Now and then we like to post things we think matter; here, then, is a story from Alison.Alice decides to buy a new computer: her Dell crashed, her relationship crashed…yet, Alice was proportional, and could hardly imagine mourning each exclusively when in fact she could accomplish both at once. Alice is a poet; aesthetics are paramount, and no one understands this better than Apple, who manages to parlay computers into a near perfect-looking package. Apple, implicating Adam and Eve, our very origins, and Alice’s plans for reconstruction.
Aesthetic, of or concerning the appreciation of beauty or good taste, derived from Aaesthesia or Esthesia, the ability to feel or perceive. This was what was she wanted; beauty, form, and function in a hard gloss white case. Its opposite, anesthesia, not feeling, is considerably more dangerous and so you see how important aesthetics are – especially as one attempts to create a new Life.
Alice is a comparison shopper; there is a sea of options out there and briefly, she became a computer-slut; touching many dark machines, for only through sensory experience would she know. BestBuy, Circuit City, CompUSA, she tried them all, nestled into kiosks, bathed in a bluish glow.
Understandably, she craved simplicity. Enter the Apple retail store in Soho: a mob at i-tunes, teams of customers in Cameras, the line to pay snakes into a dollar sign of its own. Here she is talking with Jeffrey, superior in his black “Genius” t-shirt, thick, black-rimmed glasses, a little aloof, a long-standing Apple Devotee. Alice explains she is there to make the switch, to migrate; Jeffrey nods, nothing more need be said.
Alice is looking for the prettiest notebook she can afford. Portability is going to be important. She is done with Windows (which had been revealing a filmy, unpleasant view); her life needed order, streamlining, a completely new Operating System. Quality, synonymous with beauty, was the one thing Alice could trust, and the new computer would have both; it’s the Apple way. At 3am Alice completed installation of AirPort, perfection in its sugar cube box, and quietly celebrated her newfound independence, having crossed over into a new existence, a monochromatic, mobile, realm. i-pod, i-book, i-tunes – she was embarking on a whole new i-life, and in the course of such adventure, there would be no turning back.
Labels: musing