I don't have Koi Pond

I have an iPhone. I recently quit my years-long affiliation with Verizon – they being bastards – and took up with AT&T, they being iPhone purveyors. It’s okay as a phone, nothing special, somewhat unergonomic, being flat, and somewhat quiet, being shrouded in an after market protective silicone skin.

In the case that you don’t know, I’ll tell you that the cool thing about the iPhone is that one can download applications for it, some made perhaps by Apple but mostly by third parties. These applications run on the phone and vary from the ‘flashlight’ that makes the screen shine usefully, to tic-tac-toe, to sophisticated games, to file transfer programs, social networking interfaces, and translators, converters, and widgets of all manner. One such application is Koi Pond. It costs a dollar.

I don’t have Koi Pond

The application shows cute pictures of koi swimming around the screen. If one touches them, they wiggle and move away. The urge to poke the screen with the sort of force that would break it is hard to resist.

I never want to hit my goldfish. Our taunt them with worms on pointy hooks. So, what gives?

The thing is, I like electronics. Gadgets. Quad-core processors. On my iPhone, I have the TanZen application, a tangram program. It’s a puzzle in which simple shapes – triangles, a parallelogram, and a square, sized in clever mathematical relation – are used to fill out complex shapes. I play to help increase my visual literacy.

I remember other kids making wooden tangram puzzles, or something like them, in shop class twenty odd years ago. I never got into them. I like the game on the iPhone, tho, in the same why in which I still don’t care for Hangman, which I also have on my phone. The game seems natural.

What I wonder is why I don’t care about the tactile feel of the game. I work in wood, whenever I can: more construction than sculpture, with a preference for cabinet making and shop work. I’ve considered making a tangram puzzle out of exotic woods, rubbing the pieces with rare lustrous oils, French polishing them, rubbing with rottenstone, spraying them with urethane and buffing them out smoother glass before scootching them around on a velvet felt pad. I can’t seem to get much motivation to do it, tho. In fact, I down right don’t want to. It might be a nice shelf piece, something I could have given to my grandmother. I know I wouldn’t use it. Why would I? I have it on the phone.

I could have a pond on my phone.

It’s clearly not that I’m against non-embodiment or electronics. So what do I have against disembodied fish. That I don’t have against unembodied tans? That I don’t feel for polished craft art wooden tans. That I do for fish?