• Suffering

    It is evening, two hours before your normal bedtime. What do you suppose is the worst thing you could do? How about a little nap?

    You go to bed at a reasonable hour, after your unplanned hour-long nap. You lie down to bed with what you believe to be a great recipe for sleep, a book you’ve already read once and a drowsy head start. Only, it isn’t such a tasty recipe after all. Now it’s almost two hours after your bedtime and you’re still wide awake. You’ve decided to get up and fill that pit that diet has dug in your stomach with some delicious looking frosted animal cookies. It’s only after you’ve eaten the last one that you wonder if a healthy dose of sugar mixes well with insomnia.

    So be it.

    Your next stop is your trusty computer. You decide to show your desktop Mac some love with a little long overdue attention. Having been in bed so long, and the night being so well advanced, the click of the keyboard is deafening. This is when you realize why you so often prefer your PowerBook, the elegant feel of the keys under your swift touch. You wonder if it’s like a musician trying to play a high school band instrument after playing for years on a Stradivarius. There is simply no comparison. You wonder if it would be worth the investment to upgrade the keyboards around the house.

    The eMac that you woke from sleep, and then eschewed for your trusty PowerBook, has returned to sleep. The fan cooling its innards has turned off, returning the room to near silence. Your only companion is your insomnia and the strangely addictive chatter of your keyboard. It almost becomes a kind of conversation, you interacting with the keys.

    You have returned to that place where you last slept; your feet up, reclined on the living room couch with your PowerBook in your lap. You hadn’t intended to recreate the moment, but you note the occurrence when you begin to grasp that elusive sense of coming sleep.

    Before returning to bed, you wonder if your attachment to a computer is a sign of a shallow nature, a nerd at heart, a discerning consumer, or all of the above.

    Now for a little math. You function best with eight hours of sleep. Seven is almost as good, but the seams begin to fray. Getting six is a precursor caffeine abuse. It is pushing midnight and I’m getting up at 5:30. Say, how long has it been since I’ve called in sick?

  • It had to be me

    It’s happened to you before. You get your hopes up and they are unceremoniously dumped in the crapper. The pisser about this evening is that my hopes were so fresh. I hardly got to know them before they were gone. Hope can be fleeting, but to come and go in less than five minutes? This keeps up and I’m going to need a better prescription drug benefit with my health insurance.

    The evening started with such promise. What could be more exciting than a trip to the Apple store? All right, I’m not that pathetic. There are at least two things better than a trip to the Apple Store, but whose counting? I got to the store and someone said the four words that would change the emotional tone of the evening, “That’s the garage sale.”

    In Apple Store terms, “the garage sale,” is the disorganized heap ‘o products they’d like to get rid of on the quick. Well what did I see on top of the heap? Signaling me through the fog of my caffeine addicted mind was a shiny pair of Apple Desktop speakers, marked down to $20. These are the same speakers that my father has plugged into his iMac. These are the same speakers that I’ve been jealous of since my father purchased his iMac. These are the speakers that I was more than ready to part with $20 for the privilege of owning. Yes, I said “privilege,” they are that cool looking. Momentarily suspecting a “too good to be true” moment sneaking up and biting me in the keester, I sought out the closest Apple Staffer. “Yes,” he replied, “those should work Jim Dandy with your iBook.”

    I was a middle-aged geek in an Apple Store. I quite literally skipped towards the register, stopping briefly at my friend admiring the PowerBook display to gloat over my discovery. Here’s where the skies opened and the parade went home. “John, I don’t think those things are going to work.” SAY IT AINT SO! I wanted to believe. I wanted to trust the first opinion, but doubt lingered. That was when I opened the box and saw the plug. It was immediately clear it would not fit my poor iBook.

    Next time you see Jim Dandy, tell him I’m looking for him.

    I went in search of a second opinion, but my fears were not allayed.

    &*%$!

    For about five minutes I lived in a world where I had a cool set of speakers. Some dreams die hard. Some dreams die slow. Others check out before they even really get started.

    Anyone know a really good therapist?

  • Restoration

    You’ve heard me mention the “natural order.” It’s one of the ways we make sense of a complex world, in order to keep up with all the crap out there, we take some things for granted. Growing boys will have more scrapes and bruises, growing girls will get into more trouble, my wife will have a good reason to yell at me at least once a week, Macs will continue to be a superior alternative to the Windows hegemony, and I will always have more desirable gadgets than my wife. Try to keep a hold on your emotions until the end of this entry, but for a while there the natural order was out of whack.

    Last month we signed a two year contract to share minutes on our wireless plan. Since it’s considerably less convenient to share minutes with only one phone, we bought a second one. Owing to a moment of weakness, Cheryl got the new one, and it was pretty cool, way cooler than mine. I told myself repeatedly that this was an excellent opportunity to pretend to be an adult. “I don’t really need a new phone, the one I’ve got works just fine. I don’t need all of those extra features anyway. When would I ever use a speaker phone?”

    Who was I kidding?

    Don’t you know, the whole point of having a million features isn’t to USE them? Dear Lord Man, get a hold of your self. HAVING them is the most important thing, an ends in and of it’s self. Gadget features are like tick marks on the great scorecard of life. Carrying around a feature poor gadget is worse than not carrying a gadget at all. At least if you don’t have one on you, you can maintain the image of having just left it out in the car. No one is the wiser. Carrying a feature poor gadget not only says something about your social status, it also says something about your self-image.

    “I’m not worthy of a really cool toy. I don’t like ‘me’ enough to buy cool stuff.”

    So that’s how I wound up driving home with a camera phone yesterday. I had $100 of Verizon’s money to spend on a phone, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to spend every penny. I’ve got perceptions to maintain. The respect of my wife is at stake. The natural order hangs in the balance. The pecking order, no, nothing less than the Biblically ordained relationship between a man and a woman is a risk. Someone get me Jerry Falwell on the phone. Call the President. Bring in the Joint Chiefs. Break out the Bat Signal. DEAR GOD I NEED THIS PHONE!

    It takes some of the worst pictures I’ve ever seen, but it does (technically) take pictures. That’s all that’s really important. Well no, that’s not it. It takes pictures and Cheryl’s doesn’t. THAT’S what’s really important. Rest easy my friends; the natural order has been restored.