How to ruin your eyesight and destroy several hundred dollars of technology at the same time
I could live
without a phone. I didn’t have a phone until last summer, my parents and I both
didn’t see the need, but I had always wanted one. When I was much younger,
around 3th or 4th grade, I asked for a phone for the
first time. I had no understanding of the amount of money that a phone costs and
so naive me thought it was a perfectly reasonable request for a present. When
my birthday came around I was mildly disappointed.
I don’t know if
anyone remembers the first-generation iPod Shuffle, but that was the gift I received.
This was the rectangular generation before the square generation that everyone
remembers most people don’t remember anyways. The additional half in inch
in the 1 inch by 1 inch square of metal allowed the battery to last for almost
a whole day of playing. This ended up being terribly annoying because I charged
it so infrequently that I never remember to charge it and it would always die
when I needed it most. It took an entire 23 minutes to get over the tragic sadness
of not having a phone. I could live without a phone.
The iPod Shuffle
became my life I filled it’s 1 gigabyte of storage with hundreds of songs. The
lump of metal really began to affect my life after my Dad introduced me to the
podcast. I started with Car Talk, a show two hilariously funny guys coming up
with resolutions to people’s car problems while making fun of themselves at the
same time, and it was haven. I snuck my iPod into my room after I was supposed
to be asleep to listen to every episode over and over again. Quickly my interests
expanded from old cars to other shows like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, which was a
caller response game show, and This American Life, which was a series of
engaging stories about ordinary Americans who had a story to tell. My Shuffle
lasted me for 4 years before I managed to dislocate the play button and drop it
into the sink with the water running. I was ready for something new.
My next era of
pocket sized device was the iPod Nano. This thing was mind boggling. It had a screen. It even looked like a smaller
version of the iPhone that I so badly needed. With the introduction of the
screen came something magical. I could watch movies off of it. This was completely
unprecedented. I was too scared to even try it until my brother, who also got
an iPod Nano that Christmas, bravely set foot into this unknown territory. For
a school project, that to this day I still do not understand, my brother had to
watch the batman movies and so he (very legally) burned the disk that we got
from the library onto our home computer and copied it over to his iPod (burning
in this sense does not mean setting the disk on fire, rather it means taking
the data on the DVD and copying it over to the hard disk on the computer). I
watched the entire Christopher Nolan trilogy 26 times over the next 3 months. I
partly attribute my terrible eyesight to the 150 odd hours sitting with a tiny
screen inches from my face. I was happy. I didn’t need anything more than an
iPod Nano. So after three years when I left it on the kitchen counter and
someone (my mom) spilled water all over it and the screen fell off I was very
sad.
Last summer I got
my first phone. I wanted it because I missed the fun times that I had had with
my previous devices. I finally actually needed it too. My parents wanted a way
to contact me when I was driving by myself. It was perfect, but I really could
live without it. I don’t need to have a phone. My Shuffle was wonderful and we
had so many good times together. My Nano, even though it might have ruined my
eye sight, was also an amazing part of my early middle school years. Right now,
I couldn’t ask for more. However, I am slowly but surely destroying my phone in
a few years something new will come.
I felt like the last sentence of the second paragraph doesn't fit with what comes before. Also, in the last paragraph, you state several reasons why you do need a phone, or at least why other people want you to have one, but you don't really elaborate on why you don't feel like you need one. I do like the idea for the essay in general though.
ReplyDeleteThe talking about bravely setting foot into the unknown territory of watching movies on that iPod was funny. I was confused near the end though when you said, " I finally actually needed [a phone] too." then a few sentences later, "I don’t need to have a phone."
ReplyDeleteI liked the part about your brother's school project. I thought that it was a nice anecdote and I thought that it was pretty funny also. I think the narration and chronology of the essay makes sense and definitely makes sense for a story of how you got your phone. I think its also cool that you spend time talking about all the fun you had before you got a phone and not just saying that phone's aren't that useful or something.
ReplyDeleteThe main idea of the essay is present (I do not need to have a phone other devices are adequate), but you might want to remove some of the more extraneous sentences, such as when you keep saying "I don't need a phone" every 5 lines. Other than that your anecdotes and reflections seem to be in good balance.
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