It isn’t hard for me to admit that I’m terrified of Apple.

Not of their products, with their sleek design and impressive simplicity of use. Not even with their marketing, with its confident and ever-cohesive messaging. And certainly not with their turtleneck-swathed overlord, even if he did “beat” the disease that killed my mom. (Keep in mind, pancreatic cancer has a 5% survival rate over the course of five years. Steve Jobs had it in 2004. You do the math.)

I’m afraid of what Apple has done to me. And I’m afraid of where it may lead.

Let me start at the beginning. A few years ago, when Simon and I lived on opposite coasts and were simply pen-pals who shared the same alma mater, he pushed for me to ditch MySpace for Facebook. I happily obliged, even if my sparkly-goth-hooker theme made me smile, especially with its immediate speaker-intrusion of The Smiths’ “Sheila Take a Bow.” I was in my twenties, after all. Facebook, with its obscenely bare interface, was a sign of maturity.

This was before Farmville, Mafia High-Five, “gifts,” and the deluge of ads and add-ons hijacked the whole thing.

So I was on Facebook, and then Simon started pushing for me to get on this thing called Twitter. He explained that it was a way for him to see what I was up to from a distance. That’s what email was for, I argued. He said it allowed for me to say where I was, when I was there, and that he could respond instantly. To me, that sounded like a very complicated telephone call. It was a writing exercise, he countered, with the coup-de-grace of, “You only have 140 characters. Unless you can’t write within constraints…

Fine, fine, fine. Gauntlet, thrown. Twitter, I’m on you.

Once I moved to Portland, this insistence for me to join platforms and abandon others was relentless. Posterous. Tumblr. WordPress. Pandora. LastFM. LaLa. Flickr. And so on. I followed, begrudgingly, and pointed out every time one of these systems failed with the sort of smug, self-satisfied condescension that only a luddite proved right can administer. By this point we had matching SidekickIDs, I had learned how to send Twitter messages using a 40404 code, and we’d learned that our relationship wouldn’t survive very long if he allowed his followers’ updates to be sent directly to his obscenely large, T-Mobile outfitted phone.

There was one chasm I would not cross, however. I would not abandon my massive dinosaur of a Dell laptop. Not for all the begging, bribing, or forwarded CNET and Wired articles in the world. Simon could sing his song of Apple’s superiority until his larynx crawled out of his body and took a desk job. I had enough trouble even looking at his Macbook, with its clean, white plastic casing and obnoxious snack logo. What was my life without Windows? After all, I had an iPod. That was enough. More than enough.

The iPod Touch came out, and, after saving as much money as I could and maxing out my credit card, it became Simon’s Christmas present that year. The amount of joy that damn thing gave him frightened me. It was as if I’d given him immortality and resurrected Biggie Smalls. I felt like Oprah. I felt concerned for his mental health. I quickly felt jealous as hell of the iPod Touch when it found its way into our bed and became his go-to gadget. What did Apple put in its products? Obviously it was some high-grade stuff.

Eventually my Dell died. Over half a decade can do that to a computer. I lamented what I was going to do, both monetarily and otherwise. I put a call out on the Internet. A walking saint from Texas, a previous client and Internet acquaintance, took pity on me and sent me my dream device: a Lenovo IdeaPad in a sexy shade of pink. It was small. It was quick. It became my better half. Simon quit his whining about my lack of Mac once he sat down and played with it. I felt triumphant. I’d finally won! Take that, produce products! I’d found a better device for my needs than you could ever provide!

…and then the iPhone came out.

I’m not going to go through the play by play of my iPhone drama. It involved lies. A near break-up. Long distance screaming. Anguish. Debate. Data analysis. The financially unsavvy purchase of another iPod Touch. And then, finally, it got me.

I could play Scrabble with my friends.

I had to have it.

Of course, T-Mobile didn’t aid its case by having its Microsoft-owned partner, Danger, suffer a server failure that resulted in a complete loss of data during that same week that I deliberated jumping ship for AT&T. Compared to the sleek, functional iPhone, my bulky, pink-plastic-covered Sidekick seemed worse than an amateur. It now seemed like a chump. A data-less, useless, classless chump.

And so began my descent into Apple fandom. The iPod hadn’t scratched the surface. Both the original and the Touch had been like wine coolers and pot for my inner crystal meth addict. The iPhone was my first real hit from the glass-faced pipe. I loved it from the start. Sure, its keypad couldn’t rival my Sidekicks’ raised QWERTY, and it often took longer to type a text message than it took me to learn Spanish, but it was fast. It was omniscient. And it allowed me to score 68 points using a triple word score and the letter Q…while on the toilet. Apple, you’ve made me a master of my milieu.

I don’t know where the line is crossed between Satisfied User of Apple Products and Cult of Mac. I must not be in the later camp, only because I recently argued against the pertinence of Apple TV. (Personally, I don’t watch anything other than sports, news, and Jeopardy!, so I think that any device made to synthesize various usage options for my television would, at this point, be like buying a pony. Neat to tell people about, but superfluous and expensive.) But I’m suddenly the kind of person who rankles when confronted by an anti-Mac zealot, the same type of fad-loathing, hipster-scorning, personal-computing close-talker that I once was. I’ve become defensive of the products, as though they were representative of my own technological advances. Individuals who are “open minded” enough to be skeptical of Apple I view as having missed the memo. This is the future, I want to say to them. Which is precisely what Simon had said upon seeing an ad for an iPod Touch back in mid-2007. Verbatim.

All of which leads me to the larger, more intimidating iPod Touch, the iPad. I want one. Can I justify the purchase? No. Do I feel that several hundred dollars could be better spent doing things like feeding myself and paying for the aforementioned, poorly-utilized cable television I occasionally indulge in? Yes. But I lust for this fragile, feckless device the way that middle-aged shoe hags on Sex and the City drooled over a pair of strappy metallic leather Manolo Blahnik sandals. Conspicuous consumption be damned.

What’s worse is that I feel a relentless need to find a reason why it’s “okay” to get this delicate, oversized toy, the same way that I desperately needed to feel “okay” dropping ridiculous and unconscionable sums of money on the iPods I’ve had (I “need” to have music on the go and CDs are obsolete), the iPhone I love (I “need” a cellphone, and this one has the Internet on it so I’ll never get lost or be without the knowledge or where there’s a dumpling house within twenty miles), and the machine I now use as my primary computer in place of my beloved Lenovo (I “need” to have a home computer and a laptop for work).

The majority of what I read about the iPad screams EXORBITANT, EXPENSIVE TOY. The only benefit I could see to my daily life is that I’d be able to surf the Internet while reclining on the couch, as opposed to my kitchen table. I live in New York City. The table and the couch are roughly two feet away from one another. Moreover, do I really need Words with Friends to be bigger?

The reptile part of my brain is screaming, “Yes! And YouPorn in bed!”

Until recently, I really couldn’t even think beyond this nearly carnal desire for what is widely regarded, along with the iPhone 4, as Apple’s inevitable – and surmountable – second season syndrome.

But now I’m going on a trip. One that will require a long plane ride. I’m afraid of planes…and benzodiazepines. Suddenly that reptile part of my brain has taken over, hollering that the iPad is my prescription-free salvation to this traveling predicament. Is this the air-tight justification that my financially astute, responsible, tech-wary self craves? Not at all. But I fear that resistance is futile against the chorus of desire that I now hear every time I look at my phone. Between the goddamn unavoidable ad campaign, and Simon’s giddy insistence that it will be more awesome than a pony, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to forgo basic necessities for a while, all in the name of progress. (And the joy of a Z placed on a triple-letter score.) Apple, look what you’ve done to me.

My friend has a theory that ADD and ADHD are bullshit. His belief is that there are too many distractions in modern life for children to grow up without an inability to focus. Basically he thinks that we all have ADD and ADHD, and it’s due to the amount of glittering, whirring gizmos we welcome into our lives. Between HDTV, 3-D movies, the virtual reality of home computers, and Smartphones, it’s impossible to keep your eyes on one thing for long enough to blink twice. I only bring this up because this week presented the kind of project that required the monotonous tasks of cutting, pasting, and thinking up four-hundred headlines for a travel-related iPhone app. It was the kind of work that was creative and enjoyable, but it caused a sort of drone-like trance state, where motions became routine. The only way to prevent drool spilling out of my mouth and onto the keys was to succumb to the siren song of the Internet. Which is a job hazard wrapped in the lingerie of a job perk. Internet distraction needs to be carefully dosed, lest freelancing begins to take the "glorified" out of glorified unemployment.

The Internet is my office. I work using mainly Google Docs, I run Chrome for browsing and use Live Writer for blogging. We use Basecamp for projects, and primarily conduct correspondence through Gmail or Gchat versus the traditional conference call. I’m not disciplined enough to sit at my computer all day, knowing that a world of wonder is one tab away, without peeking behind the curtain. Sometimes it feels a bit like I’m a drunk working as a bartender, only the analogy goes kaput once I recognize that, if that were the case, tiny relapses wouldn’t be discouraged, they’d be welcomed.

See, for me, fucking around on the Internet is my coffee break. Facebook is my break-room. Tumblr is my cigarette. Twitter is my extra long pee and conversation about last night’s CSI with Cheryl from accounting. The problem is, as with any gig, you can’t let the breaks get the better of you. Most of us have worked desk jobs where some sorry asshole (hopefully not you) started getting too caught up in enjoying their downtime, hitting up the MySpace, or bullshitting with their buddies. One day they were called into the boss’ office, and ten minutes later they were carting their belongings down in a box, possibly with a security escort. Every job requires discipline.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that working from home, in your pajamas, with the creature comforts of your television, tea kettle, and comforter a mere arms-reach away, makes that battle for focus slightly more difficult. Working on the Internet ups the interruption ante. But I’ve learned that a taste of the forbidden fruit of free time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve written before about the benefits of fucking around for a little bit each day. It’s like that guy who used to work two cubicles over, the one who never seemed to leave the office until the day he disappeared. Eventually you heard he was rumored to be in a hospital suffering a breakdown, six years later he’s living on an ashram and going by the name Tandralu. Burn-out is a real thing. But here’s the tricky, sticky part of the Internet being your main means of diversion: you can’t tell if your cigarette break is going to turn out to be a three-hour meth bender. In the "real" world, there are concrete means of getting some time away from your screen. Most of them involve consuming food, drink, or chemicals, and most of them are fairly mundane. To extend the metaphor, if Facebook is my break-room, I’m never sure whether I’ll walk in and grab a quick cup of tea or if I’ll wind up studying the fabric of the couch for a few hours. Getting distracted on the Internet requires vigilance and brute strength to keep it brief, at least for me.

For example, this week the Internet was good for several respites. I took ten minutes to locate an old friend and find out that he’s attending a Masters program for English. I discovered that the guy who passed me his email at the gym is actually a married performance artist from the Midwest. I located the greatest cheap Thai restaurant in our neighborhood. I ordered Sriracha and a wedding gift. All of these things took less than fifteen minutes and helped me to get my brain back on track.

What didn’t work was my quest for a new book, courtesy of a still unused Christmas gift-card from my cousin. Looking up countless tomes on Barnes and Noble ate up the better part of an hour, and amounted to nothing but frustration. (Really, what I keep hoping is that Mary Roach will release, like, six books at once. Somehow I imagine that she’ll either channel Stephen King or develop a speed problem and start writing books the way I complain. By which I mean incessantly.) Also approaching productivity from the opposite corner was a short story competition. Although I wholeheartedly believe that writing for competitions is a vital part of my upkeep as a professional, it can drain a lot of energy, especially when I’m working under a deadline. It doesn’t allow for any real downtime either, since downtime spent crafting a story isn’t exactly the same sort of time suck as, say, looking at pictures of Lady Sovereign on the web. Email is also a fucking Molotov cocktail thrown at the window of my ambition. Sure, I’ll get to those other 175 headlines, right after I write back my friend who is going through a breakup, my pal who is dealing with the ice storm in Oklahoma and wants to know a good app to kill time, and my very favorite yoga instructor who is just "checking in." Those emails only took…well, the truth is that I can’t tell you. I didn’t respond to all of them, because when I noticed how close to the wire it was, I abandoned that second email mid-sentence. It’s still saved in Drafts.

I don’t know if I can say that there are hard and fast rules to budgeting your breaks. I believe that, as with all things freelance, you have to design your own system. One of the greatest graphic designers we know works from his basement from midnight until 4AM every day, getting buckets of stuff done. Other developers take hourly breaks to eat Pringles and smoke. (I’m leaving the specifics of that last detail to your imagination.) When it comes to using the Internet as a method of recreation while also using it as your mode of work, it bears repeating that if you throw moderation to the winds, the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a deadline to meet.