Estrella and Lisa’s Bare Bones Story

This story was generated by combining two random lists: (Estrella) -cactus, metal, future, fan, slippers, hair dryer, flat, shorts, monitor, blankie (Lisa) –birthday cake, wristwatch, clogs, bad hair day, insomnia, olive oil, dentist, grocery store, mountain road, snowman.

The last straw, or "Hello my name is Cas and I'm a technoholic"

Left to my own devices I wouldn't have pushed through the "performance area" in such an all fired hurry to get back to the blazing hot car.

I would have stood politely with the other gawkers at the civic center entrance watching the Elvis impersonator sing Hound Dog in his flat nasal voice.

I've always thought that Elvis was a pretty hunky dude, so I guess you could call me a fan, but not a starry eyed one.

But not even a starry eyed fan, unless they were suffering from twelve years of insomnia, wearing carpet slippers and a tin foil hat would have been able to confuse this particular "Elvis" with the real thing.

This guy was having a seriously bad hair day, and the jumpsuit shorts didn't really add to his performance any.

So as I say, I would have stood there, running through my grocery store list in my head, people watching and blocking out the "music" until there was a natural break in the flow of the crowd.

But Cas had other plans. She needed to get back to the car so she could plug in her crackberry and check her blog and monitor her Twitter account.

And yeah, I know it's called a blackberry, but bloggers with "I'm on Twitter!" in the side bar of their website with the exclamation point at the end may as well have been announcing "I'm on Crack!" and Cas was definitely in that minority.

Or it may be the majority now. I don't know.

I DO know that I lost half of a pair of perfectly good clogs in the deep mud following Cas as she barreled through it elbowing other dentists out of her way in her haste to get to the car and her techno "fix."

I pulled my poor bedraggled clog out of the brown goo and decided that no amount of olive oil was going to shine it back to life.

I followed my friend politely, limping on my one shoe, excusing us both and smiling my way through the crowd.

I was worried about Cas.

Her blackberry battery had died during the second speaker's presentation.

After a few minutes she had started to kind of vibrate in her chair.

When her eye started twitching and she began rocking and whimpering while pushing the dead buttons on her drained technotoy I made up my mind that we were going to have to talk about her addiction.

I had tried to talk to her about her problem when we went to the restroom after the conference ended, but she just brushed my concerns aside and said that she could stop anytime she wanted to.

That it wasn't a big deal.

But I wasn't convinced.

Things had gotten a lot worse in the last six months or so.

I was starting to think that Cas was a friend I needed to walk away from while I was still able to do it.

Maybe with a few of my possessions still intact.

Sighing, I thought about my future without Cas, but then that got me to thinking about my past with Cas.

I looked at my wrist and remembered that I'd lost my wristwatch back in December when Cas wrecked my jeep on that lonely mountain road while texting and lol(ing) to a "follower."

That poor snowman never even saw us coming.

Then there was the incident with the hairdryer. No one in their right mind goes on a trip and leaves their hairdryer behind.

And I had packed mine, but Cas took it out of my carry on so she could put an extra laptop and batteries into MY bag without telling me.

My hair had looked like the spikes on a cactus the whole week we were in Barbados.

I had spent a lot of that trip hiding in my bed under a blankie.

And now following her in her mad dash to the car to get plugged back in had led to me ruining my favorite shoes.

I sighed again and wondered why I had given her the car keys in the first place.

After all, friends don't let friends drink and drive, and after the jeep wreck I certainly didn't let Cas tweet and drive, so why hadn't I hung on to the keys?

Now I love Cas more than birthday cake, and that's saying something because for chocolate birthday cake with butter cream icing I'd push my grandma into traffic.

Well, maybe not MY grandma, but someone's grandma for sure.

And here I was at a point where given a choice between spending one more night listening to Cas discuss her blog stats and how many countries she was now being read in and "oh my god Tom Hanks totally tweeted back to me" and metal spikes being shoved into my eyes, I was seriously considering the metal spikes.

Sighing one more time, I went off to have a long hard talk with my friend.

But I'll probably have to tweet her with the news, she's taken to wearing a Bluetooth in both ears …..