Pink is My Fav-or-ite Color

I want one of these:



Yeah, I'm a total sell-out for coveting the lovely magenta Motorola Razr. Any product that says these words in its promo material is clearly sent from Satan himself: "Seeded to a select group of fashion elite and Hollywood 'it' girls."

And yet ... it's so darn pretty! Can I help it that pink is my favorite color?

I scanned the eBay galaxy for more pink phones and came up with disappointingly few. Does anyone besides me miss the simpler times when you could change out the color of your cell phone with a plastic face plate bought from a booth at the mall?

Besides its delightful color, the Razr is slim and lightweight - a far cry from the Nokia Free-Beast I've been lugging around for the past three years. Yikes, has it really been that long? My phone is so antique it doesn't take photos and doesn't even let me download ringtones. That's right - I'm still going around with the classic "Toreador." (But at least it's not Fur Elise.)

My life would be so much more complete if I had a magenta Razr. I could download Project Runway ringtones. I could take photos of furniture I find at yard sales and send them to my husband to shoot down. I could watch video clips on the 2.2-inch screen, though I'm not sure the eye strain would be worth it. Best of all, the quad-band technology would let me "jet-set around the world without missing a call." Hey, if I ever decide to jet-set, that would be perfect!

And the Razr has all these cool features, even if I don't know what half of them are:

• External dimensions: 13.9 x 55 x 98 millimeters
• Weight: 95 grams
• External color display
• Picture caller ID
• Nickel-plated copper-alloy chemically-etched keypad
• Internal display: 2.2 inch 176 x 220 pixel 64K color TFT display
• External display: 96x80 pixels 4k color CSTN CLI
• EL keypad illumination panel
• Internal quad-band antenna
• Integrated VGA camera with 4x zoom
• Integrated Class 1 Bluetooth® wireless technology
• 22kHz polyphonic speaker with MP3 ringer support
• MPEG4 video Playback
• 3D Graphics Engine
• Java™ MIDP 2.0
• Dedicated Messaging & Browser keys

If only I wasn't so cheap, I'd go snap me up one of these babies right now. But why do you think I still have the Nokia phone after all these centuries? $199 just seems so extravagant when I can get a crappy free phone with my cell service.

Where Do You Listen?

The results of my long-standing poll are in. What can we learn from the whopping 11 votes cast?



Unsurprisingly, the majority of Commuter Rock readers listen to audiobooks on their commute. That's when I listen to them also (obviously).

Since the commute sucks up so much of my time, I rarely carve out a few hours to curl up with a good print book. The audiobooks have quickly become my savior - they let me keep up with the latest books, and they make the commute speed by.

If you want to try them without the financial risk (after all, some people do hate them), hop on over to Amazon or eBay, or even your local library. Used audiobooks are a good bet because they've probably only been listened to once.

I Still Love You, Ayelet

I wanted to love Ayelet Waldman's new book, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, because I enjoy her column at Salon. Ms. Waldman is quite the controversial figure at Salon. In one column, she said she hoped her son would be gay. In another column, she wrote about over-zealous "attachment" parents. She has written about abortion and suicide. These are the sorts of topics that apparently get people - even supposedly enlightened Salon readers - up in arms.

I've never been offended by one of her columns or written in a letter to call her a "hack" for writing about her own experiences, rather than quoting psychologists and book authors. These people obviously don't understand the difference between an editorial column and a researched article.

I'll defend Waldman's column and her right to make her own choices all day long. But her novel? I'm not sure.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the story of New Yorker Emilia, who has recently lost a baby girl. She "stole" her husband away from another woman, and he has a smartypants 5-year-old son William from the previous marriage. Emilia is responsible for the boy for one afternoon out of the week, and their hatred for each other seems mutual, especially since he spouts horrible comments (fed to him by his mother) about his dead half-sister.

But Emilia and William inevitably bond, mostly over their shared love for Central Park. That's not a spoiler because of course they do. We've seen this plotline a thousand times. Gruff adult hates precocious child, child charms adult, adult almost loses child, adult realizes he/she loves child. Think Big Daddy or even Savannah Smiles (anyone remember that movie?).

Still, Waldman does it well. The characters feel like real people. Emilia lies to herself, wallows in misery, misinterprets, and sometimes acts like a spoiled brat. And Waldman has four children, so it's not surprising that she paints William so perfectly. Narrator Ellen Reilly helped preserve the reality of William because the voice she did for him was perfect, childlike but with the perfect hint of smart-kid snobbery. He's a child smart beyond his years - at 3, he could recognize an anatomically incorrect stuffed dinosaur - and because of it, Emilia assigns him motives more cunning than a 5-year-old can manage. Emotionally, he is still a child, and Emilia has to realize that to fully set aside her animosity toward him.

In a book like this, where you can anticipate the outcome, it's not the ending that matters but the journey. Still, that left me without much to look forward to to keep me speeding toward the end. Though this is an abridged version, it still read slowly and dragged in the middle. I like the book, especially thinking back on it, but unlike the best books, I wasn't sad when the last CD ended.

Look at Things and Try New Drinks

I love it when the audiobook companies release audio recordings of the classics. I have so little time to read print media these days and so very many "important" books left to read.

This spring, Simon & Schuster Audio is re-introducing several Ernest Hemingway novels and stories in audio form, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.

Ernest Hemingway the man, the adventurer, I find terribly dull - he's just another chauvanist hunter, like 90 percent of my male relatives.

But I'd like to read his books because his story "Hills Like White Elephants" is one of the few things I studied in college that burrowed down in my brain and clung there, even when the tide of years washed everything else away - especially quadratic equations.

Like so many writers before me, my highest goal is to achieve such powerful simplicity as Hemingway's writing in that story. The least I can do is listen to his books.

More Than Zero

I've never been a Bret Easton Ellis fan. In fact, until Lunar Park, I'd never even read one of his books. I'd barely heard of him. Maybe that makes me a hopeless yokel, but so be it.

This is what audiobooks should be. While it isn't the quiet, beautiful sort of book I've been praising lately, this is one of the rare kind that makes me anxiously await my commute. Part memoir (but which parts?), part family drama, part mystery, part horror. It's impossible to define this book and refreshing because of that. It is an exciting, action-packed read but full of emotion, too. It is surreal - there's an attack by a hairball with one eye - but full of reality, too - the struggle of a drug addict to reconcile his old hard-partying life with his new role as suburban dad.

I'm no James Van Der Beek fan either - he was the narrator - but I loved him here. I've heard complaints that his reading was too flat and monotone, but it was exactly the right tone for the character. In the author interview at the end of the last CD, Ellis confirms that he chose Van Der Beek (who starred in the movie adaption of Ellis' The Rules of Attraction) and that ex-Dawson was on the mark.

I may just convert to a fan of both Ellis and Van Der Beek.