Computers
My middle-school biology teacher told my parents at a conference that the best thing they could do for me was to buy me a computer. So my parents, that week, bought me my own computer, a Compaq (my dad used a Mac, but being that this was a career-related purchase I got a PC) that I kept in my bedroom. The first thing I did, I think, was sign on to AOL and search WebCrawler for “sex”. Lots of my computer activities were searches for sex related images, which I, being old-fashioned, printed out and stored in a bicycle helmet box. But I also started to make videos, play in MS Paint, and a simple MIDI composition program. More and more the computer became the place I went to encounter and create stories, to draw and to listen to music; it became a major locus of my personal and inner life. And my biology teacher ended up being right, in a sense: I now make my living from computers. I am not, however, happy with my relationship to computers, or the idea of making a screen an eighth the size of my desk into a major portion of the world in which I live. For every way that it is infinite, there are just as many ways that it’s limited. I would, though, like to get that Compaq presario up and running, and look through what I left on it…
