People like to talk about the problems with cell phones. They’re isolating time-sucks. They cause brain tumours. Blue light is bad for your eyes and disrupts your sleep. They destroy your ability to focus for extended periods. Finding the right case is a bitch.

A lot, if not all of that, is probably true.

But here’s the thing – I really like my phone.

It’s not the apps, though they are good. I have a few I interact with regularly: a word game, a sudoku, and a fashion game that I may abandon because it makes me feel bad about myself when no one likes the looks I design.

It’s not the calendar, though that does allow me to schedule the appointments and reminders which keep my life humming along.

It’s not the camera. Being able to take pictures whenever I want is cool, but there’s not a chance I’ll be named “Queen of the Selfie” any time soon. I can’t bear to look at pictures of myself. I’m working on it, but I’m not there yet. This also means I’m not a fan of Snapchat, though the filters do amuse.

It’s not the tech. I don’t care how it works. It’s undoubtably fascinating but I don’t have a burning desire to understanding the inner workings. I have an iPhone because I’ve always had an iPhone and I can’t be bothered to change, not because I’m team iOS. For my purposes, I’m pretty sure they’re all the same. I do pay some attention to storage size.

I don’t like low gigs. I spent a frustrating year with an eight-gig phone that filled up almost instantly. The irony that eight gigs is not enough space when the first computer had five MBs of storage is not lost on me. But I need more room. For the pictures I don’t look at and the music I don’t listen to.

What is it that I love about my phone? It’s the browser.

My brain throws questions at me all day. Inside my head, it’s like a someone dropped a bucket of bouncy balls onto a concrete floor. Questions ping every which where. Query this, ask about that. Before the cell phone, most of my questions went unanswered. Now? The world’s information is available to me whenever I want.

Did you know that a group of cats is called a clowder? Not useful information, particularly, but something I looked up. Also, there are 2.2 pounds to the kilogram. There are four hundred and sixty-four definitions for the word “set”. The official language of Trinidad is English.

I like being able to find out stuff.

Questions I can’t answer cause me anxiety. I get stressed and I obsess. I used to write the things I wondered about down in a notebook – sometimes I even looked up the answers – but now is better. The instant gratification leads to an instant cessation of mental agitation.

That questioning part of my brain is a petulant child – it wants to know, and it wants to know now. Thanks to my cell phone, it can.