Monthly Archives: December 2009
A child of my age
Like most 6 year olds I’d had my suspicions about Santa for some time. The seeds of doubt were first planted at school. Other kids, kids who even from that early age were so much more streetwise than me; streetwise before streetwise was necessary, were making claims that it was their parents and not Santa who were leaving the presents at the bottom of their beds. They knew because they had seen them. They also know because their older brothers had told them. If you knew their older brothers you would have believed them too. They had the air of being right about everything.
A couple of times, half awake, I thought I had seen the shillouette of Santa come into my room and carefully place presents at the foot of my bed. The second time I remember thinking how similar he was in shillouette to my father, but he said it wasn’t him and I believed him. I still had doubts though. The mechanics didn’t make sense. The sleigh and the reindeers: you want me to believe that? Kind of fun; I could believe that. Down the chimney of the house of every kid in the world? I had a wild imagination as a child, I rolled with it; not an argument I wanted to pick holes in anyway. This is what debunked the myth for me: the way my toys were packaged when I unwrapped them. Or, more precisely the branding on the packaging. Hasbro made my Star Wars figures, not the elves.
The physicality of beige
This is the way it used to work: computers were housed in a rough, beige plastic casing. They got grubby. They were boxy, they were clunky, they were heavy. Clusters of dead skin would coagulate on the corners of the CPU, large grey/brown smears would radiate from the CD eject button and the letters of each key on the keyboard would be circled by a ring of finger dirt. As the hardware grew older, the retardants in the plastic grew darker and yellower. Years of use were recorded on them as well as in them. My life was being involuntarily being recorded on to it. Every so often, I would inspect the underside of my mouse and scrape several full fingernail’s worth of gunk away from the area around the roller ball. It was like it was slowly becoming a cyborg – part human, part machine; a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts. It was immensely satisfying. There were traces of me everywhere, my life on my computer was physical.
This is the way it works now: computers are housed in shiny black plastic or brushed metal casings with incredibly smooth surfaces. They are sleek and light-weight. They don’t get grubby. They reflect my image back rather than collect fragments from it. My reflected image can become distorted in the high gloss by a build up of greasy finger marks, but these can be wiped off with the end of a sleeve and they constantly are. And doing so is immensely satisfying. It’s smoothness is designed to repel. It’s shape has become ornament. My life now is voluntarily recorded within it and through it. My preoccupations and procrastinations are chronicled across the web, every trace of me exists deep within my hard drive or remotely in the cloud.