Singled Out: Falling in Love with iPhone

I hate to say it, but there's a slight poss

ibility that the world has gone completely mad.
Miley Cyrus has written an autobiography? Am I the only sane mind who sees the irony and total absurdity of this? She's only 16 years old for God's Sake! What can she possibly have to say? Or better yet, what can she possibly have to say that we should care about? Seriously, how many pages can she, realistically speaking, produce for this autobiography of hers that would be of any substance?

Luckily, someone on her team had the wits, lucidity and slight sarcastic sense of humor to title it Miles to Go. At least I'll give her credit for subtly admitting she's not taking herself seriously while absolutely taking us all for a bunch of idiots. Because ultimately she knows her book will generate skyrocketing sales and that the numbers in her bank account will go up the roof -- no matter what. Sadly, nothing can change the predictability of this outcome. Her book could even just be a series of blank pages as a metaphor for the suggested "miles to go" and it would still hit the jackpot.

Yes, I'm sorry to say but we - notice I am including myself - are a bunch of idiots. If we weren't before, then the Miley Cyrus's of the world would never even dare to insult our intelligence by penning down the inconsequential story of her very-very-very short life - which by the way I am pretty confident a ghost-writer scribbled on her behalf. And I undeniably know that I am not particularly the ideal consumer and evidently do not fit the profile of the targeted demographic group of Cyrus' marketing campaign... but still!

Who can deny the universal law of attraction attached to the very basic marketing concept known as the MUST HAVE socio-psychological phenomenon - the art of making people believe that the purchase of a specific item is primordial to the pursuit of their happiness, that they must have it right here, right now, or else their lives would be meaningless and insignificant, as would they.   

The more people flock like sheep, the more successful the product becomes. Why? Because that dynamic calls upon the most primitive form of our human emotions, namely the obsessive, ego-driven need for acceptance of others, the need to fit in, to identify and to belong. And I'll cop to it, I'm guilty of letting my buyer's impulse be dictated by the golden rule of "Do buy  yourself that which others  would have you  buy for  them."


As recently as last Sunday I once again drank the Kool-Aid.
In what my friend Beth qualifies as a "you are sounding more blond every day" moment, I unintentionally dropped my blackberry into my puppy's water bowl.  
I might have been able to save it had I immediately been aware it took a majestic dive on its own - but needless to say I didn't.

God knows how long that damned phone had been swimming in that filthy puddle of water before I thought of retrieving it. Suddenly my whole world came to an abrupt halt. Stricken with panic, I proceeded to perform every conceivable CPR technique I could to resuscitate the phone - ingeniously resorting to the blow dryer, the microwave, a sunbathing session a la natural and an entire roll of Bounty. Evidently, it was to no avail. When at last, the final diagnostic that my blackberry had sadly passed was pronounced, I felt the imminent death of me.

Not just for a moment, but seemingly forever, I had an intense separation anxiety attack.
It was as if I had brutally leaped into nothingness -- metaphysically reduced to a minuscule particle as imperceptible and meaningless as dust.

Of course, being the absolute professional paranoid that I am, I engaged in an impressive and nonsensical mental monologue with myself along the lines of:
"Oh my god, I am naked, totally alone! I've lost my identity, my existentialistic purpose; I'm irrelevant, obsolete; I've fallen into derelict. I'm completely disconnected from the world, cast away; no one will ever find me again!"
Suddenly in a moment of sheer luck, my voice of reason interrupted the frenzy.
"I'm demented, listen to me!" were the encouraging words echoing in my head.

When I finally stopped my voyage into drama land and came back to my senses, I found myself more aggravated at the fact that I had pathetically let a benign high-tech electronic device devastatingly affect me, than at the actual loss of the gadget itself.

Let's put things in perspective here, I was much more of an autodidact back in the land-lines days than in the "can you hear me now" years. How did I become so co-dependant on modern technology?

Evidently, I drove my ass in maniac mode to the nearest AT & T store to reconnect myself pronto with the real world. That's when and where the real mental torture took place: do I go back to the "crackberry" or do I switch to the lethally more hardcore, epidemically addictive fruit known as Apple? Hmmm, to iPhone or not to iPhone? That was the problematic question, although not really.



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(continued)

In my case, I had long ago made up my mind on always letting the organic progression of my innately natural addictive disposition be the gateway that leads to consuming the next best thing. And so at the swipe of Mona's plastic, I single-handedly joined the hordes of 3G, 8GB "iFiends"  - and don't ask me what these numbers mean because I absolutely have no idea, but they sure do sound fancy!

I'll have you know that what really motivated my purchase -- beyond the fact that image wise it does in a logically illogical fashion elevate your social status - was the urgency for practicality. Admittedly, what totally sold me on the iPhone had nothing to do with the many luxuriously complex gimmicks it offers but everything to do with the feature I like to call "how Mona got her groove back." Yes my not-so impulsively irrational buy was incontestably fueled by the irresistible MUST OWN, MUST GET option of having every single one of my ring tones match the entirety of George Michael's music repertoire.

Considering that I never ever leave my house without my phone and my tunes, I saw in the iPhone the golden opportunity to not only downsize but also to kill two birds with one stone. No more cramping my style having to unfashionably and quite cumbersomely carry around the cell and the iPod.

From now on I am technologically compact, fashionably intact, and yes extraordinarily fucked - ironically I can already hear the new marketing slogan: Welcome Mona to your horizon wireless mess: we never stop working on screwing you!

While I have yet to overcome my "reading manuals" phobia to learn how to operate and fully enjoy the world of infinite opportunities this fancy-shmancy portable telephonic apparatus comes with, I can confidently affirm that I have already mastered one of its, perhaps, most fundamental features. You know that one contagious maneuver that the rest of the iPhone-owner idiots, like me, religiously perform every minute of every hour everywhere around the world namely, keeping your "i (on the) Phone" at all times!

What can I say? Obviously, I too still have miles to go ...