Last night I dreamt that I was on the phone with person A. While I was talking with person A, person B called my cell phone. I tried to disable the ringer on my cell and could not. I became very frustrated. I smashed my cell phone and it would not stop ringing. At one point, I was on my hands and knees on the phone with person A and repeatedly whacking my cell phone – which by this point had transformed into a cross between a train set I had when I was about 10 and a 1950s-era telephone – with the sole of one of my old, battered Doc Marten’s. The cell phone-slash-train-telephone was in bits and pieces and yet would not stop ringing.

Finally person A got tired of hearing me make loud banging noises and asked to call me later. So I answered my cell phone by holding a miniscule particle of speaker to my ear and it was my mom on the other end, telling me that my grandfather had finally died. I was surprised because I had watched my grandfather die of a heart attack when I was about 12 and hadn’t realized that he was, in fact, living in a retirement community in Naples. It was very sad because, she said, he had bed sores and bad skin and was neglected by the evil caretakers at the home. During this entire conversation, though, the cell phone was still ringing.

I woke up and realized that my alarm had been ringing for about ten minutes.

I never said it was an interesting story.