I need to be nagged, it seems.

 It is a lovely and soft and warm and sunny April morning and I am having my second cup of coffee after a little walk in the early light.  It's part of my learning to live again in what I call my post-plague life. I, alas, had a very close encounter with the Virulent Virus and I am more or less learning to walk and talk again. Sometimes my eyesight is still a little fuzzy, which may be part of the reason the morning seems soft.

How did I, who lives out here on the edge of nowhere and never sees anybody up close and who hasn't been in a crowd for years, catch the plague?  Well of course the obvious answer is that I breathed in some of the little beasties, and they found my lungs a happy home and soon I was coughing and sore all over my body and had a fever and could hardly move.  But there is I think a more important reason, and that is not so much the availability of the virus as the unavailability of human interaction linked with a general languor brought about by the lock down.

In my 'normal' life I go out into the big world every day, and hang out at coffee shops where I can sit in the window and watch the beautiful people go by while I sip my espresso.  During the lockdown, all I could do was buy a paper cup of not-very-good drip coffee and take it far away from the other people, ugly or beautiful.  In my 'normal' life I ate out a lot.  I'm lazy, so when I remodeled my little tin can nearly four years ago, I just didn't put in a kitchen so I would never have to clean a stove again.  During the lockdown, what food that was available to eat out was over-priced--I mean, the restaurants still have their normal expenses--and in styrofoam containers with plastic forks.  So, gradually, I went out less and less and became lazier and lazier, often just having cold cereal for brekkers instant ramen for dindin.  But for most of the Covidian Captivity, I still got in a bit of exercise every day.  My smart watch, an LG until last January and then and Apple Watch for two months, would nag me into just moving another thirteen minutes and nine seconds to close some wonderful ring for another merit badge.  Annoying, but probably life-saving.  And then I got tired of all things Apple, and I sold the watch.  And no one nagged me to go that extra 267 yards.  And it rained.  And I quit my usual  walking circuit of duck pond and building sites  and probably even worse, I quit riding my bike to buy more Cheerios and ramen, because of the mud, and took the bus.  Which is probably where the virus found my lungss.

So, post-plague, I have a nice bright new nagger, a made-in-China TikWatch something or another.  And it nags me delightfully well.  This morning, no sooner had I finished my first cup of coffee and eaten my Cheerios--Cheerios with bananas and cranberries and cottage cheese and milk--but it told me it was time to move around a bit.  So, I went out into the top of the morning and walked  .45 miles and enjoyed the budding plants along the way.  

I do not intend to host the Virulent Virus or any other inconvenient disease again if I can help it.  And since I am by nature a lazy bum, I will put up with a bit of nagging along the way.

Is good the enemy of the best, or is more the enemy of enough?

 

Please bear with me as I share a very first-world problem.  But since you, my constant readers, almost certainly share in my first world, I hope for some understanding.

My dilemma has its roots in my starting a YouTube channel.  A couple of friends thought I had something to share with the world, so I eagerly agreed.  What I had to share were the insights I had gathered many years ago from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  Material for maybe five videos, which I more or less made and which quickly gathered me maybe eleven subscribers.  And then I fell into the black hole of unboxing.

I think I started with a video about unboxing the unboxing phenomenon.  And then I actually started unboxing stuff.  I dare not add up how much money I spent (look at it as stimulating the economy, stupid) buying stuff I didn't really need because it would make videos.  I even unboxed books, but of course it was the unboxing of electronics that, over maybe two years, brought me about 350 subscribers.  And a good YouTuber who follows tech has to keep up with all the developments on all the major platforms, right, so soon I had a pile of devices all nicely unboxed and videoed and stacked.

Now I have long been an Android kinda guy.  I guess maybe because I'm old, since it seems that teenagers only buy iPhones, but whatever, I thought I should try the most orthodox of Android experiences and buy a Pixel Phone.  But when I got to the store, I didn't like the way it felt.  What I did enjoy in my hand was a shiny new iPhone, which I bought in projectRed, fighting aids and my own prejudice against all things Apple in one convenient purchase.

So I explored the iPhone, and--more unboxings--all the wonders of the 'Apple ecosystem'.  I must confess I liked something about most of the devices except the MacBook.  It was a pretty little thing, but to someone accustomed to using a Chromebook, Mac OS just seemed a clutttered fuck.  I sold it.  But as time went by, I found myself feeling that the Apple devices were using me rather than my using them, and because all good YouTubers have at least two phones, I bought another Android phone, a nice and inexpensive LG Stylo 6.  Short story short, within a month I had sold all my Apple devices because I really preferred having electronics that work for me instead of my working for them.

And I have loved using the Stylo 6. It's a little slow opening the camera app, but no slower than the time it took to remove the lens cover on the Nikon I had when I was a 'real' photographer.  It has kinda big bezels, but they allow me to get a good grip on the phone without instigating something happening on the screen.  And the LG done gone and gone out of the smart phone business.  I haven't felt so orphaned since Saab got bought by GM.  

Enter the first-world problem of choices.  (One of which I confess remains ditching everything electronic and moving into a cave with one big book and maybe a small bear.)

Unfortunately, caves are relatively hard to find on-line and new electronic wonders are easy, so I was seduced by T-Mobile's offer of LG's ultimate phone, the Velvet, for half-price.  I pushed all the little buttons, and now it's on its way to my little tin can in the woods.  It was like offering an Edesel lover a 1961 Edsel for $1000.

But I am feeling like a traitor to my faithful Stylo 6, which is not nearly so flashy as the Velvet,  nor will it likely be supported for so long, but which has been my faithful friend in sickness and in health and which does everything I  ask it to do and it's paid for.

Which finally, constant reader, brings me to my point, if I have one.  Why is adequate not considered sufficient?  Or, to put it in McLuhan's terms of our devices as extensions of ourselves, why, when I am perfectly adequately extended by my Stylo, which is a bit slow and dated in appearance, but which more or less matches my sitz im leben, want to put on airs with a stylish and flashy Velvet? Or, to put it in Toffler's terms, am I just feeling too much future shock?

It is of course a small thing, this deciding whether to accept delivery of a  new phone or to keep the old wineskin.  But it is, I think, an example of the sorts of decisions that make living in the first world so stressful.  Do any of you constant readers know of a good cave, preferably with air-conditioning and high speed internet?  I have a nice big book.