The Ink-Pot and the Palette

It came! It's here! It's my new Xperia X1 phone, and it's fabulous.

It's slim and cool-metal sleek, and satisfyingly heavy in the hand. The keyboard slides out in this sort of little curvy way. The display is sharp and bright and high-res, and the touch screen is incredibly sensitive and responsive. It has an FM radio--a feature I didn't care about till I tried it this morning on my way to work and realized that the radio owns way more music than I do.

I'm riding the bus and listening to KGON Classic Rock (aka Dean Winchester music) and reading my instructions and pressing buttons and just generally geeking out, and just as I get downtown and step out into the rain, KGON starts playing "Renegade" by Styx. I am not kidding.

(*sings* Oh, mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law...)

My fellow Supernatural fans will appreciate how much this put a big shit-eating grin on my face.

So I pass a good-looking kid on the street who, though I can't hear him (because of the rather good in-ear earphones that came with the phone), makes it clear by sign language that he would like me to spare him some change.

In my mind, I'm all, well, I can't because I just spent a perfectly ridiculous sum of money on a new phone. And then I felt like crap and started blaming the world for being topsy turvy.

Which it is. But my new phone is making me kind of happy.

Okay, I did it. After six minutes of online research and many months of obsessive rechecking and waiting for availability and hoping the price would come down at least a little, I've finally ordered my new phone, the SonyEricsson Xperia X1.

I obsess a long time and then, what the hey, just jump. Besides, the right stereo channel in my current phone died the other day and that was a sign.

The new one does what I want, to wit: everything my current phone does, faster with a prettier display, plus GPS. And it'll take an 8 gigabyte microSD card, so several episodes of Supernatural highbrow documentary television can be on it at once.

And so, in conclusion, Merry Birthday to me. And yay gadgets.