Expensive Text

I have a friend overseas on a business trip. He travels frequently and claims that it's not as glamorous as it sounds. When you are aware of every hour that passes because of bells that ring every fifty minutes and you never take a lunch outside of your place of work because your lunch "hour" is only twenty five minutes, it's hard to imagine a trip overseas as anything less than glamorous. My youngest brother is currently in Mexico on business and his girlfriend is in Belgium. I'm completely jealous.

"You spend most of your time in hotel rooms and meetings," they tell me. I don't care. Those hotel rooms have cable and room service, right? The bathrooms are free of graffiti and have real mirrors not polished steel, right? You have lunch at cool restaurants not the cafeteria where women in scrubs and laytex gloves serve you from steam heated containers, right?

My friend sends me texts and pictures that make me smile. I text him after viewing a photo of a tall thin woman with an Afro smiling and standing next to a grinning shorter bald man, "Ur friends look fun! :)" He sends me another and I am reminded of an extremely expensive phone bill incurred while I was in Europe on sabbatical. My husband insisted that we talk daily. I warned him of the rates and worried that we'd be spending too much time on the phone and too much money on the time. "Don't you miss me? Don't you want to talk to me?" It wasn't that I didn't miss him it's just that we don't make that kind of money. I spent days on the Internet looking for the lowest price decent hostels to stay in and had saved frequent flier miles to pay for the flight. I'm frugal, I'm money conscious, I budget. I didn't work that hard to save money so I could spend it on talking to a man I lived with. "We have the Internet, boo," I'd tell him.

"You know that's not the same." I agreed to talk daily so that I could get him off the phone but he'd go on and on and on. When I got home the bill was $3000.00. No, that's not a typo, 3000.00 fucking dollars!!! When I told him about it he didn't even flinch. Nothing, like it was worth it to spend that much money on keeping track of me ac cross the ocean.

So, I get another picture from my friend and I reply: "hey, these texts aren't costing me 5 euros each, are they?" Then I call Sprint and learn that they don't, they cost twenty cents each. I am relieved.

I get the last picture from him at 9p.m., people dancing. Really, that is sooooo not glamorous.