate cell phones

My Motorola 120t has been comatose for 2-3 months now. Up until a couple weeks ago it worked somewhat—that is, by pressing the LCD screen in hard and squinting you could just make out ‘TELCEL’ and in the corners, sometimes, ‘menu’ and ‘names’—but now all that tells me it’s still alive is the sickly glow when I press a number or plug in its charger. I would love this except I still have to take the damn thing everywhere with me.

Honestly, its games sucked (21, video poker, and Falling Numbers—YEAH, FALLING FRICKING NUMBERS—at least give me Snake II or Tetris) and I was once grounded for 2 months for not bringing it to the tennis court. It’s not just the 120t’s age and shittiness; the concept of the cell phone is an I-crapped-in-a-jewel-case-and-made-millions-off-it gimmick and always will be. Why?

1. I DON’T WANNA THINK ABOUT IT

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,57488-0.html

The Swedish study included three groups of rats that were exposed for two hours to various GSM phones at different levels of radiation. The study found a link between electromagnetic frequency exposure and a leakage in albumin -- a protein in human tissue -- through the blood-brain barrier. The researchers also noticed that the neuron damage the rats suffered increased in response to the amount of EMF exposure.

The authors of the study acknowledged that their test sample was small, but that "the combined results are highly significant and exhibit a clear dose-response relation."

Such a hole in the brain could prove life-threatening because it would mean that almost anything circulating in the blood -- including toxic pollutants -- could enter the brain, said Dr. Tom Goehl, editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/health/sfl-rxcell01feb01,0,7105692.story

Two of the studies found a correlation between the tumor's location and the side of the head where people reported they held the phone. One also suggests the greatest risk is in people who began using the phones before age 20, but researchers said the study group was small and more research should be done.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/23/health/webmd/main2117187.shtml

The lowest average sperm counts seemed to be in men who had the most cell phone use (more than four hours a day); those who didn't use cell phones seemed to have the highest. Although the sperm count appears to go down with increasing cell phone use, the difference in numbers wasn't significant.

Aww, why are cool things always bad for you, mommy?

2. AFFECTS WATER WEIRD

Mr. Masaru Emoto’s research into computer/TV, microwave, and cell phone radiation on water (so he studies 75% of both your body and the planet at once) is illustrated in Hidden Messages in Water, which you can pick up waiting for your next flight in most airports. The deformation of ice crystals under said radiation isn’t even something you have to take his word for—the book includes some fine full-color photography.

Computers are useful, but every expert will recommend “taking a 15-minute break for every hour of use”. How about those Anytime Minutes ads when actors show off the ability to talk for hours?

3. LOOK WHAT I GOT

Like getting high and MySpace, cell phones are mistakenly assumed cool among my peers. We must not allow this conspiracy by the money-junkie adults to continue.

4. WTF IS WRONG W/ REGULAR PHONEZORZ

Inevitably, if you more or less have a social life (or bored parents) your cell shall ring while you’re rinsing off Neutrogena conditioner/shaving/being pathetically constipated. “But that happens with every phone!” you’re chanting. So it does, but with a difference.

With a regular phone, you know how many meters you’ll need to towel-shuffle even before you turn off the faucet (far enough to the kitchen wall/coffee table) or even leave it to your answering machine.

A cell phone forces you to leave wet prints all over the house, with repeated taunts of the 1812 Overture besides. It could as easily be under the bed as in hell (where it belongs for once), and your guesses’ odds are equal between the small pocket of one of the 15 handbags Grandma sent you for Christmas, and up your basset hound’s small intestine playing billiards with the TV remote and your mood ring.

“Just take it to the bathroom with you!” you’re thinking now. (Yes, I can read minds. Sue me.) But guess what, I’m an American citizen—and I won’t for the same reason I close my laptop before changing clothes; they could be watching. How they hell would you know? NOT IN MY HOUSE, PATRIOT ACT.

5. SAFETY

I’ll just quote Amy Poehler of SNL’s Weekend Update:

“Recent studies show that 34% of drivers like to talk on their cell phones while crashing.”

6. DISTURBANCE

So you pay money to see a stupid movie that you could have for free JUST because it’s on a sperm-whale-size screen with elephant-seal-mating-call speakers. Or plunk down twice more for a double-bathroom bus and not one that sits you with third-world turkeys and their counterparts, both which have, according to the media, equal possibilities of giving you the avian flu.

That’s when someone’s ringtone shoots a twitch through your eardrum. He seems to let it go forever on purpose—now ‘I’m Sorry Mama’ by Eminem’s going to be stuck in your head all day—and finally a click. “Bueno?”

At least the screaming babies are inevitable. (Wait, they’re NOT!) It’s worse, because the baby has a reason to bawl its head off, and that important conversation, nine times out of ten, goes like this:

“Yo, man, where are you?”

“Sup, I’m at the Cinepolis.”

“What’s on?”

“Click. Where are you, foo?”

“On the bus. Just with my ‘pod.”

“What’s on?”

“’I’m Sorry Mama’. He should have titled his album that way. He sings a lot about his damn mother.”

7. ADD-ON CRAP

Music downloads, little decorative beads, shit-quality cameras, screens and skins and wallpapers—I already have a blog. I’ll tell you, Silicon Valley, when I need another way to waste time, and whether I’ll want to pay for it.

8. PIMPIN’ TO THE NINES

When was the last time you sat in a bus stop or read a magazine and realized that Ipods are now more heavily funked than Cadillacs or Peugeots in their advertising? Now it’s cell phones that—wowzers!—function as MP3 players and video messengers.

Here’s an idea: take all that money you pump into discovering better Bluetooth—and put it into better American education (it only takes 4.1% of your parents’ taxes, compared to military’s 28.5%) or even keeping acid rain/global warming from exterminating all life (1.4%). There are still children who get raped, starve, live on the streets, and don’t learn how to read or worse (slave at ten cents an hour in Taiwan for Fruit of the Loom, Nike, and WalMart, nineteen hours a day), and with everything ELSE going on you cannot justify your pathetic, money-leech existence that screams on every passing billboard and insinuates itself subliminally into our minds on every TV network. (http://nationalpriorities.org/auxiliary/interactivetaxchart/taxchart.html# if you don't believe me)

Yeah, somewhere this stopped being me vs. cell phones and got into extremist opinions about corporate America. Let me say one last thing before you think, “Screw this hippie,” and go download a midi of the first Pokemon theme song; that high-tech-looking piece of ring-ring you clutch in sweaty palms after reading this won’t make you cooler, it’ll only give you headaches when you’re forty, and all those games and your bus-trip high scores in them won’t rake in the opposite sex, at least not the category really worth raking in.

Incidentally, my Falling Numbers top was 7000. The only excuse I can think of is the electricity going out during hurricane Wilma.