The Knightly News

I have a selfie stick.

I’m not proud of it, I’m really not, and I swear I’ve used it only once, and hopefully never will again. In fact, the only time I used it was to share this art with you:

I experienced a flood of emotions while I was making it happen.  First, self-loathing, next, giddiness, and then when my sister walked past the room and sawme taking it, more self-loathing.

If you don’t know how it works, a selfie stick is exactly what it sounds like: an extendable pole that people can attach to their smartphones so as to take self-portraits from further than an arms-length away.  And I know, at first thought your reaction is “Oh! That’s kinda smart!”  But then you think about it for more than five seconds and realize you just considered spending 30 dollars to enhance your selfie.

And just for the record, I didn’t buy myself a selfie-stick.  I bought my little sister a GoPro attachment, which advertised that it could double as one.  What a world we live in: an attachment for an all-weather, action-sport camcorder, is grouped with a front-facing smartphone camera.

I think the worst part of the selfie-stick is that it’s sort of an anomaly to me, like dead-heads and James Franco; I just don’t get it.  We all have arms, we all have phones—why add a bulky pole into the mix?  Is it not more of a pain to have to take your phone off of the stick every time you want to use it?

And yet, when I walk down a busy city street, I get hit in the shoulder as passersby indulge in selfies. Twenty minutes later I see two girls sitting in a park flaunting the gadget as they try to get the best angle to capture the ever-so-interesting fence and bench behind them, and as I let myself laugh they turn red and try to hide it between them.  And then when my sister goes out to dinner with her roommate’s foreign family, their first instinct is to whip out the stick to capture the moment.

But whether it’s vain or for fun, the selfie stick is definitely crossing some weird line somewhere.  Perhaps the solution is to use them only in an ironic way (see selfie above), or maybe suddenly tourists and preteens will see the error of their ways, or maybe if we’re lucky there will be a factory recall on all selfie sticks, or they’ll explode or something.

Just put down the selfie stick.