iPhone Archives

london-central

*Title borrowed from Estelle featuring Kanye West “American Boy”

While I continue work on the best writer apps for the iPhone review (dammit, I said it’s coming), I figured it’ll be a good time to start a micro-series. If social media experts and blogging aficionados are to be believed, readers love a good micro-series (“micro”Â sounds better than “mini,”Â FYI). Besides, it’ll give me a little something to write about as the days tick down.

That is to say, I’m getting married in four weeks. The apartment is abound with excitement and stress as we wrap up last minute things: marriage license, music for the reception and the ever-changing guest list. We originally planned a large affair with all the frills and lace of a Spring 2011 wedding. Eventually, we found ourselves less enthralled with a big wedding; our focus shifted to wanting to get married and having a nice honeymoon in the process. We settled on an intimate gathering in a chic Philadelphia locale and, soon after, we’re flying out to London for a week. Our first excursion out of the country, the first of many (we hope) international trips, and we’re doing it together: we can’t think of a better way to celebrate our new life as a married couple.

So what we have here is the allure, the romance, of a week in London: doing the whole sightseeing thing, bopping up and down SoHo and Covent Garden, checking out a play at the National Theatre (Fela!) and conducting ourselves in the most respectful, least American manner. And yet (yes, there’s a yet), the writer in me is equally excited for the new smells, the sounds, the sights of buildings older than the US itself. I want to do a travelogue, a blog updated daily on our exploits (rated PG, of course). I want to visit old bookstores and hold first editions in my hand. I want to hear the accents and inject them into future dialogue.

My writing is in a sad, stagnant state these days. Very low output, PANK notwithstanding, and a general malaise toward all of my prose, whether it be fiction or otherwise: I could use a pick-me-up of any kind, from any individual, in any country. Secretly, I place a great burden onto our honeymoon, granting it the responsibility to rekindle something lost over the years. Over this past summer, I’ve paired down my techno collection, now a Spartan toolbox of necessities sans bloatware, in the hopes of finding the right mix to help me write during days where hours escape like steam through fingers. A change of scenery, a change in cell phones: both are synonymous with a deeper search.

I’ve never been a religious man, in spite of my mother’s efforts. I squirmed in pews, hemmed and hawed at testimonials and sermons, quietly promising that I’d avoid all forms of ties and dress pants when I grow up. Whenever the preacher sauntered down the aisles, looking for a suspect to save from damnation, I lowered my eyes, flipped through a bible, read with intensity the back of a handheld fan, as though the advertisement for the local funeral home contained more truth and mysticism than the story of Jesus. I’ve had enough faith to remain sane, but not enough to fret over the looming threat of losing it, of waking up and no longer believing in the wisdom of God, in the goodness of man.

Apparently, people go on spiritual journeys to reclaim that oneness with God, with faith in general. A weekend retreat, maybe, or a year-long excursion through Africa or Asia. I don’t know anything about looking for God in a log cabin lodged betwixt the cleavage of some far-off mountain range, or in the eyes of an hooded Indian girl, as if her starving gaze was placed there for me as a conduit to Heaven. But I do feel bankrupt, straight up robbed of my creativity. Creativity. Creativity. Not the act of writing, or the act of connecting unlike objects to weave a muddled, prosaic tapestry. Creativity is fed, yes. Switching out cell phones and laptops and iGadgets have failed, unsurprisingly, to light my fire.

In the back of my mind, I’m asking London to breath its fog over suffocated embers, to bring back their orange, radiating bloom, pulsing with an energy I’ll undoubtedly fail to capture in my writing, but will appreciate and value nonetheless. I’m afraid of asking London for too much, to expect it to do more than act as a wondrous backdrop to the spark my fiancee and I discovered almost four years ago. I know the burden is great as I wonder with a future-projection, “What if London does nothing for me”Â? Will I come home, jet-lagged and further entrenched in my malady? I want to leave the writer at home. This is the time for my wife and I; there’s little room for third parties. Yet, I consider what writing utensils I’ll bring with me; whether or not I can leave the journal at home and use my iPhone in its place.

To be continued…

@thomasdemary. @altruistic bullsh*t.

What can I say? I had enough...

I’m crouched over a blue plastic bin of spare parts: PVC elbows, steel nuts and bolts, and a large green and white pump made in Japan, meant for usage on a project about ten years ago. I’m doing my part at the day job, sifting through old material on the last day of the week-long annual physical inventory. It’s gray outside and I wrote an acceptable amount of prose earlier in the morning; I’m feeling at ease, as if it’s an hour away from quitting time on Friday. I sit up from my stool and turn down the volume on my iPod Touch; Kanye West makes my ears ring. I lean over and pull out my Motorola Droid to check the weather, Twitter and my email. And there I am, once again, holding a device in each hand amid the age of multipurpose gadgets. I say to myself with a whisper, as if I’m ready to release a secret into the world, “I want an iPhone.”Â

The next day, my fiancee and I browse the local mall, picking up various items for our honeymoon at the end of October. Whenever Verizon Wireless releases a new phone, I find myself at the kiosk in the mall, tinkering with the new gadget to see if, maybe, it’ll fit my needs. This trip is different. Carrying newly purchased luggage, I see the kiosk and the crowd meandering around it. I’m on a mission to understand my hesitancy over the years. I’m watching the Verizon employees, wearing, for some reason, matching lavender polo shirts, and the archetypical iPhone owner, the one that existed in my head for so long, begins to fade. We all know them: skinny-jean hipsters and hooded teenagers, little women with Ugg boots and pixie hair cuts, wannabe rappers with bent baseball caps and gaudy diamond earrings. My judgements of them, born out of something trite like a cell phone, is nothing more than a judgement of myself, as if the Android phone in my pocket makes me better, smarter or less susceptible to marketing trickery.

A few months ago, I rooted my Droid and felt superior to some unknown, nameless, nonexistent audience; my phone was mine, absent Draconian controls by a Cupertino-based overlord. Rooting my phone afforded me wifi-tethering, custom ROM swapping and processor overclocking: things that added a bit more depth to my gadget experience. And yet, some time later, after I spent two late-night hours at the computer, phone in hand, switching ROMs and reinstalling apps on three separate occasions, I had a revelation of sorts. I should’ve been writing, but I was here at my desk, trying to make my phone better. “This used to be fun,”Â I said to myself. “This used to be simple.”Â

Simplicity—in terms of writing, it means get to the point, to tell it straight and to be clear. So here I am, holding the new Samsung Fascinate in my hand. Its cartoony, iOS-like interface bothers me; the shape of the phone, similar to the iPhone 3GS in my opinion, appeals to me, its plastic build notwithstanding. But to get rid of the UI skin, I’d have to root the phone and slap a new launcher on top of it. I’d have to hack away to dispose of the default Microsoft Bing seach functionality—Microsoft’s search engine on a Google-powered phone. I look over to the gargantuanDroid X, ruined by Motorola’s own UI skin and its lockdown of the phone’s bootloader, rendering it near impossible to install a new ROM.

I don’t have time for this shit.

But the Fascinate comes with a Buy One, Get Any Phone Free deal—it’s been a personal mission of mine to get my fiancee away from Blackberry. So I ask an employee about the deal, thinking I’d stomach the Fascinate while my fiancee takes on the Droid X. As the middle-aged white woman, with wrinkly neck and fresh-pressed white shirt, click-clacks on the keyboard, I think to myself, “Here we go again.”Â From the corner of my eye, I see the AT&T store. Yet, I wait for the employee to finish; she looks up and says, “Your New Every Two upgrade is available in two weeks. You can’t use it now; you’d have to buy the phones at full price. And we would charge an additional $20.”Â

I can feel the sweat bubbling from my forehead. “Twenty bucks? For what? And why can’t I upgrade at the discounted price, at least?”Â

“I’m sorry, sir.”Â

“If I go online, I won’t get charged twenty bucks AND I can get the phones discounted.”Â

“That’s not correct, sir.”Â

I know I’m right. I’m a gadget freak; I know the ins and outs of my cell phone contract, I know the loopholes and I know what I can and can’t do. My fiancee grabs my arm as I turn away from the employee, then begin to turn back to curse her out. My fiancee knows me, knows my ins and outs, and knows when its time to pull me away. As we walk away, I drag my luggage and say to my fiancee, “I’m done.”Â

I’m done pretending to not want something. I’ve wanted the iPhone since it was released and, given I couldn’t afford one, I drummed up reasons for hating it. Indeed, it is not perfect, but I had enough of making a Blackberry or Android into an iPhone. Later that night, I work out the details with my fiancee—she can have the Verizon account to maintain her number, as well as her sister’s on our family plan, and it’ll be under my name to use my day-job discount. With a call to Verizon, an $80 early termination fee and a trip to the AT&T store, things are simpler now. Just get to the point, do what you want and live with the results.

iPhone

Touch Down In London-Town*: A Honeymoon In Three Parts

Parable of the iPhone