self-indulgent

my sister in the '80s

can't say anything that hasn't been said already re: jobs but in my journal here i'm going to anyway, for me. you know, the usual: my formative computer memories are all so jobs-related, the IIcs and Mac IIs at school, the IIs at home i spent hours playing around on (why i like fonts/typography) and wrote a lot of super early papers on, the Quadra that introduced me to real games, the power pc and discovering the internet right before I became a teenager (looking at the Louvre! professors from overseas corresponding about writing!), the chat spaces and BBS where i first found local young people like me to talk with about poetry and moving away (it was even called Mac's Last Stand), the ruby iMac i took to college that carried me through and beyond all 4 years without a hitch, my dad's g3, the mini, the (i thought awesome) cube, the millions of hours of my post-high school late adolescence spent with earbuds glued to me when my parents gave me the first incarnation of the iPod as a birthday present (i probably owe a lot of my music expansion to the internet combined with the iPod). when i begrudgingly (i don't like change :) switched to laptops via the macbooks after college, i was amazed at how great they were and will probably never own a desktop pc again thanks to how much they impressed me. and now when we travel we don't need to bring laptops; the iPod/iPad is an excellent go-between and doesn't take anything to set up (which at times is actually maddening to someone like me). the iPod has enabled me to read more in-depth thought-provoking stuff on the internet (mefi mostly, but also essays making the rounds) at night in bed, which i wouldn't have time to do otherwise bc of my husband's schedule these days. for that kind of surfing, the iPod never ceases to amaze me with its simplicity and effectiveness/usefulness. it doesn't hurt my eyes or wrists either, even when it takes hours to read something in the dark.

a lot of my most vivid childhood memories come straight from the mac classic GUI, os6-9. neko the cat, the goofy movie references my dad littered throughout as sound effects/alerts (i didn't know it was hal 9000 for like over a decade! it was just that weird voice on the computer :), hypercard, scarab of RA, all the poems i collected, the early websites i created, the quote books, everything. i remember having to switch to microsoft office at some point in college and being like "what the fuck is this, ugh." everything else was always so cluttered and clunky, busy with unnecessary crap.

my mom had that whole "think different" photo set up in her classroom, i remember (she got a lot of apple stuff via grants and their educational programs as i recall). i might still have the amelia earhart one hanging somewhere in my old bedroom.

i liked a lot of the comments in the mefi thread on him resigning. it was a wonderful trip down memory lane.

i'm sure my husband and lots of other people who know me think this is gross consumer fixation, but i'd counter to him and his peers anyway that it really is no different than his fetishism and nostalgia for atari and the nes. and the way people argue they changed gaming forevef, well, macintosh/apple changed home computing just as much if not more. so it's no different at all. unless you don't love anything physical and man made, i don't think there's any room to get condescending. i spent far more hours of my life with macs and apple things than tv and sadly, probably people (maybe not books though... ;). for better or worse it's, to be cliche (and my parents used these words last night too, when they called and told me), definitely in part made me the way i am. i don't think i would like writing in the way i do specifically now, and i wouldn't have so much of it floating in my head if i hadn't collected it easily and seamlessly on those early files, and i wouldn't remember the past, color it the way i do, quite the same without the photos i took and saved onto my macs, etc. etc. i wouldn't appreciate elegance (and i mean it in the academic sense) in design as much if mac hadn't spoiled us all so early. i have never lived in a home without at least one computer, and they've always been as important as say, a bed or a refrigerator. i would feel...muted without that ease of expression and collection.

it hasn't always been perfect, that's for sure (and like Paul i grow increasingly dismayed actually at certain things about apple, design and forced limitations included), but that early shit was untouchable and pioneering, and it's still and always has been better than anything else in the same genre.

...

and the second usual sentiment here that still has to be said of course is seriously, fuck cancer. it is disturbing how quickly it can destroy a person. when he resigned i (along with everyone of course) figured he didn't have long but it's been what, less than 6 weeks, right? what can you even say to that. awful.