2006-01-08 - 10:38 a.m.
I got "tagged" by milkmaid to write five weird things about myself, so I will take up the challenge here. Can I actually think of five weird things about myself? Gosh, there must be hundreds! Probably my five answers, themselves, will be weird.
1. I have what must be, by this time, several thousand movies, mostly on videotape, but now about a hundred on DVD, too. (Although perhaps unusual, this isn't the weird thing, yet.) This actually got started by one of my uncles, who, while he was alive, would spend half the year living in Scandinavia, and the other half living in California. He did not know a word of either Swedish or Finnish (he'd more or less divide his Scandinavian time between Stockholm and Helsinki, and he owned a condo in each city), so was unable to entertain himself by watching television over there. Instead, he had begun a "movie recording factory process" in which he'd keep three VCRs working constantly day and night, recording movies off of the cable channels, and those movies he would ship to Sweden and Finland.
After he was killed in an automobile accident in California, during the administration of his estate, my brother, sisters, and I divided up among us this huge videotape collection. And I just kind of kept it going, hardly able to actually watch a movie on cable without duplicating it, or, upon renting a movie, copying it. Most of them I now have no place to put, so countless numerous ones are in boxes in my storage unit for which I sometimes have to go on a frustrating seach, which is true with just about every other thing I own, as well.
One of my constant mantras of complaint about my horrible studio apartment is "there is no place to put anything, there is no place to do anything." But when I live in a city in which the median house price is nearly half a million dollars, and even moving to a better apartment would double the rent I am paying now (I am in a rent-controlled apartment), I am kind of trapped. I did vow, though, with the coming of the new year, that I was going to solve this problem one way or another THIS YEAR.
Okay, perhaps there were a couple of weird things in there (including a weirdness of my uncle), but the weird thing I intended to put here was that there are very often certain individual scenes in these movies that I will watch over and over and over again (I don't mean all at once, but whenever the mood or need strikes). So there IS a reason, I suppose, to actually have all these movies!
What kind of scene? Well, let me give you a few examples.
In the first Harry Potter movie, I very often watch "the arrival of the invitation to Hogwart's School of Wizardry" scene. Why is that one so important? Well, one of my more powerful beliefs is that ALL of us have some unique genius or ability that we long ago have forgotten or are somehow being prevented from knowing about. It seems to serve the greater purpose of either evil forces or perhaps it is just the way of the physical world to turn us into slaves for evil forces, and if they can hide from us our true power, then we won't rebel from the suffering, and will, instead, presume that the only way we can survive is via that imposed "slavery"--being trapped, in other words.
Look at the movie Narnia; if you're like me, you might wonder why are there those creatures in thrall to the White Witch--why aren't they with Aslan? It's fascinating to me to be reminded by the movie how the power that was to liberate that world from the evil force of the White Witch (who made it always winter, but never Christmas) was merely the arrival of four humans ("Sons and Daughters of Eve"), who would work in concert with Aslan, a Spiritual King, God, Savior type force. The key was the fact that they were human, co-creators with, or at least adjuncts to (or workers for), God, and that gave them powers that made them the liberators of all other enslaved creatures. But that true "human" level is something that few have actually achieved, because they do not know who and what they really are.
Back to Harry Potter. Although he doesn't know who and what he really is, and his evil and abusive aunt and uncle who are raising him (since his wizard parents were killed by evil forces) have made every effort to PREVENT him from learning the truth about himself, the overriding forces of spirit DO know exactly who and what he is, and when the time comes that he is to begin walking the path of his true destiny, the invitations "to wizard school" continue to come (carried by owls), despite every obstacle. This is what Joseph Campbell referred to as "the call", and to which I might add that Yogananda said, "of every hundred, to one will be sent a call, and of every hundred who are sent a call, only one will hear it, and of every hundred who hear the call, only one will answer and respond to it." (Thus there are not very many in the world who follow their true destiny.)
In Harry Potter's case, the uncle and aunt are too relentless and energetic in preventing Harry from receiving the call, so ultimately the one that he is finally able receive (and answer) is one that is hand-delivered to him by the giant, Hagrid (somebody or some force felt that this was important enough to take this extra step, perhaps decided by or volunteered for by Hagrid himself).
Wow! The power and meaning of that is just so awesome that I have to watch it and experiece the deep feeling of it over and over again.
And here's what makes it even better. Harry Potter is a hero tale, but what few people realize is that hero tales are youth tales. We have few true heros in our country (and by the word "hero" I am definitely NOT including tattooed, gold-chain-encrusted professional sports figures or hip-hop stars, which are only diversions for passive, non-magic masses), and virtually the only tales anybody even knows about ARE the hero tales, because, as storyteller Michael Meade explains, the element in the story that intrigues you tells you where you are in your own story. So, for our population as a whole, we are still stuck in the "not yet a hero" stage.
But there is an entire adventure to come after even the "happily ever after" of hero youth tales, the facts of which are illuminated in middle tales and elderly tales, and that's where my own psyche comes in. In the Harry Potter scene I just outlined, I really am intrigued by the Hagrid part of the story, which is appropriate, because I am no longer "a young man of eleven," like Harry is, but, instead, in real life walk like a physical giant among a population of school-age children and I am very conscious of my ability to touch each one with my recognition that there IS this unique genius lying within them, if only they will remember it, or if forgotten, to seek to uncover it, and, as Yogananda said, I can also see which ones attract my attention for this recognition, which ones of those hear me, and which ones of those respond. Thus, by watching this scene manifested on the television screen, like in a mirror, I see reflected a portion of my true self at work, and that ought to be a joy and a treasure in anyone's book.
What might be some other scenes that I watch like that? Well, I love that "what are we doing here?" scene between Sam and Frodo at the end of The Two Towers, in which Sam outlines so powerfully what it is that they are fighting for, which I relate to our own current time in America. IS America still worth fighting for, or is it now the time to abandon it while we are still able to move and find emerging, greener pastures elsewhere? (To use Narnian terms, is this a "while the world is still young" battle like in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or Prince Caspian, or is it The Last Battle in which it is time for those who can to move "further up and further in"? Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the age of the world at all, but of the development of the particular participants in question. Thus each one will have our own answer to that question.)
Interestingly, this particular scene was NOT in Tolkien's book, but added in by the four script-writers of the movie. Stories, while based on the older stories, are still nevertheless constantly being refined, "filtered through the sands of time", to become more communicative and relative to the needs of modern listeners.
There is a little scene I love to watch in Cleopatra in which Julius Caesar, played by Rex Harrison ("King" Harrison!), an actor I had long loved and saw as a representative of someone I archetypically would have wanted as a mentor, is wearing the most beautiful (and arrogant!) combination of red and purple, royal colors, to be sure, that present the alpha and the omega of our color vision, upon having Cleopatra (played by Elizabeth Taylor) presented to him, before sitting down in front of her, the great Caesar defers to her perception of her own royalty and ambitions by saying in his professional-British-dramatist-trained voice, "It is permissible to sit?" Would that some sham like the Pope actually did something like that, but no, is his hypnotized view, all must prostrate before him and kiss his ill-gotten gold ring (a substance, according to one mystical poem I once read, that yearns to be off of people's bodies and out of their treasure houses and back inside the fiery mountains from which they were mined). Ah, like the ingenius costuming of the White Witch of Narnia, black contacts placed on the eyeballs, there truly is no soul behind these eyes, but merely a demon that knows only a very shallow magic that can do naught but freeze everything it touches to stone.
I also like to watch various scenes in the classic film, Giant (starring, among many, many others, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean). These scenes are to be bathed in an absolute pool of the possibilities of wealth. Such as, at the funeral of Luz, a wrinkled, sun-damaged, "worked hard all their lives" couple are thanking Elizabeth Taylor for the nice party, and she says, "We haven't seen much of you lately," and the woman says, "Well, we've been so busy, who'd have thought that that little scrub of a piece of land would pull in for us," and Elizabeth Taylor says, "Really, what happened?", and the man says, "Oil," and Taylor says, "My, how much is it pulling in?", and the man says, "A million," and Taylor says, "Gallons?", and the man says, "Dollars," and Taylor says "A million dollars a year?", and the man says, "A month." God, that scene just makes me whoop and holler!
Another good one is when the James Dean character learns that Luz had left him a little patch of useless land (upon which HE intends to drill for oil), and he goes out there and starts to drunkenly stumble around its perimeter while the silly little "likeable but loser ranch hand" theme plays, but then his walk mutates into masterly solid yard-long strides as he measures out the stake in the earth that is now his and by the end of the scene he has climbed up ontop of a broken-down Aeromotor windwill to survey from a higher vantage point and the full-on "Giant, more-money-than-you-can-imagine" theme plays full blast, and it's really a moment to bring tears to ones eyes, human dreams and ingenuity put to work on the abundance of an infinitely generous universe (whereas now we have to be inundated by the propaganda of "peak oil").
2. There are certain, supposed-to-be self-identifying names, titles, adjectives, words, or phrases that I attempt to avoid, or will cringe when I have to use them, because in my heart, they really do not define me correctly. For example, someone might ask me where I was going for Christmas, and the answer will be "my parents' house in Petaluma where the rest of the family will gather," but I'll do most anything to not say "Petaluma," but will, instead, simply say, "Northern California," or maybe "Sonoma County," which are correct in their denotation, but just not very specific.
It's not that I don't like Petaluma, it's actually a rather cute town and most people like it, and certainly my parents seem to really like it, but it has almost nothing to do with ME. It's not MY home, I wasn't raised there, nor do I have any interest in living there. I really wish my parents never had moved away from Asheville, North Carolina, which WAS my home, that's where I was born, was where I was happiest as a child, and then where I chose to live off and on at various times in my adult life. I loved it when my parents moved back there, it was so great to have a foot back in that region again. And, if not Asheville, then Atherton, California, to where we moved when I was in sixth grade and it was my parents' home all the way through to when I was thirty-five, when they moved back to Asheville.
Their moving to Petaluma was based on my mother's desire to be where her grandchildren were...Petaluma was where my sister, her husband, and their two kids lived. Of course, now my sister is divorced, her house in Petaluma was sold (neither spouse, alone, could afford it), and my mother is lucky if she sees the grandchildren for a few moments once every couple of a weeks, or so. And since now both parents NEED to be in a nursing home (and it will probably not be in Petaluma), there is no way I can identify with or apply that city name to myself.
Another thing like that that makes me cringe is if people ask me what my job is. I almost never can say my actual job title, which is "Human Resources Manager." Instead, I will say something like "I am in the administration of a private elementary school", which, while less specific, is actually more accurate. "Human resources" hardly even describes all that I actually do in my job, but beyond that, it only the most minimally describes who I actually AM. If anything, I am a public speaker, writer, entertainer, counselor, and educator, but I have never managed to figure out or accept a way to have any of those things pay the bills.
Yet another "cringe-worthy" word similar to the above-given examples is whatever word would define my sexuality--if I even HAVE a sexuality, any more. What IS it, anyway? When I was a happy child, I didn't even really know about sex as a particular concept, and therefore was in love with and in sensual attunement to the whole wide world and every entity in it, animate or inanimate. When pretty soon it became socially necessary to artificially limit myself, such as I had to be very carefully (and perhaps violently) taught that it was NOT ALLOWED to kiss boys, but kissing GIRLS was okay, well then, I took great pleasure in kissing girls, at least. But all-to-soon, it then became bad to kiss the girls, or even to be seen playing with them, not because "boys don't play with girls" (the anti-sissy rule, although there WAS that, too), but, strangely enough, because of the dangers of an emerging heterosexuality, a social fear that led for such a long time to the separation of genders in school in places such as, say, Victorian England, a fearful separation of the sexes that still infects fundamentalist Moslem society in the Middle East.
But then as I got even older, that got turned on its ear, again, and the social stricture was to GET involved in heterosexuality, dating as much as possible and, if you were a male, lose your virginity and broadcast that achievement as fast as you could. My mind had been so hypnotized that I couldn't even THINK of the presence of homosexuality, although I did notice some nearly subconscious yearnings along those lines, but which did not prevent me from thoroughly enjoying and lustily partaking in heterosexuality as much as was possible or respectful.
Then the seventies arrived and suddenly it definitely WAS permissible (in certain circles to which I was drawn) to not only THINK about homosexuality, but to actually swim deeply into that stream, and while I had been living with a wonderful woman with whom I had deeply-satisfying-for-both-of-us sex three times a day, this previously ignored side of my nature took over and I left her and became entirely "gay". (Bad boy, right?)
With being gay, I did love the hard-won freedom to finally become intimate with males and to also appreciate, explore, and enjoy their beautiful bodies (that is to say, when their bodies were beautiful, and not to when they weren't). However, unlike the misperceptions and lies of the Christian right, homosexuality is NOT naturally an easier or more pleasureable form of sex (thus, if left alone, everybody would gravitate toward that), but a very difficult and somewhat less-than-satisfactory physical bonding (to say nothing of the difficulties of emotional bonding). Heterosexuality can be an easy face-to-face physical melding of a lock and key that just fit perfectly together, whereas gay sex is more of a "I'll do you, then you'll do me," but then the one who was done first, post-orgasm, loses all interest in doing the one who just did him, so it is a "hurry up and cum before my jaw breaks or my arm falls off" sort of a thing, and I just don't hurry up, so I had to learn to either be selfish or to just skip it. Usually I skipped it (and figured it would be better if I were at least PAID for this service rather than having to work so hard in attempting to obtain the opportunity to perform it).
But I am NOT more straight than I am gay, nor am I more gay than I am straight, nor am I bi. Instead, I feel like I am more like a complex atom with several openings in my outer shell, so that in one empty electron space a female can connect, and in another empty electron space a male can connect, and perhaps in another one a younger person of either gender that I am mentoring can connect, or several of them, and perhaps in yet another one a very wise and kind elderly person of either gender can connect (hey, I've got a space available for Joan Plowright), or several of them, too, and the whole thing can expand out into one great big long-chain hydrocarbon molecule (either organic-food carbohydrate or engine-fuel hydrocarbon, it doesn't really matter which, all are explosive energy) and then I would finally feel very satisfied and happy. And I suspect that there are lots of others in the same boat, but it still does count as "weird".
3. Gee, all this and I've only come up with two "weirds" so far? Okay, how about this: I tend to anthropomorphize my car, so that even though I know it is a machine, to me it nevertheless has a personality, feelings, and psyche that can become a reflection of mine. For example, if I even LOOK at another car admiringly, that is a pretty color or I like the shape of that one, I have to immediately after assure my car that only IT is the one that I love and desire. I do this assurance by gently patting it on approximately the four or five o'clock position of the outer rim of the steering wheel. And I am sincere in this, I am not yearning for another car, even though I do sometimes admire other cars that I see. But this one definitely has my allegiance.
And what a wonderful car it is and it is such a pleasure to drive and it fills me with a sense of wonder and gratitude every single day that I drive it, despite the fact that I have now driven it over 50,000 miles, it is still new to me (I bought it used at 30,000 miles). And from what I read on the Cadillac forum of the Yahoo group I am in, this 4.9 liter engine that Cadillac used approximately from the late 80s to the mid 90s (before it was replaced by the Northstar engine), is probably the very best engine that Cadillac ever made, and when properly taken care of, has been known to last up to 300,000 miles without having to be rebuilt. So I rather expect to have this car for quite a long time, maybe even for the rest of what remains of my life.
So, sometimes I am overcome by the joy of driving that car, and so the car deserves to be kissed, and where I kiss it is right at the top of the steering wheel, the 12 o'clock position--I just lean down and plant a kiss right on it, when it is safe to do so, of course, and "safe to do so" refers both to the conditions I am driving in, and whether anyone else can see me or not.
I mentioned that the car also reflects my psyche. An example of that was last week when I went to a Chinese doctor who diagnosed me as being "too hot and too humid" in the top one-third of my body, which explained why I still had a serious sinus infection (for which I had not gone to him or told him about, but which he could see by looking at my tongue), and which also made me break out in acne rosacea (for which I HAD gone to him). Understand that the language and concepts of Chinese medicine are different from Western medicine--but this served to explain why bacteria was abundantly growing in my sinuses and also exuding out though my facial complexion (at the time, the redness of my face looked exactly like a medical x-ray diagram of where the sinuses are). I instantly reflected how just the day before I had noticed that my car engine seemed to be running too hot and I was having to keep careful watch on the quantity of fluid in the radiator reservoir--in the case of the engine, the water was being used up due to the hot engine, whereas in my body, the liver was "running to hot" because it was working too hard to filter my blood and water was being retained by my system as way to cool down the liver. (Solution: herbal formulas to purify the blood and cool down the liver, which will cause the body to let go of the water and in this less-suitable environment for bacteria, the infections will die. Well, it is working, the sinus infection is all but gone, now, and the face is clearing up. As for the car, the etiology is really the reverse of what I said about it. It ends up that there was a slow leak in the water pump, and thus the loss of fluid was making the engine run hotter. But this does not counteract my perception that the car is a reflection of what is going on within me.)
4. Two more to go. Are you still reading, or have you called the men in the white coats to come out and get me?
This is not factually weird, in fact, it is really quite normal, and it doesn't even feel weird to me, but to my mental self when I accept the realization, it IS very weird. Apparently I have crossed over from being middle-aged to being elderly. Not that that is so bad, I rather like it, although I would hate to share with any young person the reality as I see it--and that is that childhood is good, the freedoms of early youth (your twenties) are even better, the middle ages are horrible, but then being elderly is good again. In fact, being elderly could be viewed as the reward you get for successfully fording the raging, icy river that is the middle years.
And I know from reading fairy tales that what I say is true. Children have magic and powers that they enjoy, but then forget about somewhere around the early two-digit years when they get too busy fulfilling the dictates of society. Then they have to (or hope to) become spiritually initiated and embark on a heroic journey in search of the self that they lost and to discover what their gifts to the world are and what their place is in it. If they are successful, they have a productive and happy young adulthood, but then somewhere along the line, the magic fades or goes away suddenly, and they have to face the realities of physical life, in which they have to accept the loss of magic, but instead learn how to become magic-makers themselves, which usually means hard, back-breaking, frustrating labor. That's the part I wouldn't want to tell any youth, except that I do, because they need to know (although most won't listen, because they "know" that they are "different"--and maybe that's the way it has to be).
However, when I compare my suffering middle-aged self against my innocent, blissful youth, the wisdom that I have now is something I would rather have than the innocent bliss (and kind of egotistical stupidity) of my youth.
And happiness and wonder COMES BACK in the elderly years! There may be aches and pains (or downright disbility) in the elder years as the body abilities fade, and so far I am still afraid of that (as "elderly" goes, I am still a spring lamb and, after all, both of my parents are still alive), but I also suspect that those are merely the reflections of the footsteps being taken as we fade away from here and are recreated in the world beyond, which is either our true home or else the gateway to even more wondrous adventures beyond, so basically, if one can see it with clear vision, it is all a good thing.
What has happened to make me be "elderly"? Various signs. For example many of my "contemporaries" are retiring now (and even dying), although I do feel a good decade or more away from that, myself, and even then, I don't think I would ever "retire," but might mutate my work into something more of the kind of service I would rather do and COULD do if money were not so much of a required goal. As a practical matter, I cannot yet ignore or forget about the dictates of money (i.e., I do not happen to have a huge retirement fund just waiting for me to start drawing out of it!). But I am not regretting that, as I am viewing the retirement of my contemporaries as stopping way too soon and following more of an imposed time schedule than the one that would be blossoming naturally. As I might have indicated above in the scenes from the movie Giant that I like to watch, "money" is a kind "shining city in the future" that benevolently keeps one ON the journey. When you STOP the journey, then you may as well die, or what you possibly have done is step into the waiting room of the train station where your death train is scheduled to come. Perhaps my view of that, though, will change later, but I am not there now.
I found out that I could actually order meals from the "senior" section of some restauant menus (not that I have ever done it). And my mother told me that there are actually some "retirement homes" I could live in, now, in which instead of cooking my own dinner, I could just go over to the community dining room and be served (she told me this when I happened to mention how easily I got used to the luxuries of a cruise in which when one is hungry, all they have to do is walk down the hall to one of the dining rooms, barbecues, buffets, or pizza stations and get served). Again, not that that is something I would want to do right now, but I guess that I am of the age where I now COULD if I WANTED.
A much bigger sign to me was about a month ago, I had gone to a movie theater and the very beautiful young man in the ticket booth smiled at me, sold me a ticket, and then invited me to "enjoy the show." A simple, sweet transaction. But then inside the theater, when I looked at the ticket, I saw that it was a "senior" ticket (at a greatly reduced price). If he had asked me if I had wanted a senior ticket, I would have said "No," and I do not in fact, qualify for it...I think you have to be 62 or something, and I am only 57 (to be 58 in February). But he didn't even think about it any more than a bartender would think to card me, he simply rang up a senior ticket. To be fair, I noticed that at that 4:30 showing (I get off work at 4:00), there were only very OBVIOUS seniors in there, so he made an assumption of association. Anyway, it didn't disturb me, only surprised me.
The final, and most unmistakeable, sign was last Thursday at school, I was invited to be a "mystery guest reader" in one of the kindergarten classes. Normally after lunch, the teacher will read the kids a story, but once a month or so, some "mystery" person is invited to read them a story, instead. It is something that all the kids enjoy, this new and different "voice". This could be another teacher, or perhaps somebody's parent. Almost never is it somebody from administration (so I am proud to be a notable exception). So all the teacher would tell the kids was that the type of guest they were having this time was very unusual, meaning "not the normal other teacher or parent" type.
I got there a little early, showed the teacher what I was going to read ("Peachboy," a fairy tale from Japan), and when the children scrambled in after their lunch, I was already sitting down in the comfortable reading chair in front of the rug where they would all gather for the story. As they came in, the teacher said to the kids, "Boys and girls, this is our mystery reader, does anybody know who this is?" One boy said, "Grandpa," and the teacher looked at me sideways with an apologetic glance and said, "No...", and then a little girl repeated that, saying, "Yes, he's somebody's grandpa!" and I said, "Well, I could be somebody's grandpa, but I don't even have any kids, and the story I am going to read is about an elderly couple in Japan who don't have any kids, either, but they very much want one." I was quite amused by the children's perception of me, and rather liked it, to tell the truth. Even more amusing was that the teacher felt it was fit to have them call me "Tom," which was fine by me (I certainly don't need to be called "Mr." something or other), and so the NEXT day when I happened to walk past a crowd of them waiting for the school day to begin, I heard a dozen sweet voices call out, "Hi, Tom!" Grandpa "Tom," I love it.
Ever since I decided to let my hair go naturally gray, instead of the bother, expense, time wasted, and even cancer danger of having my hair died its formerly natural dark brown, I have continued to receive copious complements on how beautiful my full head of glistening silver hair looks. And it is true, it truly IS beautiful and, in fact, I honestly do feel that I look MUCH better now than I had looked throughout the whole of my middle-aged years. I am, in a strange way, going back to the beauty that I once had as a youth, but obviously NOT a youth, but someone with quite a lot of wisdom to share, housed in a body that is a clear reflection of having earned that wisdom.
What is beautiful is a kind of spiritual radiance, so that I view the cycle of life as being like a 24-hour clock in which both the moment of birth and the moment of death happens at 12 noon. The baby is born at 12 noon when the light is fullest, but it is slowly, imperceptably darkening as the years go by until one reaches the full nadir of middle age, the "midnight", but then life rises up again toward that final, fully-lighted "noon" once again. And so now I am somewhere past sunrise.
I have seen the same thing in my father, only amplied, so that for him the full head of hair is a glistening snowy white (which I wouldn't mind having when my time comes), and sometimes all four of his children are stopped in our tracks when we notice just how handsome and radiant he really is. Why hadn't we seen that before? He really HAS been improving all these years, and now I am, too. The blessing of having gotten through the middle years really is a true fact, I am convinced of it.
5. The "fifth weird," what could possibly be the fifth one? Humm, let me think....
Okay, here's a silly one. I am "bilingual" when it comes to computer systems. For almost forever, I was in the "PC" camp and soundly rejected "Apple". "PCs" were sober, useful business machines, whereas "Apples" were frivolous, artistic toys. The fact that I, too, was sometimes given over to frivolity and artistry didn't matter in this view, one simply must have one or the other, you "couldn't" learn two different operating systems!
However, the secretly alluring appeal of Apple kind of ran there like an underground stream that promised to somewhere erupt into a refreshing spring, and therefore when I sought to edit videotapes that I had taken with my camcorder, a colleague said that an Apple I-Book would do the trick, I jumped at the chance to not only supplement my home desktop with a laptop, but to also have that laptop be an Apple. So, at home, I now had both and became useful at both, and both of them are networked together, use with equal ease the same DSL line, print via the same HP all-in-one inkjet, receive scans either one from that same all-in-one, share my 250-gig networked external hard drive, and even read each other's files.
Then it happened at work, too. The computer tech had hoped to convert all the office staff to a Mac standard (all of the school's academia was already Mac), which he said was more stable and less vulnerable to viruses, but as office people are almost entirely set on PCs and see no need to change, he needed an influential guinea pig to help demonstrate to the others the advantages of such a move. When he learned that I had facility with both at home, he asked me if I would be willing to switch to Mac at work. I would be tied in with the school server, which was PC-based, so whenever and if ever I needed to "be" a PC, I could merely log onto the PC side on the server--in other words, I would be "both".
I agreed to his plan and so far it has worked out pretty well. I am primarily on a Macintosh "OS X" platform, but for word processing and spreadsheet work I am using Microsoft Word for Mac and Excel for Mac, and my Powerpoint presentations are also "for Mac" (so we're hybrids there) but other functions are pure Mac and most of the time my Internet work is done via Mac's Safari. The only time I really ever need to go over to the PC side is when I need the latest version of Internet Explorer to effectively work on some external, outsourced databases. Our dental plan, for example, doesn't work on Safari, and our employee benefits maintenance and COBRA insurance administration sites won't work on the last "IE for Mac" upgrade (Apple decided to stop upgrading compatable versions of IE). I therefore could NOT completely abandon PC for Apple, but this way, though, I guess I can have the best of both worlds. Now, about three others have followed suit, including my boss, so I guess it is a slow migration, but one that so far is satisfying our computer tech.
Here is one thing that I tell people about it: Last year after Christmas break, the tech department upgraded me from Microsoft Windows 98 to XP, and it took me about a MONTH to become fully productive on XP. But after Spring break, when they switched me over to Mac, I was fully productive in one week. So for those at work who are afraid of it, I tell them that the conversion from Microsoft to Mac was easier than the conversion WITHIN Microsoft from Windows 98 to XP, so especially if someone is begging for or due for an upgrade out of Windows 98, I recommend that they go straight to Mac rather than go to XP.
At home, my desktop is still Windows 98, and while I don't really see much need to upgrade to XP (or even any of the upgrade steps inbetween), I am thinking more and more that I need to do SOMETHING, this computer is feeling more and more "backward"--S L O W and constantly crashing. I'd love to completely "erase" everything inside (having already stored all my documents and files on the networked hard drive), replace and increase all memory chips, replace the hard drive with one about thirty times larger in storage capacity, and use a brand new operating system. But XP? That doesn't lure me. Get a brand-new Mac, instead? If I thought to do that, I may as well forget the desktop entirely and simply use the I-Book as my ONE computer. Stuck in abeyance, I really don't know the solution, so I will just do nothing and vaguely suffer.
Quandaries like that, I do allow myself to get trapped in them. And so that is yet another something "weird".
How about you? I will continue the "tagging" and pass this on to these five: Jeff, Moonsphinx, Wench, Soldiergirl, and Shadow-box. If you are reading this and want to play, you're on!
�
 |
 |
�
