Though it seems that every one of my friends has an iPhone or an Android or some other breed of hipster Smart Phone, I have been a holdout, limping through life with a beat-up, 10-year-old dumb phone that doesn’t connect to the Internet, play music, or mix margaritas. Even folks I know who rail against consumerism and reject better-living-through-technology got swept away by the cultural/consumer tidal wave that is the Smart Phone. And still I resisted...to the point that I was beginning to expect that Steve Jobs might personally show up on my doorstep and ask how it could be that I could live without an item that has become a perceived essential of human existence in the developed world.
I can be contrary that way: The more a thing becomes accepted, the more I sometimes reject it.
Thus, if you felt the earth quiver a bit under your feet this week or experienced some other disturbance in The Force, it might have been the result of a trip I made to the Apple store to purchase, at long last, an iPhone. Now, finally, I am one of the Cool Kids. The $300 I spent on my phone means I’m doing my part to support the American economic recovery. And I won’t have to explain to clients or potential clients that I’m late returning their email because I was away from my office computer.
Now I can, if I chose, always be connected...though don’t count on that to happen, as I suspect I’ll leave my phone behind as often as I carry it with me. I am, after all, a contrarian.
The pictures I’m sharing today, shot in our kitchen, are examples of things that matter to me much more than even the most wondrous of gadgets: Vision. Imagery. Exercising my way of seeing.
The marbles are among the items --found objects, mostly, like shells and empty bird nests and drying flowers -- that we collect and keep on our kitchen window sill.
I might add (with apologies to Mr. Jobs) that I did not use the camera in my new phone to take these pictures.
