I've already alleged that Rage Baby is devious well beyond her years (I wonder who her mentors are?), and every single time I bring out my iPhone, I feel more and more certain that she does indeed have nefarious plans afoot. Whether I bust it out to check my email, make a phone call, post on Facebook, or, most frequently, take a picture of video of my adorable daughter doing something new or cute or just existing in a way that only a parent can find to be totally captivating, Rage is immediately on the case to foil my plans.
If I'm trying to serve food in my zombie restaurant, or collect coins from my zoo animals, or fuck someone over in words with friends because I'm a master vocabulator (yeah, stick that bad ass invention in your pipe and smoke it), I usually try to sit her in my lap so that she can watch what I'm doing. She likes the movement and music that go along with the games. Lately, her trick has been to stare at the phone as if completely in a trance until the app loads. Then she springs into action, swiping frenetically at the screen in an effort to do- well, do something anyway, I don't think even she has that angle totally figured out yet. She intends to disrupt whatever I'm trying to do as severely as her chubby and clumsy baby hands will allow, that much is clear. I'm forced to hold the phone at ever increasing distances away from the grasping child until I am physically unable to perform the essential functions of game play or until Rage starts bleating in protest of the angle I'm leaning at to keep her at bay or at being kept from acquiring and destroying her target. Needless to say that with all this dodging and evading, I don't get much accomplished with the apps I like to use during the hours when hands-on baby care is occurring.
Every now and then, it's imperative I make a phone call. Usually these phone calls are essential to Rage Baby's health care or disability classification in some way, and entail navigating through an automated routing system that doesn't allow you to use your keypad to make a menu choice, but rather requires you to say aloud your name, ID number, the issue with which you are requesting assistance, and so on. On the best of days, these systems are aggravating and not the least bit helpful, repeatedly mistaking your careful pronunciation of "YES" for "SPANISH" and changing over to a telenovela announcer repeating your choices or redirecting you eight times through the same menu or series of options before hanging up on you. Such calls require a persistent and unflagging determination to beat the odds and get in touch with a real live person, and a completely quiet environment, as the merest shift of a passing moth's wings can fool the system into believing you've said something and responding, "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Please repeat your request." (My typical reaction at that point is usually shouting "I DIDN'T MAKE A REQUEST YOU CUNT! GET A TOUCH PAD SYSTEM LIKE EVERY OTHER COMPANY!" but then, patience has never been a virtue of mine.)
Rage Baby doesn't just coo, laugh, talk, and fuss at maximum volume, she shuffles, rolls, farts, breathes, and exists at maximum volume. This is not a kid who is in training to become a ninja, that's for sure. Trying to make a phone call requiring silence and concentration, let alone being able to access and provide reams of information to prove you're still the same person as the last time you called, is simply not possible. On the few occasions I've had to make other types of phone calls and foolishly thought I could get away with it while holding Rage, I was swiftly reminded of the truth with her vigorous attempts to make the phone call as unproductive as possible. The squirming, grunting, and fussing begins the minute the phone goes to my ear, requiring me to take the one steadying hand away from the receiver and use my shoulder to prop it up. If you've ever tried to prop an iPhone with your shoulder, you probably know how this ends.
I've started playing people a numeric keypad symphony, activated the mute button so anything I said fell upon deaf ears, and most frequently of all, flat out hung up on people, all while trying to calm and steady my wildly bucking baby. One time I was on the phone with my father and somehow managed to, using just my cheek and shoulder, hang up on him and dial my sister. Hearing her answer the phone when I was still trying to figure out if my dad's phone had dropped the call again was somewhat of a surprise. The level of fuckery that iPhones can achieve when you're attempting to use them for that most basic purpose they were designed for, by which I mean making a phone call (not googling The Hunger Games series or making sure that none of your friends has sent you a new drawing to guess, dummy!), is unbelievable as it is. Add a baby hell bent on tormenting her mother and you have heinous fuckery most foul. Now, any important phone calls I have to make are planned days in advance and require a babysitter.
My favorite use for my iPhone is easily the camera and video camera features. Having put up with some atrocities in my day so I could document the doings of my family, I really, really love the camera on this thing. Before getting my iPhone, my photos were taken on a crappy digital camera, or my Blackberry. That was one piece of ancient, outdated cellular technology sent to me straight from hell in order to make every photo I took hideous. The camera, for its part, took pictures of the absolute shittiest quality imaginable and upped the ante by imposing an extensive lag between the time I first held down the shutter button and the time the camera actually snapped a photo. Not only were pictures with this camera grainy and low in resolution, but the color balance made it look like we were posing in a carnival fun house and the delay between attempting to take the photo and actually managing to do so ensured that it caught only the sloppiest of facial expressions and poses.
Despite these major setbacks to my amateur photography hobby, I still managed to earn the nickname Mamarazzi among my friends and family. And by photography hobby, I mean I liked to take pictures of people and things. Ask me about aperture or lens preference and I'll just blink wetly at you. I have no illusions about the quality of photograph I produce. My children grew accustomed to having a camera or phone shoved in their faces several times a day because of how often I decided I needed to "record the moment." Happy-Go-Lucky would see me whip out the camera and flash me her cheesiest grins, while Taco Princess would stuck out her tongue and scrunch her eyes closed to make sure that any pictures I had of her would feature what seemed to be an extremely slow child with Asian features instead of my beautiful daughter. Dammit, though, they were trained! They knew what the camera meant. I even taught both of them how to use it to take pictures of each other and me, along with any other inanimate object they had a mind to put on film.
The major obstacle to a Mamarazzi heaven full of winsome photos of my little ham Happy and my photo-bombing Taco was my lack of a decent camera. I consistently took small, low resolution photos that were too dark or too exposed and were full of kids with ghoulish glowing eyes. Rage Baby, who was during this time being guarded in the high security facility known as the NICU, was duly photographed as well, and the first 500 or so pictures of her as taken on my phone or old digital camera just weren't able to do justice to her tiny, delicate features, her translucent, paper-thin skin, or all of the amazing progress she made over her first few months of life. I still treasure those photos, but I would be over the moon if they didn't look so much like I traveled back in time to use the oldest camera I was able to come across. And, really, how am I supposed to get on Facebook and brag about how gorgeous my children are when the camera quality makes them all look like they're surrounded by an ominous aura or ghostly fog? No, no, everybody, trust me, they're gorgeous. They could all be models! What, the glowing eyes? Just the camera. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
Watching my most favorite subjects fail to appear as beautiful in photographs as they did in real life was painful for me, and I came to a point where there was just absolutely no way I could cope with it any longer (that sounds like a potential caption for one of those White People Problems photo, but that's the way it was). I couldn't afford both a digital camera and a new phone (which I also sorely needed and desired), nor did I want to continue to cart around two separate devices I'd have to juggle between using. I figured if I played my cards right I could find something that was both a good quality camera and a somewhat cutting edge cellphone. I broke down, renounced my religious creed, and bought an iPhone for, and I swear to you it was for the quality of the pictures and the dual-facing cameras. The high download rate for porn had nothing to do with it. A couple hundred dollars later and I was ready to immortalize my children in the manner they deserved.
It was every bit as glorious as I had hoped. I've had the phone since late August of 2011 and I've taken almost 2,000 pictures and approximately 30 videos, mostly of Rage Baby and her older siblings. When Rage Baby came home from the hospital, everything was such a new and overstimulating experience to her that whether or not I had some black thing that made noise in my hand didn't seem to affect her one way or the other. I could snap a picture of whatever face she happened to be making or activity she was engaged in without worry that she would become distracted by me from whatever it was I wanted to put on film. Gradually, however, she became more aware of and engaged with her surroundings, and she started to get nosy.
It progressed in intensity and frequency until it evolved into what it is today- an intense desire to become dead still and stare at the phone whenever I'm trying to get a picture or video of something. While it's cute when she lays there without making any type of shrill fussing noise, it does not make for a particularly interesting photo or video. Yet this is what happens each time, without fail, when she catches me aiming the phone's camera lens in her direction. And that she will catch me every single time is almost certain. She has level 42 Paladin powers and can summon the power of various creatures at will, it's said. Detecting when Mom is covertly trying to aim a camera towards her is a simple matter, and she does it with ease. I have been foiled in getting a candid photo of her many, many times. Likely I have failed more times than I can ever hope to succeed.
Not only is there a dearth of photos and videos that don't feature Rage Baby staring blanking in the direction of the camera, I begin to look insane when I start making claims about the things she's learned to do. I have yet to get video proving that she has ever rolled over, and I've probably recorded and deleted more than 50 different clips trying to get her to say mommy or daddy. Keep in mind that when the phone isn't in my hand, all she does is ask for me and her daddy. Over and over and over and gallop and gallop and GOD DAMMIT. I digress.
This kid may only weigh 11 pounds, but each and every single ounce of those 11 pounds has been crafted and finely honed to somehow foil all activities I attempt to engage in using my phone. I'm not sure if it's because she's developed a dislike for the phone and all of the time it preoccupies Mommy and Daddy when they should be directing their attentions entirely to her, or if it's something deeply embedded in her genetic code to detest and destroy anything that causes others pleasure. I don't even think it's important, because no matter what the reason she rages against the iPhone machine, her father and I aren't in control on this one. So we'll just have to wait until she gets bored of the game, outgrows her antipathy toward the phone, or we just flat out give up. As long as I don't have to listen to "Killing In The Name Of" or "Bulls on Parade" while I'm waiting, I imagine that I shall survive this tribulation as well.
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