iPhones – Friend or Foe?

I am an old fashioned girl. In some respects, at least. My current cell phone has 3 basic functions: 1) to take/receive phone calls; 2) (clumsily) send/receive texts and 3) to make me look like a social pariah when using it in public cause I don’t have internet, email, video, apps, gps, etc.

I am on the fence about these new fangled fancy phones with their apps that give you directions, count your calories, pick a restaurant for you, do your calculus homework for you, and a whole host of other things that take the work out of living. On one hand, it would be nice to have directions at your fingertips -when K and I explore a new area of LA, we have that ultra cumbersome task of having to print off mapquest directions. Yes, people still do that. Taking the decision out of our hands for where to eat tonight might save hours of argument. Hell, I bet there’s an app for doing a recipe search and it automatically generates a shopping list for you and locates the grocery store that offers the best price on those items. I would love that.

On the other hand, are all these helpful apps really just making our life easier, or in actuality taking away our ability to put effort into something? Like, if we become accustomed to having all the answers at our fingertips, never having to really think about the where, why and how to get these answers, are we really doing ourselves a favor? Will we lose the ability to problem solve? To make our own decisions? Have the ability to read a map? Understand how to calculate a 30% off sale price? I know I sound like a curmudgeonly old bitch here, but I have always thought that sometimes the effort you put into something is just as important as the final result.

Of course, I realize I am totally generalizing – I’m sure the 90% of the people who own these kind of phones do know how to read a map, deduct 30% from the price of an item, can decide for themselves that they want to Sushi versus Italian for dinner, or look up a phone number in a phone book. I’m not advocating against technology here. I just believe that the easiest way is not always the best way.

Ok, off the soapbox for today.

At least I didn’t get into how annoying it is to have to hear people bitch and moan about being broke all the time, when they have a $100 month cell phone bill cause they NEED access to twitter, Facebook, gmail every second of the day.

You have got to be kidding me… The Bachelor

So last night, K and I were watching the Olympics and during commercial breaks we would flip to another station. We stumbled upon a travesty of a reality show… a show that I’ve never watched, but have been hearing about for years.

The Bachelor. WTF?

Now, first, I must defend our choice to actually watch that show longer than a cursorily drive by . I saw that they were filming in St. Lucia, which is where K and I are going on vaca later this year. We really know nothing about St Lucia except it’s in the Caribbean and likened to a tropical paradise. And that we won a free trip there when we won the Newlywed Game Show a few months ago (that’s another day, in a more positive post). We were really just trying to check out what the island looked like, get a feel for the place.

Anyway. The Bachelor. He has to be one of the least genuine or least original people ever to denigrate my TV set, and don’t get me started on the women. Now, I’m just being totally logical here, but how on earth can a women “be in totally in love” with a guy who a) she has known for less than 4 weeks b) she knows that he’s banging other women at the same time he’s making moony eyes and relaying proclimations of love or 3) he can’t come up with one original emotion that was not force fed to him by the producers. Everything he said sounded like he was reading lines from a play. A nightmare of a play. I sincerely hope the reason that the Bachelor series is so popular, is because it’s a hilarious train wreck, and watching vapid, intellectually devoid women cry is a fun pastime for us Americans. Not because this mess is anything to aspire to. Christ.

Man, I sound like a bitch. OK, rant over.