iForget

Okay, I admit it. I bought an iPhone.

Yes, I realize that I specifically counseled the readers of this blog not to buy iPhones. I believe I also referred to the iPhone as the "High School Cheerleader of Cell Phones" in an attempt to underscore the superficiality of spending $400 on a phone just because it looked cooler than other phones.

In jumping to that rash conclusion, I didn't give take into account two factors:

It is damn shiny and, God help me, so very pretty.

I'm glad that I spent the $400, actually, because not only did I pick up a sexy new phone, I also learned something important about myself. I'm not referring to the fact that I'm a shallow consumer tool with too much money and not enough common sense. I already knew that. I'm referring to a revelation that occurred as I transferred all of my contacts to my new phone.

As you may know, the iPhone is not just a phone. It's an e-mail client. It's a Web browser. It plays music. It takes pictures. It stops nipple chafing when applied directly to the male breast.

Okay. I made that last part up.

The point is this: getting an iPhone required me to punch in not only the name and phone numbers of all the significant people in my life, but their physical addresses and e-mail addresses as well. I also needed to put in the Web addresses of my favorite sites. I started to set everything up immediately after buying the iPhone, once I reached my car in the parking lot. I stopped about two minutes later.

Other than my wife's cell phone number - which used to be my number - I remembered exactly none of that pertinent information.

I depend on computers and cell phones so much that I have not bothered to remember any of the information of any of my friends. I don't know their phone numbers. I don't know their e-mail addresses either.

A couple of days later, the rest of the epiphany came into focus. My eight year-old son, Gabriel, was wrestling with subtraction problems. I easily walked him through the first twenty or so problems. Then we came to a thorny nest of problems where you had to "borrow" from the next column of numbers. Suddenly, I mentally stumbled in explaining the process to my son. I realized that I hadn't done even simple math in years without using a calculator. And right then, I realized that I'm actually getting stupider because of my electronic devices.

I have become e-tarded.