Friday June 18, 2004

The Magnetic Appeal of Stuff

The Earth wanders serene through the cosmos, untroubled by most of the junk in its path -- until some piece of that junk starts emitting gravitational pheromones, and the mating dance begins.  Depending on the size of the junk, we either we get a pretty light show in the night sky... or Armageddon (the movie, not the biblical thing), and next thing you know, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck have to suit up and save the world.  And between Demi and J Lo and their pheromones, don't they have enough to deal with already?

I find the same thing happens in my life.  Some random piece of stuff enters the remote outer reachs of my gravitational sphere... and I have to have it.

I first noticed this a couple of years ago, in regards to a pocket knife.  Maybe it was because I wasn't allowed to have one (a cool one, anyway) when I was a kid, or maybe (more likely) it was some Maslovian urge for personal security post 9/11.  I had to have one.  I spent days searching the web for just the right one, at the right price -- since I was wracked by guilt over spending real money on something so obviously useless.  The thing arrived, so big I felt positively criminal walking around with it in my pocket.  So I sent it back for the more modest model -- not as deadly looking, but still enough to make me feel weird carrying it.  It's now somewhere at the bottom of my sock drawer.

The next time it hit me, I wanted a 6 D-Cell Maglite.  I like Maglites.  I own a single AAA-Cell 'Solitaire', a double AA-Cell 'Mini Maglite', and a two D-Cell flashlight, which I keep in my car, partly to light things up, and partly because it feels like a club.  That security thing again.  Why I wanted the 6-D Cell behemoth, I cannot tell you.  It's 19 1/2 inches long, weighs over 3 pounds (the approximate weight of a small dumbell), and is more like a walking stick than a flashlight.

This time I resisted.  Probably because if I'd tried to hide it in my pocket, it would have stuck out to the height of my shoulder.  I'd have to measure my sock drawer to see if it would fit there next to the pocket knife.

The reason I bring all of this up is that it's happening again.  I just bought my wife and kids all new cell phones, lovely little Sony Ericsson T226's that play the latest downloadable polyphonic ringtones.  Someone calls my wife, "I Like The Way You Move" starts playing from the depths of her Dooney & Bourke.  And now I want one.  Not one of the basic ones either, but this snappy new T637 camera phone that just hit the Cingular store.

I like the phone I have now, a relatively new and perfectly functional Nokia 3560.  It does everything I want.  I can even talk to it: "Call Home." "Set Silent."  (Get strange looks talking to my phone rather than into it, but nothing like the looks I'd get with a 19 inch flashlight sticking out of my pocket.)

I do not need a new phone.  It's multi-band GSM capabilities would let me place and receive calls from many foreign countries I have no intention of visiting.  Ever.  Being a camera phone, I could not take it into the locker room at the local YMCA or into the Supreme Court, so in those regards, it's completely impractical.  You never know when I might want to drop in on the Supreme Court, say, to find out who the next President's going to be.  I don't even like taking pictures.  Love cameras -- there's that magnetic appeal of stuff thing again -- hate taking pictures.

But if I had a camera phone, I could put pictures in this blog!  Grainy, blurry, off-color pictures of people and places you could not possibly be interested in seeing.

Maybe you want me to get it?