Unlike the viral prank video, I have not drilled a hole into the bottom left-hand corner of my iPhone, but you wouldn’t know that to look at it. The fascia, after being dropped on to hard concrete a few months ago, had a faint hairline crack across it, which after several more accidents spread outwards like the limbs on a tree until an entire chunk fell off, revealing the naked eye of the camera. Every time I look at it, it feels like staring into the face of a dystopian future.
To keep using something so close to broken is odd, particularly as our relationship with technology becomes increasingly seamless. For long periods, I forget how the device looks, then hand it over to someone to show them a photo of my children and watch them recoil. (Of course, it could be they are recoiling at some hideousness in my children that, as their mother, I will never, ever be able to see.)
The point is, I wouldn’t watch TV if there were a huge crack across the screen, and if my kettle broke I would get it fixed. But for some reason, I let this one stand. It is partly because I’m cheap, and partly because I’m lazy. But it is also to do with something I detect as resentment. I was never one to love Apple products; the clean lines make me nervous, and the store, with its lack of structure and those people in blue T-shirts milling about in lieu of a cash desk, feels as wrong to me as newscasters wandering about to deliver the news.
I know I’m not the only person to keep using their cracked iPhone. I see them around all the time and feel a sense of solidarity with their owners that is, I’m sure, wholly imagined. But I do wonder, as I look at my phone approximately 45,000 times a day, if there isn’t something to be said for being reminded with every glance that it is a cheap, breakable, crappy piece of glass and metal, and not a portal to the infinite.
50 is the new … 50?
A long profile of Sarah Jessica Parker ran in the New York Times magazine last week, in which a single phrase caught my eye. In the process of describing Parker – who stars in the HBO comedy Divorce, created by the writer/actor Sharon Horgan – it pegged her, now 51, as inhabiting, “early middle age”. I will be 41 this November and God knows I’m telling myself 40 is the new 30 is the new black is the new burger. But even with life expectancy in the US at nearly 80, can 51 really be described that generously? In 10 years’ time, Parker would be forcibly retired from most US government jobs. If she were a fire-fighter, she’d probably already be on the bench. I say this not, as the formulation goes, to age-shame the woman, only to suggest that there might be some strength in letting 50 be 50 and not sell it as younger.
How much is that in lattes?
Another off-putting sales pitch this week came from the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, membership of which is tiny compared to every other play space in the city, with annual dues – tax deductible! – of $225 (indoor playgrounds that are not run as non-profits start at well over $1,000). Still, I was unnerved to see the museum tout membership as equal to “the price of a latte a week”. In the panic maths one does to justify expense, the latte is a reliable unit, small enough to seem trivial but still a luxury one tells oneself to forgo in tough times. Just this week, a bill came in that I tried to rationalise in terms of the egg sandwiches I buy daily from the snack truck across the street and that I won’t be buying for two days until I forget. These calculations are stupid, irrational, and almost impossible to resist, and it feels like poor sportsmanship for a company to encourage them.
