Tech

I feel bad about my computer. The poor thing is overheating a lot—yesterday, while I was writing my essay, I had to prop it up on index card boxes. It's taking ages to start up, failing to read CDs, and (as I mentioned) is shutting down randomly.

My most precious possessions are my gadgets. My first gadget was a computer, an iMac I got for my birthday when I was eight or nine. I adored the thing. Spent hours on it playing Oregon Trail, Amazon Trail, SimSafari, Nanosaur, KidPix... I'm sure there are a thousand more, but those were the ones I adored particularly. Eventually I got an older iMac, complete with OSX. I played the Sims and Warcraft. I went from ClarisWorks to AppleWorks to Microsoft Word (brilliant picture, by the way), from Netscape Navigator to Internet Explorer to Safari, from KidPix to Drawing to InDesign and Photoshop. Now, I have a MacBook, which is dying on me. Appropriate? Only in about eighty years.

Birthdays are big for me. I got my first camera on a birthday, a Nikon Coolpix, which was pretty basic, but still functional. Just a month ago, for graduation, I got a Sony Cyber-shot, which is top-of-the-line as far as amateur cameras go. My first important series of pictures I took at Kansas University while enrolled in the Duke TIP Writer's Workshop course (I loathed the walk from the dorm to the classroom so much that if you put me down in Lawrence, I could probably navigate to either place just through sheer force of hate.) Some guy figured out how to open up the elevator doors to reveal the shaft, and I took pictures. Now, I center my lens at leaves and pets and people, rather than events.

Most importantly for my social life, I got my first phone on my birthday. It was a Nokia 3200 and I adored it. I could change the face- and back-plate of the phone; generally I kept it on a firey, reflective background and matched it with a picture of the sun as a menu background. It had Snake and Solitaire, most memorably, and I bought a "Dark of the Matinee" ringtone, which have today on my current phone. Within two years I'd traded it out for a Motorola RAZR, the cell phone of my generation. It was a wonderful little thing. On the RAZR I discovered texting and web browsing. I had to rebuy my Solitaire game. Sadly, RAZRs didn't come with Snake. It served faithfully for another two years, lasting me until my dad got an iPhone a mere week after they were released. I drooled over the thing so copiously that to my utter shock, I got one for Christmas (really, for early Thanksgiving, since I was going to Utah over that holiday). It's one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I adore my iPhone. The few times I've dropped it, I've nearly cried.

The other cool gadgets that I've owned (and own) include the Flip, a truly breakthrough little camcorder that kicks ass in the trenches of the video age. I had a Shuffle for ages, until I moved on to a regular old iPod, which I still cherish even though it's beginning to look (and feel) a little archaic. For another birthday I received a beautiful pair of Skullcandy headphones, exquisite in their ultra-cool simplicity. I own JBL speakers, a WD MyBook external hard drive, an Apple 23-inch cinema display, various jump drives (I've gone through three), a PiXMA printer, an HP digital photo frame, and some very pretty white speakers that I can't remember the name of.

The lesson to take from all of this? Despite all of the technology in my life, if I were to leap from a burning building and could only take one object with me, that object would be my very first copy of Watership Down.