Stars upon thars

I finally did it. I finally joined the vanguard of hipness and ahead-of-the-curve technological superiority. Three years after the fact.

I got an iPhone!

My relatively awesome little Verizon flip phone hadn’t given me a lick of trouble in the three years I’d been schlepping it around, but it didn’t do anything more than take pictures and send texts. And, um, sometimes make calls. Though in the last few months it had lost its ability to hold a charge for more than a day.

I wanted an iPhone in the same way Sarah Palin wants to matter. But the domestic partner and his brother were on our Verizon family plan and were both under contract. And we had no beef with Verizon … and tons of concerns about AT&T.

Then! The domestic partner got out of contract. And so did his brother. We thought. But we were too lazy to try to get all three of us in one AT&T store at on time so I could cross over to the side of the mountain with all the sheep.

Then! The domestic partner’s phone went blank. Kinda like when Sarah Palin accidentally wears mittens at a speech. And we had no choice but to pack up the herd and head to the trendier meadow last night.

And in three hours (it seemed) we stumbled out the door with an iPhone for me, a plain old phone for the domestic partner (who can barely be bothered to check his emails and his Facebook on his regular computer) and a plain old phone with a temporary number for the brother-in-law, who it turns out still has another month on his contract. So we’ll cross him over next month when he’s safely a free agent.

Getting an iPhone is just as exciting as getting a tattoo. Except an iPhone doesn’t bleed. And you can figure out how to use a tattoo on the first try. And you pay for a tattoo only once. And a tattoo doesn’t punish you for having big meaty fingers when you try to send texts on it. And a tattoo makes you look badass. Or delusional. But you can take pictures of a tattoo with an iPhone and not the other way around. So there’s that.

And the first two apps I downloaded—Facebook and the CTA Bus Tracker—are so far more irritating than useful to me. Especially the CTA Bus Tracker, which incorrectly predicted FOUR bus arrivals this morning … two of them by 15 minutes. But maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand the words “2 MIN.” Or something.

In the mean time, I can’t be bothered with Middle Ages technology like blogging and laptops. I have apps to download! And texts to misspell! And—as always—Sarah Palin insults to dream up!