Archive for June, 2008
in which i am using a laptop
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Oh, hi there.
So, two weeks ago I had to put down my 7-year-old computer. I had gotten used to the fact that it was noisy. Noise was OK. But all of a sudden it would become dead silent for a split-second, like its little electronic heart had skipped a beat, and whatever I was doing, or whatever I was listening to, would skip right along with it. And I took that to be a Bad Thing.
I was able to back up everything of importance, and I’m going to buy a shiny new iMac soon. In the meantime, though, I’m using an 8-year-old laptop, and it’s just not good at, well, pretty much everything a computer is supposed to do. But it’s not dead yet.
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Anyway! I wanted to bring your attention to some Internet videos. Here is one:
Yay! The Old 97′s, playing a song. But who’s that fella in the foreground wearing a yellow shirt, the one with such a handsome back of head? It’s ME.
Obviously, I was pretty excited to find this (and other, similar videos from the same performance), and I went on a YouTube hunt for myself. This was nothing new; mere hours after seeing a Stars-Red Wings playoff game with my dad, I was on Flickr, searching for a few pixels from someone else’s camera that looked like me. (Sadly, this laptop has no photo-editing software other than Paint, and although I’m a master at that, it’s maybe not the best tool for showing you the Tom-shaped clusters of pixels I found.) When I bought the pretty decent Beulah DVD, I watched the Philadelphia sequence in slow-motion. (Kristen and I are on there for a good half-second or so.) And so on.
But why? Why the need to catch glimpses of myself through others’ eyes?
Well, I think Ray Davies knows: “People take pictures of each other,
just to prove that they really existed.”