Crisis Averted

I remember vividly the first time I heard about the iPhone. I don't remember the exact date, but Wikipedia says it must have been Jan. 9, 2007.

I was walking from my apartment at Heritage Manor at BYU-Idaho when my phone rang. My sad, tired, cute little flip phone that showed the caller's photo when a call came in—it was pretty much state-of-the-art.

It was my friend Nic. He was breathless with excitement. "Bre!" he said. "You'll never guess what Apple announced today."

"Another iPod?" I asked. I am not an innovative thinker, apparently.

"An iPhone," he said. "Isn't that amazing?"

We were both huge Apple fans, so this pretty much the best news ever. I listened as he explained that the new device would be a phone AND a camera AND an iPod all in one. (Apps were yet to be. I think our heads would have exploded if someone had said it would also be a barcode scanner, GPS, game console, friend directory, Internet browser, notebook, recipe finder, score center and everything else.)

"That's, like, everything in my purse!" I said. "I would only need one thing!"

But as (bad) luck would have it, the iPhone turned out to a) cost about a billion dollars in college student money and b) only be available on AT&T. I'd just have to wait for an iPhone, I decided.

Here I am seven years, one college degree, two children and four smartphones later. I've still never owned an iPhone.

-----------------

I don't know what it is lately, but I've felt kind of bored with myself. Not with my children, or with Ryan, or with what we have going on in our lives. But bored with me, with my habits, my likes, my dislikes.

It's like I don't even have to think about decisions anymore. I know pretty much what I'm going to order at every restaurant, where I'll sit at the movie theater, what movies I will see, what kinds of books I'll read. My sense of adventure is lacking. My life is on cruise control.

I'm coming up on my 26th birthday. This summer we will celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary. Is this what they call a quarter-life crisis? Probably not, at least not in its true sense. But it's a crisis all the same, just a-brewing in my soul ...

So when I discovered that I was eligible for a phone upgrade and that all those barriers to my entrance into the iPhone world were now gone, I picked up the phone to order it. (Interestingly, this happened on my friend Nic's birthday. Isn't that kind of Twilight Zone?)

I'd set my sights on the iPhone 5C. And I knew exactly which color I would choose.

My favorite color is blue. My entire closet is blue. My personality on the Color Code? Blue. My niece asked me what my three favorite colors were. I told her blue, light blue and ... gray, I guess? My wedding color. My bedspread. My first car. Blue, blue, blue.

But in an act of uncharacteristic spontaneity and reckless abandon, I changed my mind at the last minute. This arrived on my doorstep today:

I guess I can still surprise myself.