Molt Be Blog

New blog Post - 04/24/2004 updated 05/21/2004
My PDA and other stuff.
I started thinking that I could work on writing something magnficent. Something that wouldn't take up too much time; allow me to be lazy, but be a story nonetheless. I've never been asked to write a story with no topic. Actually, that's not true. I haven't been asked to do something like it since highschool. I feel like if I actually have a topic, I can really come up with some quality writing, but that if there's nothing there to begin with, I can make it more trouble than it should be. There's definitely plenty for me to talk about, but it always sounds like needless complainig if no one ever asked you to speak in the first place. Maybe that's the trouble with writing like this: there's no audience. There's a lesson in there somewhere about not taking the advice of idiots spouting about "knowing your audience" for granted. I think I got a really weird sunburn today at the track meet. Some splotches under my right eye and a spot on my neck too. Sometimes I think I should be sued for overuse of commas and not having known what the word "trite" meant, despite having used it in sentences for years. Everyone does it, but catching yourself feels pulcritudinous. (Exactly.) So, either way, there's some neat stuff for me to expore here with this portable palm thing and the keyboard. Romantically, I think that it will lead to me writing in public. I picture myself on a bench in the center of Dupont Circle watching couples and bike messengers share seats with hobos. I know that this will never happen, but it's nice to imagine it. I wonder what business people imagine when they get their first PDAs. Do they ponder all of the useless jargon that they have and try to make up new ones by stringing different phrases from different memos together? What else can they leverage independantly of ongoing market variance? Do they know what half of those ten words really mean?
I learned what proactive meant today and was sorely dissappointed. I thought that it just meant being in favor of doing things. I turns out that it means the same thing as "predicting problems or scenarios and acting to prevent or prepare for them." I liked it better before and now recognize how poorly used it is that I could never figure out what it really meant from the context that it was in.
Back to the PDA. I really am fooling the hell out of myself that I'll ever use this in public and the reasons for it rattle off in my brain like pictures out of Abu Grahib:
(1) It's loud and annoying when I type. I hit the keys too hard, especiallythe space bar. I slam it, and only with my right thumb. I think I might even annoy myself with my typing. That's a lie. I revel in it because it makes me sound faster when I'm slamming on the spacebar somwhere along the line I was taught that typing fast is cool.
(2) I don't want people to think I'm some yuppie ass rich kid with a PDA that his mom gave him. Self-loathing must be the most pathetic and epidemic quality of middle class offspring. Kids who moved up from the working class to become our parents were allowed to say that they had made something of themselves. Whereas their offspring will forever doubt if they made themselves what they are or had success based on their parents' ability to support them. Would I be sitting here typng on a collapsable keyboard into a PDA if it weren't for them? What a stupid, trite question. Shoulder, Chip, blah, blah, blah.
(3) I know I'm just going to use this stupid thing to write hai-kus while I'm in the bathroom at work.
So yeah, that's the new PDA. It's a hand-me-down, it's not color, but I'm done fulfilling my subconscious need to defend anything good that happens to me as someting earned or pure luck. It's a great little device that my shoulder-chip will shame me into detesting. Perhaps I'll throw caution to the wind and there'll be more to come.
*UPDATE
And there was more to come. I wrote that stuff up there back in April... --
New blog - 05/21/2004
What an effort it could take to actually think of something intelligent to write. Something that's not trite or boring... why bother?
So I got a PDA. I still have trouble remembering what it stands for... personal digital assistant? portable? eh, doesn't matter. My mom got a new one from her work and I scored her old one with no whining or anything. Good stuff. It's a Handsprig "Visor, ," which, from what I've read online, is a good pda to start out with. I've actually surprised myself by using it every day. I thought I'd be using it to blog stuff that I think of on the spur of the moment when I'm not close to a computer... but that hasn't really worked out. I've been so swamped with stuff to do that I use it for, you guessed it, the To Do list function. This function is amazing... when you check things off, they disappear. It's so satisfying to watch a little line scratch through them that I've started writing in little things that I forgot just so that I can tap the check box to watch them go away. My nerdiness knows no bounds.
Just like a nerd, after I got the thing I started searching around for different little applicatios to download onto it. I've gotta say that there really aren't enough free games out there. Either that, or I haven't spent enough time looking.
Another excellent thing on the PDA is that you can convert large textfiles into a .doc format and then read them all over the place. It's a bit ridiculous to think that I'll actually find time to read some book that's so old that no one owns the copyrght material while I'm waiting for a bus, but it's nice to think it could happen.
Another good feature is this whole Avantgo.com business, which lets you download news, weather, and other info every time you connect the PDA to the internet. I've been happily reading my news on a smaller screen for several weeks and I can't say it's all bad. We'll see if THIS THING ever gets posted.
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