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By Root 269 0

no, that’s not what I look like regularly, not at all. I look like that mainly because it is hard to take your own picture with an iPhone; it is not like a regular camera at all. Did you know that? You just have to guess where the button is and keep touching it and touching it around the area you think it might be and, yes, it can get frustrating, and, yes, you can get hand cramps because that’s the hand where my carpal tunnel is the worst, so that’s why I was yelling in some of those pictures. But I was yelling at myself in those pictures, not at the iPhone and certainly not at anybody else, so it should not be an indication of my character or person, not at all. I’m a nice person most of the time. Eighty percent of the time. Maybe 76 percent of the time. In almost all of my iPhone pictures, I am being nice. In fact, if you flip through those photos, as I’m sure you might have—not saying that you don’t have any respect for the privacy of the person who was clearly careless enough to get out of her car with an iPhone on her lap, not at all, I’m sure you do, but curiosity baits us all—you’ll see that I take photos of happy, jocular things, demonstrating my multifaceted interests, hobbies, and things I see as curiosities.

After all, can a girl who has 750 photos of her little dog—who you may notice is sometimes wearing accessories, such as glasses and hats—on her phone be all that bad? She certainly can’t be as bad as someone who doesn’t deserve to have their phone returned and loses it to someone who instead does something nefarious with it, right? But, no, you probably won’t see any pictures on that phone of me building houses with Habitat for Humanity or volunteering in Central America, holding open the mouths of tykes while aiding Doctors Without Borders as they fix the cleft palates of little children. Probably not on that phone, but I did give them twenty-five dollars once, I just didn’t think to take a picture of me donating online. I’m sure it was used to fix a palate. Or at least part of one.

But if you wonder whether I took the picture of the girl sitting on the curb with her butt crack hanging out while her boyfriend was breaking up with her, no, I did not take that. My friend thought that was funny, and in a way it was. She really needed a belt. But even if I tried to tell her, I doubt she could have heard me over her racking sobs.

All right, I took the picture, but listen, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, you know? I saw the crack rising up and I just snapped, I didn’t even think. It was during the 24 percent of the time when I’m maybe not so nice. It was like seeing the Loch Ness monster or something similar, no one will believe you unless you offer proof. Now I have proof. So when I tell the story, I can offer a visual, and people believe me. That a girl who is very busy having her life destroyed by someone she loved can be too distracted to know that she is slipping out of her clothes.

Oh, God. I just had a horrible thought! You don’t know anyone in China, do you?

Checking my email again!

Boy. How late do you usually sleep?

If you will get out of bed, we can go have your REWARD breakfast right now, if you will just get up and go on Craigslist. Get up get up get up.

Please don’t call China. You better not have called China. If I have to end up paying for calls to China and/or any other far-off lands, your reward will reflect it, and I’m only being honest. Fair is fair.

ALL RIGHT. Fine. How about a REWARD BREAKFAST and one call to China. A short call. I will do a small call, a brief call, a “Hello, Ma, I am calling you on a stolen phone. I know, I laughed, too!” Okay, I’m sorry, sorry, not a “stolen” phone, let’s say a “phone that does not belong to me and instead of flipping through the contacts list and hitting the entry that said ‘home’ I called China instead” phone. How about that?

Are you awake?

You’re awake, aren’t you? You know, I get the feeling that maybe you really are already awake and, instead of spending efforts to find the listing for a lost iPhone on Craigslist, you just might be