“Did life slow down, or did I become faster?”

Not sure what to write about… well, it was a friend's idea to have a weblog in order to belong to civilized society, and surprisingly it was not such a bad idea… until I actually tried to use the site, I mean this is one of the slowest sites I've ever encountered! Great, just another thing to add to my day-to-day frustration and my genuine hate for my computer, which I hope cannot read me at this moment (could computers read what’s on their screen or do they just use the screens as their eyes to stare at us staring at them all day long? I wonder).

But trust me I am literally seething about the 512MB extra RAM card that I got, going down the drain. A desperate attempt to make it faster, and you would think that a total of 1 GB should be mind-blowingly fast; I mean a giga is a billion bytes - right? - that's a lot of bytes in some circles, especially to my generation of people who grew up with a 16 MB PC running on DOS, and thinking you're the coolest kid alive...

Anyway, I digress; but how can I not and here she is (yes my computer is a she - long story, but all Mac PowerBooks are females at essence, and I can prove it, but that’ll have to wait till my next blog) here she is downloading these pages at a pace of @#&*@$&@(&(!! well, at a rather slow pace.

You know what, the only way to reconcile with these situations without having minor heart failure every day, is to go back to thinking that my computer, the coffee maker, the printer, and any person at any cash register in any corner of the universe, are actually functioning at a normal, average speed. But it is I who actually became faster (just like in “The Matrix”, you know). I am faster, so life appears slower, simple relativity (thank god for Einstein) and I feel better about myself, pity all these inanimate objects and people for the lethargy that envelops their very essence, and leave them in this… this inertia! (OK, well now I just feel like running back to the cafeteria, slapping the woman at the cash register to save her from her life as a vegetable and I already feel better)…

“Are people slower in Boston than they are in New York? Well, what about my computer? She might be adapting to Boston faster than I am after all!”

G.
Boston, March 1, 2006.