My Contact List

My phone can, as it turns out, be used for something other than poking myself in my eye. It is a place to store contact information, including names and phone numbers. Who knew?

I guess most people, including me. I'll just claim that it was a rhetorical question.

I had reason to go through my contact list on my phone this week. The contact list has been building for about four years, but the last three (corresponding with my dramatic change in circumstances) is when it started to get busier and
more confusing.

In real life I'm a bit of a packrat. Actually, anyone who's walked into my apartment and seen the cardboard boxes that haven't been opened in five years can tell you that I'm more than a bit of a packrat. Electronically? It's even worse. Storage is cheap and search capabilities are excellent... so why throw anything away?

As an angry tangent: I'm still pissed that I can only store 135 txts in my phone. I end up storing about 132 at a time, making me delete sent and received txts in real time when I'm in a conversation or two. So fucking annoying.

While I am limited to fewer than one gross txt messages, it seems I can keep an unlimited number of contacts. Which is good, I guess (if I couldn't, I'm sure I'd be bitching about that)... but messy.

In addition to standard contacts (family, (ex-)co-workers, friends) there are
a few other categories. I don't literally have them as categories, although that would be funny, but they roughly break down this way:

Dead Ends
These are numbers that I received from women that didn't go anywhere. I called them once or twice, or I txted, and got either no response or such a luke-warm one that I didn't bother to follow up... or if I followed up too much, they became a Bitter Pill (see below). These are numbers that I should probably delete, but it's entertaining to see names from the past that I recognize and either chuckle or curse under my breath about. Oddly enough, about 75% of these numbers seem to be from girls somehow related to Peso's.

Bitter Pills
These are numbers of girls that I went out with once or twice. Girls that weren't into me or were into me too much. Girls that I dated and then was told that they were going to be dating someone else exclusively. Girls that demonstrate to me how tough dating can be.

Who the Fucks?
My favorite. Who the FUCK is 'Juliette'? Or 'Emily'? If either Juliette or Emily are reading this and you know that you've given me your number: I'm sorry. No offense. I must have been really drunk and/or without my daily vitamin that day. You, along with a select few others, are officially 'Who the Fucks'. Which is distinctly different from the 'Want to Fucks', which tend to populate the other two categories. A related category: 'Why the Fucks?' tend to be friends-of-friends that I have in my phone, and I am never quite sure why I needed the number nor why I would ever need it again.

Appendix I: Marriage
I did an unofficial count as I was going through my contacts and it appears that three or four women that I went out on dates with are now married, with another engaged to be married. Wowzers. Fortunately, none of them reside in the 'Bitter Pills' category.

Appendix II: Broken Heart
Unrelatedly except in temporal terms, I went through my Facebook friends list, too. It reminded me that I have had my heart broken twice in my life. It's happened every 16 years, as it turns out, so I've got another 13 to go before things take another tragic twist.