Caustically Optimistic

Rambling on the iPad

I'm typing to you from my iPad. At first I thought I was ambivalent about the thing because I didn't need it. Who needs anything? You don't need computers and I certainly didn't need this wee computer but there is no point in working if you don't get a cool toy once in a while, right?

This now allows me to do what my moleskin notebook hasn't allowed me to do: instantly tell you the stupid things that have wandered into my brain. For instance, Governor Bashear said the budget negotiations could prove "cataclysmic," as if the budget situation could provoke the Lord in Heaven to open up the earth and swallow Paducah or hurl a meteor at Berea.

I'm also imposing the Beastie Boys on my coworkers. I'm a little annoyed at the foul language myself but I have to support my people. I sometimes feel like Bob Cratchet at work because I sit at a tiny desk and while one of my immediate supervisors babbles inane and cruel remarks or offers a commentary on our work habits. The best times of course are the ones like right now where he makes a big show of scolding us for being lazy when his boss wanders in catching him watching videos on YouTube.

I have a new appreciation for the show, "The Office," that I lacked entirely before. There is always a heaping portion of the truth in any comedy and while I'm unfortunately Angela in accounting or Andy Benard in his less malicious moments my immediate supervisor is not unlike Dwight when left in charge. He lacks Dwight's charm though but that's fine as we have neither a Jim nor a Pam. We have Mimi from the Drew Carey Show. In these tough times its rough to be out of work.

What I'd like to eventually do is figure out how to mark a montage of the moments from "The Office," that remind me of my own place of work. It's truly appalling what goes on there and if you were exposed to the videos we take of each other and post on Facebook you'd be mortified. I should probably juxtapose the videos we've made with the ones from The Office. People in the car business aren't the villains you think they are - they're not intellectually capable of the trickery with which we are associated.

I complete this on a very tiny plane on my way to visit another professionally displaced English teacher. Those of you who love the language - or are vaguely familiar with it - would also be horrified by the people I work with and how they speak. I look forward to being around other literate adults and by God if I am going go work with children why do they have to be my boss and why can't they be actual twelve-year-olds instead of emotionally handicapped nincompoops?

Being on an airplane is also a great deal like being a child in school again - although United let me have a full soda which i absolutely regret as the person I am sitting next to is asleep or possibly dead. He also looks like Pedro and I'm terribly tempted to say, "I didn't vote for you." I refrain because he's asleep, not drooling on my shoulder, and I'd retort, "at least I don't resemble the bloated corpse of Jack McFarland."

I could also comb through the catalog they put in the seat behind you full of things that seem like a good idea thousands of feet in the air but that we'd pass on when we found it at Target. Right now I'd take the R2D2 that follows you around the house and the oak or mahogany pet kennel that looks like furniture. I'd totally go for the meerkats statue for the garden and the King Tut sarcophagus for inside the house - it doubles as a cabinet!

I can pass on the wasp traps, our neighborhood needs a little more catch and release on those. I'm also a little afraid of all the products to abuse your pets. My dog, Molly, and my koala (who prefers to have his name redacted from the internet for his own safety) are pretty much the only animals that I consider. Dogs are pretty easy going - it's the humans who could use a nap.

I thinks so far my favorite part of this iPad and this flight has been the questions. "Is that an iPad?" No, ma'am it's an brushed aluminum sandwich. "Do you love it?" It's inanimate. How can I not love it! It doesn't talk back or pee on the carpet or even use all the toilet paper.

It's like reading a book and being asked what you're doing. What are the possible answers? Also, doesn't it appear to you that I am pleasantly engaged in something and perhaps you should keep your hand out my cage?

There are a great deal of productive things I can accomplish with this computer but I'm pretty sure I'll stick to causing trouble.

iDork

I got my new Mac Book on Sunday. It has taken me a full twenty-four hours to start an entry because I have either been playing on the computer or at work thinking about playing on the computer. I felt sick and they sent me home early – but I am sure it had more to do with my book being in computer withdrawal. The twenty-four hours previous to this I relinquished my iBook G4 for the data transfer and was Amish for twenty-four hours.

That was a hard time because I get two channels on the television and the DVD player was fried when the electrical storm fried the other computers. Entertainment was limited to the few CDs that I own, a VHS tape of Ten Things I Hate About You and a Keanu Reeves movie on Fox, Chain Reaction, in which I realized that he while he cannot act he can make you tired enough to sleep in any situation.

It was a great chance to get my apartment clean; I passed on that. I used my phone to text message and to text message, pioneering a new game with Chaos Bean – text message slug bug – where you text the person “SB Red” for “Slug Bug, Red” or in my case, “SB TC” for “Slug Bug, That Color.” Chaos Bean is amazed at my ability to detect and report Volkswagen Bugs with their color because if it were a Jetta or Passat I would be unable to tell you what color it was. Bugs are made of sterner stuff.

The Mac Book is an amazing fun computer. I like everything about this from the coloration, to the remote control, visual display and the on board software has been great to play with. The only draw back is that with video conferencing I am not required by my own morality to always be well groomed, or at least plop a hat on my head. No more chewing with my mouth open or picking my nose. So far I have been using the photo booth the most, but that is more out of finding a place with good lighting in my apartment.

I would write more but I want to try my video games with a higher speed processor.

iDate

It’s an Apple thing, you wouldn’t understand

Last week an electrical surge tore through my DSL modem into the AirPort and down to the iMac, one of the iBooks, and my iPod. Had Chaos Bean and I been home when this happened we would have accompanied this catastrophe we would have thrown ourselves around the living room in a manner consistent with Star Trek, complete with the ruining Chaos’ elaborate Queen of Naboo Pompadour. The other iBook was not connected to the DSL Modem so Chaos and I have been sharing this one for almost two weeks while my insurance gets its act together.

In order for the insurance to help us the computers needed to be diagnosed by a professional, and not just the conjectures of an elementary school teacher and his Chocolatier sister. Chaos and I decided to go to the Apple Store to find out their procedures for having such work done and to get prices for repairs. My insurance will either pay for repairs or replace the computers depending on what the technician says. The first Mac Genius (their academically acquired title) told us that our conjecture was indeed correct but that we would need to bring in the computers for examination. Yet another, unhelpful, Mac Genius tried to explain my insurance policy to me (sight unseen) and Chaos and I were worried because without a Mac Genius to tell us what we already knew we were going to be a one computer, ground line apartment.

We went home and I loaded myself up with thousands of dollars of irreparable Apple products and trundled that and Chaos into the car and to the Apple Store where another Mac Genius help us. Lucky for us, he was one of Chaos Bean’s people. He complemented her pompadour and recognized her jacket as being a Social Distortion jacket. I was a little worried at first because when I initially told him what happened he said he was sorry and touched my hand – this was until I realized that as a Mac Genius he knew that losing your computer, AirPort or iPod was tantamount to your Grandmother, your best friend, or your dog dying. Losing all of them at one time was like someone lined them up on a wall and made you watch while they were shot. People who do not have iPods, to include my incredibly unhelpful and obtuse insurance adjustor, will not understand.

We left the Apple Store with the paperwork we needed to have our computers resurrected from the ashes of our misery but with a new idea, a new purpose. I am betrothed and need not this service but Chaos Bean and I hatched the idea of having an “iDate” service. There are dating services for every group imaginable but there is no official, Apple Sanctioned dating service. I am betrothed to an Apple user but there is not guarantee for Chaos Bean. This is something that we have to consider when dating someone because we are at the age that we may end up marrying the people we date and having children with them – as opposed to younger people who have children and get married.

I want the best for Chaos Bean. I want her to find a nice Lutheran boy who likes Punk Rock, uses a Macintosh computer, and has enough ink on his body to reprint a copy of the Augsburg Confession in the original German, I can skip the “enough metal in his face to build a scale model of the Statue of Liberty,” but I can only speak for myself. Alex Vance, converting is the least of your worried before we send Chaos Bean and her dowry along.

“Through the internet, things you will see, other places, the future, the past...old friends long gone…”

Yoda was right.

My sister has gotten me into using MySpace – something that I am in no way proud of – and I found two old friends using MySpace.com yesterday.

I was looking for a friend from Middle and High School and a friend from college. I had given up looking for Erin when she signed onto AOL Instant Stalker and I was looking for something on MySpace when I found Millicent.

Erin was always there to save me from doing my homework and yesterday was no different. I am not a wild person but some of my wilder college moments (read: kidnapping baby Jesus) were spent with Erin. She was a freshman my (first) senior year and was a part of a freshman retention project on our debate team. Erin was one of the few people I thought was acceptable to meet my family, and even fewer that came to my house.

I was always very worried about Erin because the people at our college in general and on our team specifically are vicious gossips and she disappeared after I graduated and fell off the face of the planet – which could simply mean ‘stopped using the internet’ in my world – so I heard a great deal of nasty things about Erin without hearing from Erin. I tend not to believe the gossip told me by my teammates or classmates: if you believed what you heard about me you would believe that I was more interesting than I actually am.

I also found my friend Millicent from Middle and High School while using the MySpace people search. Her surname is unique and so is her first name but neither of those pieces of information will be useful if you cannot spell them and if she got married – both of which happened.

I was concerned upon finding Millicent that she would go to my page at MySpace and think I was a dork and then it occurred to me: MySpace is by nature sinful and unclean, also wicked dorky. It also occurred to me that, after Peter, few people know me as long as Millicent without being related to me – if she does not know I am a dork then perhaps she will never know. Millicent was always more popular and smarter than I was and probably still is. She was also a better writer than I was, if she still is I will never stop hating her.

I was excited to find her because as an Army Brat, you do not keep in touch with many people and most of the people from your past that you run into are people you would like to run into with a car or bus.

Most of the people I run into from Middle or High School also look like they were hit by a bus, drug behind it for a couple blocks and then used as a soccer ball by street urchins before dragging themselves into Wal Mart for clean clothing. Millicent looks even more beautiful than she did in Middle and High School. Why, oh why, are all the pretty straight women my age married?

some things cannot be bleached

I went to the Mall today because I needed my computer serviced at the Apple Store. The ‘genius’ at the genius bar that serviced my computer commented that I had the cleanest keyboard he had seen in a while and that I had the first computer in months that did not have a keyboard area full of pubic hair. I asked him to wash his hands and he thought I was crazy, but I persisted and insisted. I am not judging what other people do at their computers but I am not keen on someone being up to their elbows in other people’s pubic hair touching my belongings. I had run out of the hand sanitizer that I carry in my brief case so I offered him a Clorox wipe.

Right now, he is probably writing about the nut job that did not have hair or food in his computer that carried Clorox on his person. This was a free service and he showed me a few other tricks that my computer can do so it was not a waste of time, I wish I could have called it a wash. I did buy products to clean my computer and other digital equipment after being admonished that I indeed should not bleach everything and that my computer is one of those things that is too ‘delicate’ for bleach. I really am disinterested in owning anything that cannot be bleached.

The Dork Side of the Force

A store where I used to have a line of credit sent be a gift certificate for my birthday and I only mentioned it to my friend Peter because it is definitely not my birthday but he missed that point because he has no idea when my birthday is. Here is a hint: we were born on the same day.

So, Friday, in the mail I got a gift certificate to the Apple Store because that is where I get my capitalism on and Peter knows it and after checking out a million education and useful applications for the gift certificate – for me or my students and even checking to see if I could swing the repairs on my sister’s computer I settled on blowing it on a video game for my computer because I have decided that I need something fun to do occasionally and this virginity is not going anywhere so I might as well get a video game.

In checking out the games there were many options but I hate to spend too much on something I may not like. Finally, I succumbed to the Dork Side of the Force and bought LEGO Star Wars, The Video Game on the recommendation of a ten-year-old in my class. Then, after figuring out how to install it on my computer, the game ate my life. Who knew something so goofy could be so fun?

Peter, however, is not so impressed that I spent his gift certificate on a game, mainly because it is not my birthday and I should have sent it back but I figure that September 5 is my unbirthday, and his, so I deserve a gift. Being his friend is a lot of work.

For future reference, gift certificates are great gifts. Someone pointed out that they do not express that you know or love your friend or family member because you did not know what to get. I make a point of not knowing or loving my family members and I would be loath to admit to a friend that I did. However, if you know were a friend likes to shop a certificate can be a great gift because it could save someone the hassle of returning or exchanging. Really, who would return a gift certificate for being the wrong size or color?

I could elaborate but you do not understand the power of the Dork Side. I must obey my master.