My Affection Towards Small, Electronic Devices

My sisters are obsessed with clothes. Nothing invigorates them more than a batch of freshly purchased garments. I will never understand this. And apparently, they will never understand that I will never understand this. Because I'd say that on over 300 occasions in my life, my sister Lindsay has sat me down and displayed for me gleefully her new pants, and her new tank-top. I act openly upset every time she makes me sit down to do this, and yet she is completely blind to my reaction and consistently thinks that this is an exciting event for me as well as her (when my sister reads this she will be concerned that it makes her look bad-- sorry, Junior).

But I shouldn't cackle too loudly-- I have a material obsession of my own. I'm obsessed with technological gadgets.* To the point that they actually look delicious to me. One of my students showed me his new video iPod today, and I had an intense urge to eat it (he also had an f'ing pillow speaker. He'd plug the iPod into the pillow and you could put your head on it and listen to music. Another tutee has a sweatshirt speaker. He plugs the iPod into the sweatshirt and when he puts his hood on he can hear music. I'm not kidding. Who the fuck has a sweatshirt speaker?). When I bought an Apple camera to put on top of my computer, I was jolted into a good mood each time I looked at it for a full week after I bought it.

In Europe now, they've combined the video iPod and Blackberry phone into one device, called the G3. This apparently replaces your phone, laptop, iPod, TV, DVD player, digital camera, internet, external hard drive, alarm clock, calculator, road navigator, and Playstation, and it's the size of an iPod. And frankly, I think that's tubular.

There are some people reading this right now who are tearing up, lips quivering, thinking, "is nothing sacred?" and yearning for the simple days. Well maybe you should spend more time shaving your legs and less time eating non-fat yogurt and resisting delicious technology.

Other people have found this posting to be extraordinarily nerdy. Those people are cowardly.

And still other people are uneasy that I just spent a chunk of time criticizing myself, and then coming up with non-sensical comebacks, and that they sat at work and read it. Now they are reclining in their chair, gazing aimlessly at the upper corner of the room, and feeling just so-so about themselves.

*I'm also deeply fond of globes.