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May 12, 2008
forgetting sarah
My first experience with relationship debris was in the immediate post-Fucking Amy aftermath, when the movie "Chasing Amy" hit theatres and remained there for 162 years. Was that really necessary, God? Was it?
Now I'm in the post-Sarah aftermath, and along comes "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," or as every theatre owner designates it:
There's just no avoiding relationship debris. It's not like I didn't try. By now I know the drill: throw out nothing, but hide everything where you don't have to see it. So the day after she tossed me on the pile with her other discards, I spent hours sanitizing my life of her. Every last note, toothbrush, and sock was stuffed into a box. I went into iTunes and deleted pretty much every song I purchased in the last year. I moved her email to the Estranged section. I would not be made to think of her involuntarily.
Which is to say that every day for the three months since, I've come across a scarf or shoe or underwear or hair. Several times a day. Especially the hair. The chick sheds like a Newfoundland. And then there's two TV shows with Sarah in the name, each of which has ads (with the word "SARAH" prominently emphasized, naturally) embedded into the shows I watch. Because to marketers, in "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," Sarah is apparently the operative word.
Nothing, not even the real Sarah abruptly dropping by two weeks ago to try to placate me, has had the effect that the iPhone did. See if you can follow this. I had to transfer my Verizon number to AT&T, which meant losing my saved voice-mail. I had many vmails from Sarah that I don't want to hear but that I don't want to throw away, either. Verizon provides no way of saving voice mail, so I hired a third company to record it for me and mail it to me in an MP3. And so they did. And iTunes invisibly—and quite thoughtfully—sucked it into my library and put it on my iPhone, which played it when I was hurtling down I-5 the other day.
"Thank you for loving me," Sarah cooed over the stereo as I swerved all over the interstate, trying in vain to find the skip button.
I have exactly two religious beliefs:
- There is a God.
- He's out to get me.
posted by john at 6:55 AM • permalink