Is my cell phone hot? Or not?

Last night, after a particularly intense workout at the gym (this means I was on a Stairmaster at .5 setting for 1/2 hour while I watched 'Jeopardy'), Salome and I returned home with our take-out dinner. As is customary in all American families, we eschewed dining at the table and conversing in favor of sitting in front of the TV.

Salome is a wonderful woman with an intellect and nimbleness of mind that astonishes me sometimes. The woman is just smart. But if there is anything plebian about her, it's her choice in television programs. I say this just in reference to the fact that our television dinner fare was American Runway, or Project Fashion Model Breakdown Designers, or something of that nature. Anyway, it had to do with fashion. That much I am certain of.

Throughout the 15 minutes I was watching the aforementioned show, every so often a little blurbed footer would appear saying something inane like 'Log on to www.projectfashionrunwaymeltdown.com to watch Alejandro's melt down while knitting a scarf!' To me and most guys, this sort of thing is anathema: everyone knows that area on the screen is reserved for SPORTS SCORES ONLY.

Regardless, one blurb asked the question: 'Is your cell phone hot... or not?'

Let me say here that I am one who is always behind the fashion curve. New trends look unbearingly stupid to me for a couple of years, until they're firmly entrenched in our culture, at which point I give way to them just as the trend is falling off. My timing is always bad on this.

So I found this question, posed by the fashion-nazis, to be almost existential: was I in? Am I out? When I pull out my cell phone to answer a call, are there admiring looks at my little V-cast, or is that horribly passe?

And if it is, then what about the rest of me? Where have I broken down? What have I missed? Is it a case of having the right button down, flaired cuffed shirt but the wrong pair of stonewashed, weather beaten, frayed jeans that are available at Nordstroms for only $125? And if these are a mis-match, then what does that say about me overall? That I'm a poseur, a fraud, a 'wannabe' from back in the high school days?

And if I am fashionably inept, then can I be taken seriously by the rest of the world? What hope can I possibly give in this season of giving if I can't even get my cell phone to be stylish? What good am I, and if a man falls in the forest and he's not wearing Eddie Bauer, does he make a noise?

As I'm pondering these things today, my cell phone rings: it's our body shop, telling me our car will be ready for pick-up tomorrow. The tone is clear, I can hear him, he can hear me, and as I flip the phone shut I shrug my shoulders and say to myself: 'Hot? Not? Whatever: the damn thing works.'

I think that's good enough for me.