In Twilight Regalia

I bought a printer-scanner and it turns out I have to be physically connected to it to use it after we shopped for something I could use remotely. It is a large ugly thing, but had the most practical number of bells and whistles. Why do they always seduce me?

Maybe I rush into things because I don’t want to stand in Frye’s electronics anymore. It’s bad enough going to any crowded store — I get really queasy in malls. There is a place for us in hell, me and my electronics: I actually feel guilty about getting so into my electronic toys these days. It’s my space bubble, my world of my own, and since I get claustrophobia in the narrow warehouse aisles packed with nerdy fat guys and families trailing screaming children, I long for it. They’re all most often shorter than me, and they pack themselves into my personal space without noticing, even stepping on me like I’m just a lamppost or something. Ok, I’m not all THAT tall…. but rather than retaliate, I want to grab my iPod or my phonegames or something…just some distraction…so I don’t kill someone… with a ray gun…. like that one over there!

Our Frye’s is particularly creepy, as it is set up to look like we’re in the middle of being invaded by ALIENS…. which are actually little green headed squished looking 1950s movie creatures made of fiberglass looking like they’re running around the front of the store, wearing goldfish bowls with little antennae on their heads. There are also a bunch of full-sized U.S. Army mannequins in stripped down U.S. Army jeeps and they’re pointing machine guns at them in fending off the attack (suddenly I feel a bit green myself), while over in that aisle TOBOR has stolen some Faye Wray-like woman and is marching along with her in his arms. It’s rather disconcerting to hear something CRASH in such a location (actually it was some clumsy customer knocking over a floor lamp they were selling and the glass lampshade smashed on the floor). I don’t LIKE passing a mannequin pointing a gun at me, even a fake, and hearing SMASSSSHHHH!!!!!.

“!!@$%#!!!!!”

I really should have had my iPod in, I wouldn’t have jumped so. Frye’s jitters make me want to go home to my computer RIGHT NOW.

There is something wonderfully comforting about my iBook at home, having my files where I want them, in a beautiful iBook package, and my keyboard actually does beckon me. (My keys all sound like Alice in the Brady Bunch: “Hello hunnnnny, had a rough day?? Come tell us! “) And the people that I can talk to on AIM only pad that feeling out - they’re waiting for me! I must answer!. My movies and my songs and my stuff to read. Hmmm scroll scroll let’s play… that one. I want to go to…. hmmm, let’s Google up Prague. YEAH now THAT’s a place to visit, oooh lookit that castle, I’m so there!…

Everywhere else my iPod looks after me. It actually helps in getting me well when I’m sick, I listen when I’m in the resting/sick room for my 20 minute power naps at work, a calming effect, pouring into my brain like mystical balm, my quiet-song list.

When I’m stuck in traffic and my mind is racing, but my car can’t, my up-list or my new stuff-list full of bashing rock take me somewhere that I can actually go, instead of having racing bloodpressure.

And now I’m going to HAVE to get the new iPod with video ultimately…. it’s just a matter of when…. eeeeek I’m getting addicted. If they add in a phone that’s better looking, which they will in a matter of months, I’m sure, I won’t have to go home ever again and my husband will sit blinking in disbelief on the couch…

I first realized my geekdom in the 90s when I was on AOHell as we used to call it, and I had friends who came to drag me out of the house and I realized I wanted to stay home and talk to my Instant Message friends rather than go out with my There In the Flesh friends. That was a disturbing discovery, and in four months or so I was back to sharing in Real Time life. But I could see how someone might never leave the electronic world.

Had I been a less attractive or less well adjusted person, I might still be there in my workroom, typing away all day, unemployed, piles of newspapers pinned randomly to all the walls, expecting the end of the world any day now, having not eaten or slept in several days. It’s just that you wouldn’t want to miss anything, you know? It was back then I realized I was morphing into a nerd when I started my day by hopping out of my warm bed and thudding across the room in my t-shirt, immediately checking my e-mail, and I realized…. I was FREEZING and I’d been sitting there for 20 minutes without noticing.

Even now I sometimes shoot through dinnertime without noticing if I’m really into what I’m responding to or reading online (I check the moment I set down my purse and kick off my shoes). This is quite something for a low blood sugar carboholic like myself. My husband says politely from his desk, “Honey, aren’t you hungry?” and I realize HE’S STARVING and I’ve been here way too long.

Even my pets tried to tell me. My pet rat Irina was actually coming up and sitting on my wrist for a reason, I realized, after I’d moved her twice. She was doing that old kitty trick: If mom is spending too much time on that machine instead of with me, I’ll just go sit on her so she can’t. I had another rat years ago who, although never peeing a drop outside the confines of her cage before, actually dotted my computer mouse with pee. I realized with amusement that she was marking her territory: I was HERS! ! and that plastic thing had better get that straight!.

How ardent are the people here at Frye’s about their electronics? Are they so emotionally invested?
I view the Saturday morning crowd. The testosterone level is pretty high, but it’s a varied horde. Looking around you see the place swarming with young males of various ages (all in the worst possible clothing)…

… a few new students and their families making serious monetary investments funded by the Bank of Dad…

… couples picking out sound systems and cameras, framing each other and laughing…

… and one lady was returning the most laughable boombox I have ever seen. (It was HUGE… It was ORANGE!! Anyone who knows me well will know at the mention of that word that I’m cringing.) Funnier still, she dressed just like it…

I tour around the aisles looking for my husband who has headed off in search of the wireless device that will make peace between our equipment families. We have a Mac and a PC which always becomes an issue. I look frequently for a white waving banner of truce on that subject, but here two guys are at it even now in the laptop aisle. You’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it — it’s another pointless debate. I watch my guy friends have long drawn out battles (yup, it is ALWAYS the guys) in the Mac v. PC Gladiator Arena. Man, am I sick of that. For heavens’ sakes, they serve different purposes. But the guys are fully suited up and ready to stand and deliver at the mention of megahertz. ( I hope they don’t try to steal a ray gun from that fibreglass Martian, I think that really used to BE something electronic… it looks like a cattle prod…)

PROPOSED SOLUTION: I am waiting for Linux to turn a bunch of hungry penguins loose on them both, but it seems unlikely.

ACTUAL DENOUEMENT: Like broadsworders of the Society for Creative Anachronism, they bash away until they’re tired, nothing resolved once more. They both take up each of their sentences with, “But dude, look at THIS!, ….”

A girl is pacing, prattling away in Arabic on her cell phone amid the cacaphony. She’s definitely in her own space. She sounds frustrated. I think it’s her mother she’s talking to. She’s not safe from a Mom invasion anywhere she goes, I guess. The bubble has backfired for her — phones have made electronics actually change relationships by accessibility (or interruptability if you will) nowadays. I now have friends (who shall remain unnamed, ::cough::), who refuse to respond to anyone who can’t send them a text message on their phone. Such a busy voicemail box I wish I had. I give up and e-mail most often, but writing is just… different.

Here’s the danger to that besides just wearing out your thumbs on your Sidekick or phone: We all write differently. All of us emphasize or think about certain parts of electronic information differently. You as a reader might remember a statement in an e-mail as imperative which I as writer added as an afterthought. Putting things into print creates illusions: Was that post a core dumping of someone’s thoughts to make them a public lash-out? or was it a belabored, calculated publishing of a treatise?

I watch a 12 year old boy click through a few web pages on a new iMac G5, hardly looking, click, click. We all read differently as well: Do we read for poetic completion and style? or scan for content? How busy are we? How awake? How bored? Are most of us so accustomed now to weeding through the piles of information on websites such that we presume much of it is just garbage we can ignore? And if so, what parts? How do we edit? Who says we should? Where do we end our searches where there is so much that it is exhaustive? Are we getting the whole picture? Do we need to? It’s as if our own bubbles of electronic reality are creating unique understanding levels among groups of us (sometimes age groups, sometimes other reasons). There are agreed-upon comprehension levels. I have some younger friends, for example, who won’t read more than a paragraph in an e-mail. They stop after that much text and call me to ask what I’ve said. They really don’t want to go through it all. It’s like cryptography to them.

Worse, just how much of what we look at has been fact-checked or made reliable? I was looking up lyrics the other day and found that none of the sites I visited seem to have anything completely verifiably correct. Is it a giant game of “telephone” with each site cribbing from others? Does it crib only parts? What parts? And there’s the who-can-steal-what-or-use-what issue, another huge topic to fight multibilliondollar battles over. All this informational change and shift and squabbling, apart from even the mechanics of the toys and what they do for and to us….

Me, I’m just runing from the battles. I don’t want the alien green guys and the Marines to shoot me as I’m ducking over by the headsets. I want to be able to be in my civillian Happyhouse of sound and creation, and walk out of here with something else I can hide in — as soon as I can figure out what’s compatible. Where’s my husband? I’ll call him up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.