>> [REVISED, LATER THAT NIGHT: You know what? The answer is yes. Yes, I am a douchetard. Am I so intellectually crippled that I can't even decide what frigging telephone I want? Jesus Christ, Chris, grow a frigging spine and an evaluative brain. So yeah, I've decided which one I want. I leave the post up, however, as a monument to the weird emotional / intellectual state of paralysis I've put myself in over the last few weeks.]

(I steal the fabulously descriptive term "douchetard" from The Face Knife's brutal dissection of Jonathan Franzen.)

So I need to get a new cell phone, right? And I'm going to do it through Cingular, since I get a respectable discount on their phones / plans through work. (Before you complain to me about Cingular sucking, don't bother -- the discount is better with them than any other carrier. Besides, all the wireless carriers suck and we all know it.) I want to get a fairly nice phone, with a strong featureset (i.e. a good camera I can moblog Flickr photos with, some kind of internet access), because it's likely going to be a phone that I use for the next two years at least, and I don't want it to be a dinosaur by the time my contract runs up. (An extinct mammal, such as a mammoth, is OK, but a dinosaur is going too far back on the evolutionary ladder.) I'm prepared to spend a bit of money to get a phone I'll be perfectly happy with, too. But here's the problem: I can't find a phone with all the features I want that doesn't make me look like a douchetard.

I essentially have the list narrowed down to three options:

• Motorola RAZR V3 (Silver). Does pretty much everything I want, at a price I'm comfortable with, and it does look attractive (and is pleasantly light to carry in a pocket). Unfortunately, the camera's not as good as on some other phones, and... it's a RAZR. It's the ultimate "OMG I am so cool" phone. Pulling one out is like screaming "I like spending money on frivolous bullshit," and saying "I bought it for the features!" is like saying you buy PLAYBOY for the articles, even if it's true.
  
  
• Sony Ericsson s710. Also does everything I want for a decent price, but it's black (which is ugly on a phone, IMHO) and is one of those retarded swivel phones. Sliders I can deal with, but swivelling? That just screams "douchetard," does it not? "Oh hold on, let me take this call" ::spends fifteen seconds fumbling awkwardly::
  
  
• Nokia 6682. Does everything I want. Looks attractive and doesn't draw attention to itself, and I vastly prefer candybar phones to the flip-top kind anyway. But it's $70 more expensive than the other two, and I haven't been able to actually pick one up and look at it in a store yet, so if I were to order it and suddenly find it physically unpleasant, I'm fucked. (I'd like to order the phone as soon as possible, since I'm sick of waiting.)

In other words, two of the phones make me look like a douchetard, while one of them would make me feel like a douchetard because I overpaid. (Then again, overpaying for something has never really been known to bother me for more than five seconds. I regard this as a strength, though some may differ.) Should I splash out the not-inconsequential sum of money for the 6682 (though yes, all of these phones would actually be a fair bit cheaper than the price quoted on the website) in exchange for peace of mind? Or am I really, really overthinking this?

(And yes, I know this blog seems to be turning into a bit of a "Chris Asks His Audience For Advice Regarding Conspicuous Consumption Variety Funtime Hour," but I promise, once I finally settle down with all the components of my life -- phone, computer, camera, etc. -- I'll go back to talking about... whatever it was I used to talk about.)

>> Aaaaargh. No cable today. One more week. Cable companies fucking suck. It would've killed you to do a tiny bit of research before you made us wait two weeks, give up an entire afternoon, and then disappoint us for another week? Bastards bastards all bastards. (The equipment they needed to hook us up to is on somebody else's property, which they didn't bother to learn before they came, and they couldn't contact those people. So now it's our job to do so before our next appointment, which they tried to have be eleven days from now, but my bitching and moaning got it moved up to next Friday. Grrr.)

Anyway, no guarantees about internet access over the weekend; draw your own conclusions.

>> The last few weeks in bullet-point form:

• Saturday, August 27th: My roommate and I, accompanied by several of our friends and family members, move into our new apartment. Or more precisely, we attempt to move into our new apartment, as we learn, upon arriving, that due to a profound failure of communication between my broker and my landlord, there is somebody living in the apartment who must remain there until the morning of the 31st. What's more, that "somebody" is the guy who manages the building for the landlord (i.e. is the guy we'll have to deal with if we have any problems), and therefore we really cannot get on his bad side. After an incredible amount of swearing, and some contemplation of stopping the check for my broker's fee (she'd been quite pleasant to work with until this happened, though this incident revealed a startling and infuriating lack of diligence), we basically find ourselves having to roll over and accept the facts. We move all of our boxes / furniture / etc. into the apartment, but I go to stay with my sister for a few days while Ashley stays with friends near Pratt. Further frustrating the situation is the revelation that while my tiny bedroom can in fact accomodate my queen-sized bed in a very satisfactory way, the boxspring for said bed cannot fit up the building's narrow staircase -- more precisely, it gets wedged between the second and third floors, no matter what we do. I end up having to leave it on the street.
  
  
• Wednesday, August 31st: Miraculously, everything goes according to plan and we can, in fact, move into the apartment. I take the day off work and start putting furniture together, and within 48 hours the place looks like a real house that grown-ups live in. (Also, I meet with the manager of our building and learn that he's a lovely, friendly guy that we shouldn't have too many problems dealing with. Phew.)
  
  
• Saturday, September 3rd: The Aristocrats is quite funny, though not as gut-bustingly uproarious as perhaps you might hope. Kevin Pollak's magnificent Christopher Walken impression is a highlight, as is the trailer for Sarah Silverman's Jesus Is Magic (actually funnier than her appearance in the film itself, which bodes well).
  
  
• Sunday, September 4th: The traditional Sunday Night Dinner at our place is marked by the thrilling discovery that ice-cream cones at the place around the corner (open until 11 PM every night!) are both delicious and inexpensive, costing less than two dollars (!). We also plow through the entire second disc of Arrested Development Season One in one sitting.
  
  
• Monday, September 5th: My sister and I attempt two significant improvement projects for my bedroom: Purchasing a wall-mounted Elfa shelving unit and desk at The Container Store, and building a new frame for my bed. The former is completed by the end of the day; unfortunately, we tried to be clever and get lumber in Manhattan, rather than schlepping out to New Jersey, only to discover that this is functionally impossible, at least on Labor Day, as all the lumber places are closed and the two Home Depots (a.) have a substandard selection and (b.) do not do any cutting of lumber on-site (!). I mean, what the hell's the point of selling lumber if you're not going to cut it? You think people in studio apartments in Manhattan have workbenches? The pain of leaving my mattress sitting on the floor is significantly ameliorated by eating too much at Outback Steakhouse for dinner. (Obviously much of the day is spent in "the suburbs," i.e. Sixth Avenue between 18th and 23rd Streets. I'm not the only one who's noticed this, right?)
  
  
• Tuesday, September 6th: A couple of hours after arriving at work, I begin to feel mildly ill. A couple of hours after that, I begin to feel distressingly ill. I hold out until the end of the day, go home, strip down to my underwear, and alternately shiver and sweat underneath my comforter on the couch watching the entire third disc of Arrested Development Season One. Somewhere in the final stretch of episodes, I "enjoy" a phenomenally memorable gastric event which immediately makes me feel a whole lot better, and the illness that I'd assumed was the start of a nasty cold is instead attributed to some kind of mild food poisoning from the double-chocolate muffin I'd bought on the way to work. Note to self: Never, ever buy from a breakfast cart on the street again.

So. As it currently stands, our apartment is pretty much entirely settled into, with the exception of my bed lacking a frame and our cable still not being hooked up (they're coming on Friday, but as I think I said before, I'm extremely apprehensive that they won't be able to connect us, as the building isn't currently wired for cable -- everyone seems to have satellite -- but I imagine the installation guys are fairly clever with this sort of thing). Once those two things happen, though, and hopefully they'll both be finished before the end of this weekend, I'll officially be able to say that I'm very, very satisfied with our new apartment, despite its smaller size in comparison to our (frankly palatial) old place. Hurrah.

There's some personal stuff I'm leaving out (What, more personal than a memorable gastric event? --ed.), but that's the gist. I assume you're all doing well. If not, feel free to complain in the comments. And once I have the internet in the apartment again, you can expect this blog to get back to its regular rhythm of suckage, as opposed to the rather sporadic crappiness it's been peddling of late. I can't wait!

>> I'm squeezing as much internet time as I can out of my approximately thirty minutes of battery time (and six fucking dollars of T-Mobile hotspot access), so this is just a hello to remind you that I won't have internet access at home until Friday at the earliest (that's assuming they can wire us up properly when they come -- my building doesn't currently have cable running into it...), and won't be at work again until Tuesday (obviously). So happy Labor Day, everybody. Give to the Red Cross. And try not to think about how fucked and ineffectual our government is.

Don't bother to check back for the next couple of days, because I won't be around. I'll try to leave you with a lovely Flickr photo from the new place before the battery poops out for good. Enjoy what's left of the summer.

>> I always feel vaguely uncomfortable and self-righteous posting this sort of thing on my tiny podunk personal blog, but do please consider donating to the Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief. I just kicked some money through my company, who are matching donations -- you should check and see if your employer isn't doing the same.

Every new story coming out of New Orleans makes the situation look more and more horrible. I can't believe my hometown in Florida has been as lucky as it has been with hurricanes, and I pray it always will be. And despite all the hassle we just put up with moving into our new apartment, at least we've still got our home, and most of our belongings...