Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Then why am I so wanting?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you now my first ever blog post written on Prisstina, my dear new laptop. I can already tell that I'm not a fan of the space bar. No worries, though, I'll get a real keyboard at some point.
But I have content, too.
My computer is still not internet-capable, so I brought a CD to work to burn some files to take home. They added up to about 50 megs. I felt a little bit guilty. Guilty!
See, I have some sort of innate distaste for waste, and CD-Rs are really wasteful. I mean, you get one shot. Then it's done. And this is basically a one-use CD. I get my patches, I take it home, I install them, and that's the end. So those 750 megs go for nothing. Nothing!
It was worse when I was editing my newspaper. Antioch is, shall we say, wired fairly inconsistently. And a lot of people there have iMacs. Which, thanks to the brilliantly forward-thinking people at Apple, don't have disk drives. (only people better are Nintendo, who fixed the problems with the original Gameboy Advance by releasing the SP, which - oops! - failed to include a headphone jack) So occasionally, we'd get an article or letter on CD. By itself. One 2k, 400 word story, that got burned to an entire CD. AHHHHH!
It's fairly easy to see where I get this. I don't have a lot of stuff. What I do have, I use. I grew up in a house where this was largely the case. I also grew up with recycling. Wasted things, like paper and cans, were recycled. The cans in particular have stuck with me. I don't buy soda in cans when I live where I don't know how to recycle. Probably good for my teeth . . .
This has negative consequences, though. I have virtually no mementos of my past. For example, I have nothing from my Evil Ex, save for a blank spot in my CD collection where she bitch taxed my Richard Hell - Blank Generation album. In that case, it may be a good thing, but I also have two prior girlfriends I'm not terribly sorry about, and nothing from those relationships. It's not only relationships. I was talking to someone about keeping things from school. She (I think it was a she, I don't remember exactly who it was. Heh) said that she kept every notebook from high school. Me? I remember, at the end of my junior year, taking my notebook, opening it,and dumping it all in the trash. Hmmmm. I recall it being trash, but that goes against my recycling instinct. Strange. I've changed that slightly in college. I try to keep my graded papers. It's a hard impulse to control, though.
The worst part of it, though, is when I try to write for any non-specific reason. I can't convince myself that what I've written is good enough to keep. Sure, maybe it's good that my poetry is lost to the winds. But maybe not. And I doubt the stories I started to write would have gone anywhere good. But maybe, if I had the confidence to finish what I started, good things could have happened. Could still happen, I suppose.
I can also explain this in a deeper, more personality-based manner. Some part of me really doesn't want to leave physical marks. It wants to disappear completely. It's the part of me that makes me step lightly when I walk, so I can't be heard. It's also the part of me that makes it really fucking hard to keep the few friends I make. That's part of why this blog is working for me. It gives my life a sort of permanence. It acts as an anchor, both for me, and people who want to know me.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you now my first ever blog post written on Prisstina, my dear new laptop. I can already tell that I'm not a fan of the space bar. No worries, though, I'll get a real keyboard at some point.
But I have content, too.
My computer is still not internet-capable, so I brought a CD to work to burn some files to take home. They added up to about 50 megs. I felt a little bit guilty. Guilty!
See, I have some sort of innate distaste for waste, and CD-Rs are really wasteful. I mean, you get one shot. Then it's done. And this is basically a one-use CD. I get my patches, I take it home, I install them, and that's the end. So those 750 megs go for nothing. Nothing!
It was worse when I was editing my newspaper. Antioch is, shall we say, wired fairly inconsistently. And a lot of people there have iMacs. Which, thanks to the brilliantly forward-thinking people at Apple, don't have disk drives. (only people better are Nintendo, who fixed the problems with the original Gameboy Advance by releasing the SP, which - oops! - failed to include a headphone jack) So occasionally, we'd get an article or letter on CD. By itself. One 2k, 400 word story, that got burned to an entire CD. AHHHHH!
It's fairly easy to see where I get this. I don't have a lot of stuff. What I do have, I use. I grew up in a house where this was largely the case. I also grew up with recycling. Wasted things, like paper and cans, were recycled. The cans in particular have stuck with me. I don't buy soda in cans when I live where I don't know how to recycle. Probably good for my teeth . . .
This has negative consequences, though. I have virtually no mementos of my past. For example, I have nothing from my Evil Ex, save for a blank spot in my CD collection where she bitch taxed my Richard Hell - Blank Generation album. In that case, it may be a good thing, but I also have two prior girlfriends I'm not terribly sorry about, and nothing from those relationships. It's not only relationships. I was talking to someone about keeping things from school. She (I think it was a she, I don't remember exactly who it was. Heh) said that she kept every notebook from high school. Me? I remember, at the end of my junior year, taking my notebook, opening it,and dumping it all in the trash. Hmmmm. I recall it being trash, but that goes against my recycling instinct. Strange. I've changed that slightly in college. I try to keep my graded papers. It's a hard impulse to control, though.
The worst part of it, though, is when I try to write for any non-specific reason. I can't convince myself that what I've written is good enough to keep. Sure, maybe it's good that my poetry is lost to the winds. But maybe not. And I doubt the stories I started to write would have gone anywhere good. But maybe, if I had the confidence to finish what I started, good things could have happened. Could still happen, I suppose.
I can also explain this in a deeper, more personality-based manner. Some part of me really doesn't want to leave physical marks. It wants to disappear completely. It's the part of me that makes me step lightly when I walk, so I can't be heard. It's also the part of me that makes it really fucking hard to keep the few friends I make. That's part of why this blog is working for me. It gives my life a sort of permanence. It acts as an anchor, both for me, and people who want to know me.