Monday, May 16, 2005
In defense of laziness and being a geek
A few entries back, I posted about how my mom was pretty ok in the sagacious-department. And she, like most moms (unfortunately not all), had we kids’ best interest at heart. I don’t know if I touched on this yet, but she was also pretty granola. Not an overt hippy, at least not by the time we kids rolled around. This meant two things: it was a chink in the armor of her being sagacious (to spare her, I’m not exposing the “crystals can heal” fiasco of the late ‘80s), and she was a nature freak. Strangely, she didn’t really like nature herself, but she was definitely fer it and not again’ it. She didn’t care for camping, or really being outside for prolonged periods, water in lakes freaked her out because it wasn’t as clear as swimming pools, and so on. But one thing of which she was ironclad certain on: we kids should watch less TV and go outside and runaround more.
Despite the fact that I hated sports (I wasn’t an anomaly, no one in my family loved them), I did like to go out and runaround. I was good at tag. See if there were an organized tag game, I may be tempted to play to this day. And I was a quick little fucker. I beat neighborhood kids on bikes—no hyperbole. I beat a friend’s moped while on foot—again no hyperbole. But I did not like running around as much as I liked Tom and Jerry on the tube in general. Especially any cartoon. Or anything with a robot, or monster, or ray gun-like thing. I didn’t dig westerns yet, but the space western, Battlestar Galactica, was awesome. “I dug the tube” is what I’m saying. This set poorly with mom.
The only thing that came to replace the tube was the computer. Mainly because it was exciting and new, but also because TV in the mid ‘80s got real bad. I’ll leave it to you to search the pop culture shrines to jog your memory of what was on, but with the exception of V, there was little good on TV.
Allow me to go down memory lane (RAM lane?). It was an apple IIe, oh I’m sorry, the cool kids (maybe that’s the wrong phrase) called it the apple //e. It had 128k of memory (as opposed to the 1 gig my slightly aged laptop has), had TWO floppy drives (the ironically smaller capacity with the bigger form factor), a dot matrix printer that sort of almost really worked, and an honest to goodness RGB monitor instead of a TV you could plug it into. I also had the extended 80-column card to display 80 columns of text instead of only 40, and—count ‘em—16 colors. And this was the enhanced version. And it was pretty huge…not like my modern day laptop that I can happily take outside—where my mom would much rather I was.
I almost didn’t get into the computer racket. After the parents bought this thing, it sat there, quiet, a little foreboding, but more inviting, dead, like the long dormant computer they used to decipher the German enigma codes at Bletchley For you see, mom dictated that we must have computer classes before we hopped on the computer. Made sense, but the computer classes never came. So we had this insanely expensive lump o’ plastic in the Music Room, as it was called. It was more than I could take. I prevaricated.
Somehow, seeing a 15-minute video in school on the wonder of computers equaled computer lessons in my mind. You know the video; you’ve probably seen the video. It was a mid ‘80s yawn fest about RAM, ROM and little else. Vague, a little misinformed, and by no means a class. But good enough for me. So I told mom I had classes. She grudgingly conceded. She had to know I was fibbing, but at the same time, it had been more than a month that the techno-monolith just sat there; she tacitly admitted she was being irrational.
Who knew if the damn thing actually even worked?
Next thing I knew, I heard the ominous sound of the floppy drive calibrating during boot up. Don’t panic. The sound of Semi air breaking down a slick mountain rode is a perfectly normal thing to be issuing forth from some hi-tech, sleek machine.
Once, I got on, I stayed on, brother. I learned it. I learned the hell out of that thing. And in those days, that meant programming. This frustrated mom to no end, for you see, the computer was not even window-adjacent, much less outside.
There was drama. She was right about the situation a little. I should be a little more well rounded. But she unplugged the computer and lost about 100 lines of code and told me to go outside and that I was wasting my time. The computer to her was a toy, much in the same way, that the TV was a passive thing that rotted my brain. They would never contribute to my life, and in fact TV and computers would stand in the way of things that were important in life. Like instead of sitting in a room doing nothing, sitting outside doing nothing.
So without too many Freudian reffs, I wonder if the reason I use COMPUTERS to create TELEVISION media is just to prove mom was wrong about these two things. Although I admit, when I’m entrenched too much in the technological horror that my life can become, I really just want to go outside. So maybe, ultimately she was right. Anybody know of a job I could just sit outside?
Despite the fact that I hated sports (I wasn’t an anomaly, no one in my family loved them), I did like to go out and runaround. I was good at tag. See if there were an organized tag game, I may be tempted to play to this day. And I was a quick little fucker. I beat neighborhood kids on bikes—no hyperbole. I beat a friend’s moped while on foot—again no hyperbole. But I did not like running around as much as I liked Tom and Jerry on the tube in general. Especially any cartoon. Or anything with a robot, or monster, or ray gun-like thing. I didn’t dig westerns yet, but the space western, Battlestar Galactica, was awesome. “I dug the tube” is what I’m saying. This set poorly with mom.
The only thing that came to replace the tube was the computer. Mainly because it was exciting and new, but also because TV in the mid ‘80s got real bad. I’ll leave it to you to search the pop culture shrines to jog your memory of what was on, but with the exception of V, there was little good on TV.
Allow me to go down memory lane (RAM lane?). It was an apple IIe, oh I’m sorry, the cool kids (maybe that’s the wrong phrase) called it the apple //e. It had 128k of memory (as opposed to the 1 gig my slightly aged laptop has), had TWO floppy drives (the ironically smaller capacity with the bigger form factor), a dot matrix printer that sort of almost really worked, and an honest to goodness RGB monitor instead of a TV you could plug it into. I also had the extended 80-column card to display 80 columns of text instead of only 40, and—count ‘em—16 colors. And this was the enhanced version. And it was pretty huge…not like my modern day laptop that I can happily take outside—where my mom would much rather I was.
I almost didn’t get into the computer racket. After the parents bought this thing, it sat there, quiet, a little foreboding, but more inviting, dead, like the long dormant computer they used to decipher the German enigma codes at Bletchley For you see, mom dictated that we must have computer classes before we hopped on the computer. Made sense, but the computer classes never came. So we had this insanely expensive lump o’ plastic in the Music Room, as it was called. It was more than I could take. I prevaricated.
Somehow, seeing a 15-minute video in school on the wonder of computers equaled computer lessons in my mind. You know the video; you’ve probably seen the video. It was a mid ‘80s yawn fest about RAM, ROM and little else. Vague, a little misinformed, and by no means a class. But good enough for me. So I told mom I had classes. She grudgingly conceded. She had to know I was fibbing, but at the same time, it had been more than a month that the techno-monolith just sat there; she tacitly admitted she was being irrational.
Who knew if the damn thing actually even worked?
Next thing I knew, I heard the ominous sound of the floppy drive calibrating during boot up. Don’t panic. The sound of Semi air breaking down a slick mountain rode is a perfectly normal thing to be issuing forth from some hi-tech, sleek machine.
Once, I got on, I stayed on, brother. I learned it. I learned the hell out of that thing. And in those days, that meant programming. This frustrated mom to no end, for you see, the computer was not even window-adjacent, much less outside.
There was drama. She was right about the situation a little. I should be a little more well rounded. But she unplugged the computer and lost about 100 lines of code and told me to go outside and that I was wasting my time. The computer to her was a toy, much in the same way, that the TV was a passive thing that rotted my brain. They would never contribute to my life, and in fact TV and computers would stand in the way of things that were important in life. Like instead of sitting in a room doing nothing, sitting outside doing nothing.
So without too many Freudian reffs, I wonder if the reason I use COMPUTERS to create TELEVISION media is just to prove mom was wrong about these two things. Although I admit, when I’m entrenched too much in the technological horror that my life can become, I really just want to go outside. So maybe, ultimately she was right. Anybody know of a job I could just sit outside?
// posted by Tim @ 2:08 PM 
