Dear Jayce,
You are writing this because in truth you are much more interested in getting home and re-configuring your mac than you are working. So you get up, take that first 15 minute break on the system, and return to your desktop and tap tap tap. There’s a certain rhythm to it that you recognize and you continue writing words which do not immediately make sense, but the prospect of getting a constant tap tap tap on the keyboard excites you.
You have a shitload of work to do and you know your mind should be tethered to only the work you have within only 1-foot radius of your workstation. You know you should be focusing. You know you should be sending a shitload of emails. You don’t care. You can get exhausted more than you can even bother imagining for yourself, but there’s an excitement that the abundance of emails will not be able to quench: it’s the amount of new tinkering that you have waiting at home. Over the weekend, you managed to get your paw on a system extremely alien to you, and in as much as your best friend of a laptop’s memory is badgering you, you know that Wicky—despite its video card death—will be happy for you. For how many weeks you have been glumly looking at your girlfriend’s laptop—the other household laptop, Finn—and you know you will never be at home with a system you cannot bastardize for your own comfort. You laugh at the word bastardize, but in truth, that’s the only way you can work with something—if it resembles your mind every time you look at it. If it had a stench that will be unmistakably yours.
She knows it—your girlfriend who has been tolerating your desperation and depression and swinging moods and tastes which instigate vertigo on her, but you can’t make up your mind on which system you really want—an N900? A Samsung? A Blackberry? An unbranded tablet pegged to be more powerful than a Samsung but can’t be repaired cheap when it breaks down? She knows it, and she definitely knew it when she can’t even really bother you while you’re in front of that system and reconfiguring it, talking to her only on the small instances that you deem it proper, and only to inform her about your reports/findings about the laptop that’s so full of jargon but she still nods her head trying to make you feel she understands. She doesn’t. And she doesn’t really give a fuck. But she loves you, hence, she nods her head and tries to grasp what you’re trying to say. But she knows it. She knows you’re excited as hell and she knows it will not die down for the next few weeks. She knows it while she looks at you configuring your desktop workspace to look as workable as it suits your taste. You put in a kick-ass looking wallpaper (it isn’t the best but it will do) and start moving around things in order of your need for use, and she looks at it and she asks why you never fixed Finn to look like that. But she knows it.
She even suggests her time by offering to download some programs for you. You know it can’t help because most of those programs are too heavy and you can’t find the source just yet, but you’re thankful she’s supporting your ridiculousness. You go through the list of programs you need and you tinker with the OS and you wonder why you didn’t stumble into it earlier. Your inner geek is protesting because it’s a system that’s too simple for your own complex inanities, but you can’t help but applaud the way that in truth, it has sort of made your life easier. It WILL take some getting used to, but it’s very exciting right now. And you can’t wait to do projects and wonders with it. And you wonder when you can finally install the needed basic programs – a graphics creator, a photo fixer, a desktop publisher, a live microblogging feed reader, a video editor, a music editor, and possibly even a dj program that the girlfriend can tinker with. Yes, it’s a small list for now but it will soon be on your cluttered desktop. And you will hate the clutter and fix them again into something very neat and instant, that it’s almost like you know the feeling of an oriental cook discovering Ramen—it’s oh so simple and quick and you know you can do better but you can’t deny that it’s a pretty good solution to maximize for your hunger for now.
Hunger. You haven’t even thought of eating much. You have thought of allocating the money for those disks for installation instead. Hunger. To type, to create, to blog, to do graphics. Hunger to do something new. Hunger to be new.
Your 15 minutes is up. You try to set your mind on work now. You kind of manage to do so. But you know something new is waiting for you at home. And it’s making you work with a smile.
Love, Jayce
