I love my new phone.  I now text.  Texting took so long on my old phone that I tried never to do it.  My old phone looked like this:

My new phone is a “slider” with a full, QWERTY keyboard.  I can take pictures and send them with ease.  I can upload pictures to Facebook (they’re usually upside down or sideways, but still).  Get this: I actually cut my thumbnails shorter the other day so they didn’t interfere with my texting!  I have begun to really appreciate my phone’s calendar (I’ve entered new appointments while standing still standing in the vicinity of the counter where I booked them – AWESOME) and I’ve used the Memo tool for my Costco and Wal-Mart shopping lists.  Plus (and this is very important) my phone is a nice color pink and it has decorative squiggles on the back

– the only way I might like it better is if it was a nice periwinkle blue with sparkley squiggles and it talked to me throughout the day when appropriate like a positive personal assistant.  “Don’t forget you have physical therapy for your shoulder this afternoon and by the way, that new ring of yours is GORGEOUS!” 

Still.

I have a limited number of people who call me on the cell phone and I still do NOT want to be accessible all the time.  I know that some people do this.  Kids especially.  How do they do it?  Better yet, WHY do they do it?  It must take forever to do everything…  “morning. What r u wearing?” “IDK yet. im taking a poo right now.” Well, maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s got to be close.  I remember in high school, spending HOURS on the phone with my friends, and we were in the same classes as well.  My dad always knew where I was because all he had to do was follow the long phone cord (We had 2 twenty foot cords connected together. YES, those were the days before cordless phones.)  He sometimes had to yell at me to get off the phone at 9:00 p.m. because I had been talking since dinner ended, but at least when that happened, there were no midnight consultations, no comparing and contrasting of gossip when I should have been sleeping, no "he said" "she said" at the bleary eyed hour of 2 a.m.  I remember reading an article a few years ago that said that most teenagers are sleep deprived because they send text messages into the wee hours of the morning.  It can’t be THAT bad, I thought.  I asked a class of 9^th graders, just for curiosity’s sake, how many of them regularly stayed up past 2:00 a.m. sending and receiving text messages, and HALF THE CLASS raised their hands!  Yikes.  Did their parents know?  I wondered.

I love my new phone, but not that much.