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Well this is just getting ridiculous.

In the last few weeks I've:

• found out that I'm going to be a birth partner for one of my best friends, which I'd hoped I'd get to do but had thought I wouldn't be able to
• found myself set to go on a trek in Nepal, which is also pretty amazing, after moping about how I haven't travelled in a while and would love to again soon
• and now...

The other  month I was trying to get towards maybe encouraging myself to maybe possibly thing about getting around to one day maybe finally buy a new phone after buttons started falling off my old one, but thought it'd be a while before I got around to it, knowing myself and my tendencies towards procrastination and avoidance of new technology.

Well, yesterday I bought a new phone.

Not just a new phone but a new new phone!

After exactly one evening of getting to play around with my friend's phone and her giving me a genuine but very casual

I feel like Jay in Dogma, flinging my arms out and yelling 'Beautiful, naked, big-titted women don't just fall out of the sky you know!' except in my case, buxom lasses actually do start descending from on high.

This is my new phone.

 A HTC Velocity*.

If you've heard terrible things about it, keep them to yourself because as with everything in life, once I've made up my mind, I care not for the opinions of others. Or at least it's too late for the opinions of others and as it hasn't given me any trouble so far I'd prefer to live on in blissful ignorance.

It's got a fairly intuitive set up and there's nothing I need it to do that I haven't been able to get it to do so far.

Most of what it's taught me so far is the importance of decent sized pockets and exactly how gross and smudge-y the human finger is.

So, yes, I managed to buy a new new phone instead of clinging desperately to the old ways, well done me!

Now to think of some other things to remark upon because obviously this has become a magical wishing blog and I should take advantage of that whilst the enchantment lasts!



*'A HTC', I said. It'll be a cold day in hell before I'll use 'an' before words beginning with H. H is not a vowel, people.

Me Vs Me: The Adventures Of A Luddite

The refrain of 'If this is the future, where's my jetpack?' has been knocking around for a fair old while now but based on my customary approach to things, if we had jetpacks available to us, I probably wouldn't use one.

At least not until all the early adopters worked out the bugs - their recognition for these contributions possibly accorded posthumously - and it became absolutely necessary.

I'm basing this assumption on the fact that a button has recently fallen off my mobile phone, forcefully reminding me that I need to buy a new one, and the amount of trouble I'm having deciding on what sort of phone to get does not bode well for my adopting any other forms of technology without putting up a fight.

I've mentioned before that I'm a bit technologically disadvantaged, a bit reluctant to take up certain things, and this definitely applies to the way I think about phones.

It's the cynical, old-before-my-time part of my personality that drives this, viciously gumming a butterscotch as it mutters under its breath that phones are for phone calls and if I wanted to take a photo or access the internet I'd use a dang camera or a gosh-dang laptop computer.

The part of me that wants to try new things is valiantly struggling against this argument, a little more strongly than it used to in the past.

If we get a touch-screen phone, it whispers, we'll be a step closer to having a computer book like Penny. I know I said your laptop was like that but isn't a phone better?

We'd be like Ford Prefect, scrolling through The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and checking out the entry on Eccentrica Gallumbits, The Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon 6!

I'd been having some luck talking myself around to this way of thinking until some friends responded to my remarks about my broken button meaning I needed to get a new phone by commenting that the fact that my phone had buttons at all was the reason I needed to get a new phone.

This is a terrible approach to getting me to try new things.

I react to it in much the same way I did as a teenager to comments like 'Well, look who's finally up!'

I turn around and get back into bed.

In this scenario, bed is a metaphor for old phones.

That sulky part of me would rather like to track down one of my favourite handsets - the Nokia 6085 - and just stick with that for another few years.


It made me feel like I was a Star Fleet officer.

I think I'm going to be able to overcome my hesitant, grumpy self and take a step into the future* to join everybody else, but I'm approaching it slowly so as not to startle myself.

The only thing I can say for sure is that it won't be an iPhone, for no better reason than I can't stand the way that people go on about them.

This may be as irrational as saying I'm not going to try penicillin because of the way everybody keeps knobbing on about it but it's an aversion that's pretty well cemented in.

Now I just have to find a viable alternative, get used to the idea and then hold my nerve all the way up to the register!



*Or even the present would be a good start!