Falling in love with dumb phones and big wide sidewalks

(trigger warning: brief discussion of school shooting)

I made my phone dumber by design, so that I couldn't turn into a dummy at the hands of my smartphone. Now all it does is connect me to people I know, and an occasional song or camera or map. No Claude telling me I'm "absolutely right" as I poke around for culture stuff it's bad at anyway. No scrolling.

Here's a recipe for a dumb phone and semi behavior change, based off my last six days:

1. Tell your friends you're getting a flip phone, and really mean it
2. Realize the radical impracticality
3. Delete almost all apps and widgets, set phone to greyscale, and lock Instagram for 23 hours of the day and focus on creating content and real people connections. Choose boring backgrounds that make your phone more of a tool than an entertainment console.

Here's the results of looking into the world, in a human-scaled neighborhood. Basically, I fell in love with wide sidewalks.

1. Saturday: I got personal horrendous news about my beloved college. My partner's seen the headline on TV, and we look up together. Dinner friends go quiet, lean into the conversation, keep me out of the phone vortex. It was the 75th-ish mass shooting on a US school campus this year.
   
   We came out, however, to a merry blob of grinches and Santas milling around the sidewalk. The goofy merriment highlighted the absurdity of the world, bringing comfort as my head spun, as my spirit writhed'n'shattered.
   
2. Sunday: I'm looking up as I walk into a coffee shop, and literally bump into a pal from the same college. Big sidewalk, nice trees, we catch up and he links me to a discounted ticket for a music show that afternoon. The city holds me. Varun shows up for a quick Ceen session, and then we walk towards his home and my surprise show.
   
3. The Paramount Theater is in easy walking distance. The line wraps around the block: people humming and chatting, fashion bumping, textures jumping out of everyone's clothes. Sick outfits look so different in real life, not on my screen. The big wide sidewalk becomes a runway and a hangout. I wait in a few different lines to pick up a last-minute ticket, chatting about people's outfits.
   
4. Out from the sidewalk: a cousin and his--our!–big family, three generations in line for the same show.
   
   I cry through most of the show, mostly happy tears. I'm surprised how different it feels to listen to music with 1000 happy people, especially as compared to scrolling through not-that-respectful-to-artist music streaming platforms while lying on a benchpress.
   
   Our cousin crew meets up. We prance out of the show together and I race my littlest cousins to the corner. We're a champion race team, aged 8 and 12 and 35. We cross the street and race again. My phone stays tucked away, the city's gently moving, and I've just fallen in love with big wide sidewalks.

Horrendous news and family hangs all work better on big wide sidewalks. Big thanks to the SF and Oakland sidewalks for holding space for all of us this weekend.

Good to Get Out:

As opposed to hitting "refresh refresh refresh" to see whether they've found the gunman.

Building the Ceen:

Writing the blog on schedule feels good, but not in the mood to hype our favorite tiny b-corp.