rice.
Twisted, I forgot to twist the cap of my water bottle off today. And there it was, my bag, acting as a temporary swimming pool for my Istanbul notebook, my reusable shopping bag, my keys, my wallet and my phone.
The Istanbul notebook is a collection of pulp now, between the dryness of the pages it shows Rorschach, pink post-it notes leaving their pink-ish traces, square-ish, corner-ish, the notebook has exploded:
Butterflies.
Butterflies.
A silhouette of a man and his shadow.
A silhouette of an older man.
Elaborate wine glasses.
Elaborate vases. One a mirror image of the other.
Mountains mirrored on the lake’s surface.
Is my imagination really that limited? Or is my Id blocked?
My phone was something else. I told it to go to menu and it says “l”, “ljkl”, I hit delete and it says “ljkljkljkl”. Dear Keypad, you don’t really have to stick together, I know it’s a wide wild world out there but you’re not really out there. I thought of my earlier thoughts this week of getting an iPhone instead. No. I’m on a budget. So I turned on my heater, and put a layer of paper on top of it, stripped the phone off its SIM card and battery, and cooked it.
Rice, Sab kindly tipped, will take care of it. Lucky I still had a bag of it in the kitchen. I sunk my phone in the pile of rice, and waited for several hours. No cooking. It worked. My keypad wasn’t afraid anymore. No ljkl anymore.
And that’s the moral of the story: next time anything is wet, just put it in a bag of rice and let it sink for several hours. It’ll take care of it. Nothing fancy – just old Saudi wisdom.
