Schamp Guides are now available for iPhone and iPod Touch. And my photo is in the Brisbane Guide.
Connected.
My desktop computer has been groaning and creaking in the death throes of old age and reduced mghz. I needed to replace it but I did not want another great lump of grey plastic, inducing worry that I’d bought too little, too early, not enough bells and too many whistles.
Enter the UMPC. What a fantastic idea! All things I could do and all the places that I could go with a UMPC! How cool am I that I can use UMPC in a sentence!
The Ultra Mobile PC or Netbook is faster, lighter, groovier than the usual lumps of dell that I buy. Plus it comes in pretty pink or azure blue. And there is an UMPC culture. Forums to read, tricks to pimp the UMPC, hotspots and wi-fis to connect.
Now, I have more ways than ever not to talk to anyone and I can do it pink.
Read.ing.
Am going through a reading fad. Its odd that I don’t read for a month or so and then lose myself in about five books one after the other. At the bookstore I picked up:
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert – Can’t possibly be a nearing middle age, white protestant woman and risk the bandwagon leaving me behind.
God’s Call Girl by Carla Van Raay – Have a thing for biographies at the moment.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys – a million years old but I wanted to read it because I watched an excellent BBC production of this precursor to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – because I wanted to know what I was talking about when I say things like “Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequal to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.”
I also picked up:
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle – because Oprah said it was good. Actually Oprah said his new book was good but this one was cheaper and I like to get to know my authors before I commit.
The Dummies Guide to Meditation – by some dude that writes Dummies Guides. How come we can never remember who wrote a Dummies book? The author’s name is right there on the front cover like other books.
Anyhoo – must go – I think I am about to have an 18th Century religious experience.
On being ill.
It’s been a strange couple of months. People getting sick, getting biopsies, having palsies. I’ve wondered whether it’s just a sign of aging; the older I am the more likely I am to know sick people. But three months ago I was only three months younger, and everybody was well.
Perhaps it’s just my turn on the wheel of fear. I’ve heard the word “…oscopy” used in conversation way too much recently. It gives me the willies; it gives everyone the willies.
So I talk to the palsied and the afflicted, and I say, “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.” It’s a thing that people say. Our daily interactions are filled with requirements for us to say the right and acceptable thing. I wonder though, when people say, “I’m sorry for your loss,” would they still say it if amputations were in question?
It’d be great if, for once, when someone said, “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do,” the other person felt free enough to actually say, “Well, you could do the laundry. I just haven’t gotten around to it, what with half my uterus missing. And, look, could you go down to Energex and pay this overdue electricity bill? And by the way, that’s a nice shirt – could I have it?”
But sick people don’t say that, because they know what you mean. They understand that we are all helpless in the face of the extent of our mortality, and know that you wish to assert the common bond of humanity. However, telling a sick person, “I assert our common bond of humanity” is just weird, so you say the other thing, the agreed-upon utterances of social connectivity.
The reality is that people we love are going to get sick and die, along with people we’ve never heard of, and the misery will stop only when we ourselves kick it and let someone else do the grieving. Either way, I hope that those about me will balance honest appraisal with a nod to polite sensitivity. “Your uterus will explode in seven minutes, please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
