Friday, September 28, 2001
3:41 PM:
oh, the peculiar life of the unemployed-- today i am buying a laptop.
i really do need it-- i mean i think i 90% need it. my desktop computer is the same one i acquired, a piece at a time (motherboard, RAM, hard drive, video card, and so on (hey, my hard drive spins fast, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, because i researched the sucker)) back in 1996. my old hand-me-down monitor broke in may, all the vertical information collapsing into the space of a few pixels so that i had a monitor, if you could say that a 3 x 1024 display was your style. so now i am using a monitor a friend gave me for free, a minute little gateway that was once the property of nortel, but shortly after the 1994 earthquake (in l.a.) fell out of a mustang convertible onto the 405 as the old nortel office space was being evacuated and acquired some nasty skid marks. amazingly the monitor still worked, but nobody actually wanted it in their cube anymore. small wonder. i've got those skid marks covered up, though, with a jungle-themed border made for school bulletin boards. purchased from staples. the monitor has all of 12 inches of screen. the display size is even smaller.
and my apartment, it's only one room. my desk (with computer) is, thankfully, in the kitchen, so if i'm to work on it, at least i'm half a room away from the Room, but then again it's only half a room. so if i wish to work all day on my computer, then that means that i don't get to leave the Room. this has resulted in several weeks of me with an interesting case of cabin fever. trust me, it sucks. you walk outside and you realize the expression on your face makes you look like a lunatic. no good for a formerly high-flying digerati. no good at all. definitely bad for the soul.
so i think i deserve an iBook, don't you? just because you don't have a job doesn't mean that your life has to stop, right? one of my friends who is unemployed, he just got DSL another seems to have been on a perpetual motoguzzi ride across the USA and canada. yep. you can't let the man bring you down. just because he took away your income. damn the man.
i'll have so much fun with the iBook. we'll go places, like coffeeshops, parks, and borders. i'll write long screeds to employers extolling my employability. i'll install Xfree86 on it and run GIMP. things will be cool. and at the end of the day i'll pack it into my little notebook bag and go home. to the Room, or, if i can no longer afford the rent for the Room ($705 a month), to my parent's house. and someday, maybe i'll say, "those were the days."
