Continuing the series debuted with “OCD and the Fitbit,” I’d like to further embarrass myself by providing you with another window into my dysfunctional relationship with portable electronics.
I got an iPhone 6 on Saturday. It’s truly a thing of beauty. Aesthetically, anyway: I can’t tell you much about its functionality beyond what I read in the dozens of reviews I studied prior to purchase.
Why? The answer should be obvious.
The chances that I’ll damage my stunning gold iPhone (yep, I’m an Apple fangirl) increase exponentially every time I lay my carefully washed hands on it.
I wish I could operate like a “normal” person and use a new device immediately after acquiring it. Instead, there’s an extended “getting to know you” period during which I try to habituate myself to the idea that the phone/laptop/whatever I’ve just bought is meant to be touched and taken out of the house.
Then there’s a lingering sense of discomfort.
Then there’s the occasional freakout. The problem is, I’m able to convince myself that every fingerprint is a scratch. If I find a genuine scratch, no matter how tiny, I feel like I’ve destroyed the object in question and wish I could get rid of it and start afresh. (This, ladies and gentlemen, is called “black and white thinking.”)
Within a few days, I’ll have come to terms with the fact that with no risk comes no reward. Specifically, without removing my iPhone 6 from the safety of my living room, I won’t be able to experience it like it deserves to be experienced. Or, if I want to pretentiously bring it back to Italian Studies, I could quote Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote that “never was anything great achieved without danger”; this is is clearly appropriate since I would likely achieve minor greatness with my iPhone—Instagram a celebrity during the Toronto International Film Festival, for example—if only I could face the threat associated with exposing it to the environmental perils of the outside world. But God knows that when I do, it’ll be swathed in a thick layer of protective materials of various descriptions and that I’ll shed a tear or two at the first little dint that appears on its now-flawless exterior.
