Apple Computer

Seniorwritist 6  Apple Computer

Be warned, this entry may seem snarky.  It is about Apple Inc, a company about which I have embarrassingly found myself uncontrollably, even angrily, hypercritical over the past ten or so years of general apparent Apple fervor and worship.  I have often, even among friends, exhibited unattractively irrational and peevish behavior when the brand was positively evoked. That the eponymous apple was the object of temptation in the garden of Eden made perfect sense to me in regard to the Apple phenomenon, with the embrace of the promise of access to all knowledge leading to the downfall of all humans.   Not that I buy into the biblical version of anything, nor do I want to be seen in any way as supporting such theism, but I mention it to illustrate that by even evoking it,  how far I myself can fall.  (For the sake of accuracy and the reputation of the forbidden fruit, I reluctantly point out, at the urging of my girl friend Amy who is my informant on a number of items old testimonial and most new, that in the Hebrew bible,  the evil edible was simply a piece of fruit.  She claims that is only the bad pr and luck of the apple that has given the tempting tasty malevolent overtones in our moral and literary imaginations. )  I would even, when going full bore, censure Apple for stealing the name Apple from the Beatles, and, with it the allure and cache of that beatific  brand.  (Apple records, did indeed, feel impinged upon and sued Apple Computers for copyright infringement.  I don’t know the exact result of the suit—probably sealed—but obviously that worked out OK for Apple C.) 

I do understand that much of my antagonistic attitude toward Apple originates in a thrifty and insecure-about-her-judgments person’s resentment of instruments, in this case laptop computers and smart phones especially, that are affordable in a broad sense but whose utility advantage, aside from bragging rights and possession of the newest thing, is uncertain.   I mean, I am a person who felt compelled to sell her reluctantly purchased in the first place second hand BMW when her partner also had a BMW (eagerly purchase, I might add).  I was unable to bear the, to me, stigma of the two “high performance” cars symbol of prosperity, acquisitiveness, and bourgeoisness (all of which Amy claims to embrace, aside from the acquisitiveness.)    I tried, I really did, to enjoy the vehicle without guilt, but finally I sold the Beemer and bought a Prius, which, while admittedly also an image car of considerable  power,  represented a consumer with a conscience rather than an elite consumer consumer.

But perhaps more at the core (sorry, I had to do it) of my issues with Apple is this cultish, Teflonesque adoration of all things Jobs and Apple.   (I have always appreicted the term Teflon applied as an adjective to describe a person or phenomenon that all the negative, however well deserved, simply slides off of.  This use originated, according to Wikipedia, with Pat Schroeder, the then Congressional representative from Denver.  In the wiki version, Schroeder, while frying her breakfast eggs in a Teflon plan, was struck by the resemblance between the slippery eggs gliding over  magically coated pan and the lies and broken laws that slid off the then President  Ronald Reagan.  I appreciate Schroeder’s evoking of her own domesticity and culinary experience in this matter, thus somehow both rejecting and accepting that a women’s place is in the House but, it also sounds a bit calculated to me.  Not that I don’t think Pat Schroeder fried her own eggs.  BTW, as in interesting aside, did you know that Schroeder started college as an aeronautical engineering major but defaulted to history when she was advised by her professors that she, as a woman, would never get a job as an engineer?  Fascinatingly, Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, was trained as a physical chemist, another hard core math-based profession.  What does that tell us?  Should we advise young women who want to go into politics to study physics?  Does familiarity with relativity, the uncertainty principle, and the wave-particle dilemma hone the mind for success in dealing with the rigors of the geometry and calculus of politics and social challenges?  Sounds good to me. )   This Teflon quality  seems to have allowed Apple to make failures, such as fuzzy phone reception, not only irrelevant but to be addressed  peevishly as if the fault lay not in the product but in the consumers who whined too much and/or did not buy reception correcting cases. 

On a more personal Teflon and magical thinking level, I was puzzled by the praises of friends and acquaintances who exalted their Apple personal computer (yes, a Mac is a PC in spite of its efforts to label itself as some other species altogether) over all others.   It is not that my friends are among those who camp out overnight to be able to brag that they were among the first to get the next new bright and shiny Apple thing.  And I am not saying that Apple acolytes are unthinking followers.  Don’t get me wrong.  Well, all right. I can’t help it, but I often think of Germans and Hitler veneration when multitudes fill auditoriums, web sites, and consumer electronic stores to worship and purchase new Apple products.  OK. OK—too extreme.  Still, when perfectly intelligent people exalt that their computers are able to perform tasks unheard of for a dumber machine like mine but which, somehow, my PC had managed with little effort or imagination to do, I am a bit dumbfounded.  Also irritating is the claim of the ease of use and intuitiveness of these machines even as my friends struggle with them.  In one particular case, a friend labored with the installation and connectivity of her new Mac for hours such Apple electronic installations  are not supposed to consume.  After a much labor, she tried phone support but found no satisfaction with the myriad phone agents she spoke to.  Finally, she resorted to returning to an actual store, though she knew that without an appointment at the genius bar to speak to a technician, her wait was bound to be long, which it was.  (Why, I have asked myself, is so much genius assistance necessary for machines that are supposed to be so easy to use?) Finally, her problem solved, she returned home, not admitting to any flaws in the brand.  The belief in the superiority and infallibility of all things Apple still gleamed in her eyes.   How had, I asked myself, folks whom I generally and deeply respected became prophets in this new church?  Was a flaw in understanding the use of an Apple a flaw in themselves so not admissible?  Or was it simply that, having paid the Apple brand surcharge, they had a financial and status incentive to love their new machines uncritically?   

 Even then, though, with all this familiarity with the frailties of Apple, the extremity of the cultural confirmation of the superiority of all things Jobs wormed its way into my consciousness.  It created a niggling, insidious doubt in my belief that much of the extreme love of Apple was superficial trendoidism and that the true difference in function between the Mac and PC was in affect rather than effect.   So while I was satisfied with my PC, at least as satisfied as anyone is with these electronic tools whose idiosyncrasies, imperfections,  and frustrations we accept as we do in no other pieces of equipment we use daily, I kept wondering if there indeed was a golden, yellow brick road to easy negotiation of the great, complex world of computing.  I wondered if I was denying myself of this privileged access for churlish reasons.  I longed for an opportunity to try a Mac and thereby perhaps resolve my angry uncertainty, insecurity, and ambivalence toward the product without the expense of buying one.  I was willing to accept that maybe I was wrong.   So, I was secretly thrilled when  I was loaned an Apple MacBook Air by my college (Pasadena City College) for my sojourn as a faculty member for a semester abroad program in Oxford, England. 

Let me just tell you here and now after a first month or so of use, I was sure I WAS NOT WRONG.  Even though I pride myself on some computer fluency and am not afraid to try experiment to figure things out, I experienced a great deal of frustration with my machine.  IT WAS NOT AT ALL INTUITIVE!  It would freeze up.  I was never was able to figure out how to turn on the Skype video camera or sort my photos.  Figuring out how to find and sort other files was an aggravation.  I even had to call computer support at my institution to understand why it would fall asleep and not wake up.   But, then, one day as I looked at the screen at what I had written, I noticed that I had way fewer misspelled words.  OMG, I thought.  I was wrong.  Apple is wonderful.

Yuh, sure. 

Time Paradox

         Here we are at the turning to 2014, and I find myself disconcerted once again by what I have come to call a time paradox.  The phenomenon is a kind of palimpsest in which the early decades of the old century, years I only know from tales and images, seep through into the new, preventing the new from establishing identities of their own.  These fictional years simply refuse to leave the stage.  For example, 2014, rather than bringing its own anticipatory glee, distinctly brings to mind 1914, and I fear the outbreak of a world war.  Yikes!  I have experienced this phenomenon every year since the old century/millennium turned to the new. 

The aughts were particularly fraught for me in this sense since they were the first to do such imaginary battle.  (The aughts, I should make clear, are not to be confused with the “oughts.”  The oughts indicate the relationships between parents and children, church and acolyte, and ourselves and our consciences. The aughts, on the other hand, designate the first ten years of the century.   I admit that I did not even know what an aught was until I attended a Harvard University commencement in the seventies, which is to say my late twenties, when I was employed by Harvard Hillel, the Harvard Jewish student organization.  Let me be clear.  I did not attend or graduate from Harvard.   I was, at that time, the administrator of Harvard Hillel, the Jewish student organization, so please attribute no false brilliance, prestige, or elitism to me.  Thanks.  At the commencement, the convener began the celebration with a bow and salute to the men of the aughts, clearly indicating the gray haired and balding shrunken men seated in the front rows, each row marked with a tasteful cardboard sign bearing a legend such as ’03, ’04, ’05.   (Similarly gray but not so bald female pates, I have come to learn recently, are referred to by the young as q-tips. Of course, there were no q-tips in that crowd.)  Ah, I thought, so that is what the first decade of a century is designated. But even this knowledge made only a minor splash in my mental puddle.  In fact, it was not until I was writing this piece as we are well into the aughts that I thought I might look up the word.  I hesitated, though, as I actually morally judge folks who stop conversation and flow to look things up on their electronic devices.  But I could not resist.   According to the on-line Merriam-Webster dictionary (the first notation that emerged in my Google search which did not require further inquiry, thus not to be taken as a recommendation), aught, to my delight at something so philologically ironic, means zero, anything, and everything.  Wow is all I can say to that.)  (I might also note that you might have noted that I have avoided the use of the nomenclatures “twentieth” and “twenty-first” centuries.  This is because, even after decades of employment of such terms, I still find myself hesitating, momentarily confused about precisely which century they are designating.  (Similarly, I am reluctant to utter the word “bosom” out loud as I evidently mispronounced it while reading aloud in class in sixth grade, to the derisive laughter of my classmates who would probably have at least tittered at the word even if it had come trippingly off my tongue. I, to this day, avoid the heavily freighted word in speech whenever possible.) Why, my friends and I always asked, and I, at least, continue to ask, aren’t the 1800s the eighteenth century, the 1900s the nineteenth and so on?  Wouldn’t that make more sense and be easier to remember and save us all many seconds and second thoughts?) 

For me and my peers, the true baby boomers born in 1947, 48, 49, and 50, as opposed to what I call the baby boomer adjacents of the fifties and early sixties, the magical millennial year of 2000 had been highly anticipated.  My friends, brothers, cousins, and I spent hours of our youth calculating and recalculating how old we and everyone we knew would be when the ball dropped to end 1999. (Yes, the ball was dropping even in my youth.)  Our parents, we understood, were probably not fated to experience that milestone, but we, with just a little luck and longevity, would most likely live the 50 to 53 years it would take to get us there.  We were destined for the future.   But, from the onset of the aughts, slivers and glances of olden golden days of small towns, large Victorian houses, bicycles built for two, straw boaters, barbershop quartets, and calico dresses of the literature, movie and TV shows I had imbibed in my growing up and adulthood, bled into the everyday of my new century.  So, too, did the tales and reality of my grandparents.  

My maternal grandmother (my grandfather died when I was very young and I have no memory of him living) seemed quite early century American to me.  After all, she spoke English with no accent except a New England one and was born in Nashua in the very Yankee state of New Hampshire, though admittedly of Polish immigrant parents.  (Don’t get me started on the Yankees, the bane of my youth, always just beating the Red Sox for the pennant at the end of the season.  Oops—wrong Yankees.  Sorry.  Automatic reflex for many of us born and brought up in and around Boston.)  This Nashua evoked images of wooden sidewalks fronting wooden shops and horse drawn carriages rolling down the main, unpaved street.  My grandmother was fifteen years old and adventurous, or bored and stuck, when the twenty year old itinerant cloth peddler arrived in Nashua on a Friday to sell to my great grandfather’s clothing store.  As it was the Sabbath, he was invited to dinner at this one local Jewish household. Evidently, he liked the young woman he saw, and she was willing to accept his affection.  He returned, sex ensued, as then did pregnancy and marriage.

On the other hand, the often haunting stories of the early, lonely immigrant life of my paternal grandparents gave a more melancholy patina to my paradoxical moments. Their apartments always seemed sad and heavily furnished and pervaded by the smells of gefilte fish, sweet noodle kugels, and sesame candies.  Their aughts existed in my mind as the era of Jews arriving poor in the United States fleeing eastern Europe in the face of the destructive pogroms.  In fact, though, my grandmother on my father’s side, while, yes, living a difficult, sometimes desperate life in a Russian shetl, fled not pograms but custom that designated her the replacement wife for the unappetizing husband of her recently deceased older sister.  My paternal grandfather fled fate, too, but his impetus was avoidance of being drafted into the Russian army, a future, I was told, that meant, for Jewish draftees, not just a few years of servitude but virtually a lifetime of service. These paternal grandparents arrived in Boston separately, unknown to each other, to live in crowded tenements and electricity and plumbingless slums to work in the needle trades (grandmother) and as a carpenter (grandfather). The family story goes, because they were lonely in this strange land, after a chance meeting on a bus, they married because they came from proximate villages and spoke the same language.  Ironically, the tongue that brought them together kept them foreign to me as neither ever learned English well, and I never learned much Yiddish. 

All these images continuously leaked into the days and nights of my new years.  It is as if the old aughts and times were claiming true aughtness and rightness, as though they are the real 00s and teens, not the aughts and teens of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the Y2K kerfuffle that signaled the turn of the millennium was a hint of what was to come for me, a case of the past not letting go of the present and future. For the millennium, though, it was a false alarm.  Nineteen disappeared and those new zeroes, the aughts, were added to the twenty without incident. We were not brought to our knees. The twenty-first century was not to be held hostage to the twentieth.  But, for me, time, apparently, while it does indeed march on, also circles.

Writing Group

I am in a writing group for the first time in my life.  (Do not let that sway you to think that the group is responsible for the quality of these blogs. I take all responsibility.)  After a virtual (in the old sense of “nearly” as opposed to the new sense of “not really”) lifetime of writing, this is my first experience with such a group.  My lack of crowd sourcing for criticism is not because I do not play well with others.  I do.  Mostly in the past I did not have the time.  Now I love the biweekly meetings of the seven or so women who comprise the group, except when my work is up for comment.  In those instances, my multiple insecurities manifest themselves with remarkable ease and agility.

Early on in my participation in the group, I keenly anticipated opportunities to show my work .  I was sure I had a brilliant concept in my in-progress text that astutely commingled theoretical discussions of gender with mini-memoir.  Alas, while each of my few sessions commenced and concluded with validating observations from others about the worthiness of my ideas and writing, any praise was soon buried, from my perspective, by a veritable cavalcade of criticism.  (That I, as many others do I am confident, gloss over the positive responses is not a surprise.  Disapprobation is almost always more seductive than affirmation.  (Is that a woman thing?))  While these negatives were frequently in the guise of solutions for issues I might have suspected, they were also often correctives for issues I was not even aware existed.  Why, for instance, did people object to my use of parenthesis?

My repertoire of response to the assessments of the women in my writing is unfortunately limited.   The first problem is that I, as do many others I am sure, perceive my writing as a proxy for myself.  So challenges to the content, organization, and style of my writing (grammar and mechanics are rarely issues—I have, after all, been a teacher of writing for many years) are assaults on my intelligence, lucidity, and fashion sense as well as on my personality in general.   Thus, in defense of the integrity and coherence of my very self, I begin my post- having been up days dominated by an irritated conviction that my readers simply do not know what they are talking about, do not understand my innovative style, and are unaware of my general overall brilliance.  This hole of identifying with the work, with its concomitant disbelief that what I thought was wonderful perhaps was not, takes a few sometimes teary days to dig out of.   

I emerge focused on the writing and to the daunting question of what to do with this criticism.  After all, what if they are right?  This possibility brings with it a sometimes dispiriting awareness of a plentitude of faults and failings as well as a disheartening sense of ignorance about how to repair them.   Which bring me to my other difficulty.  Even if I accept that perhaps my work could use some editing, I do not know how to take advice from folks other than some therapists and my lover.  This is not because I think I am always right.  Au contraire.  It is because I lack confidence in my own judgment (another female thing?).  This is not a surprise as an astrologist warned me many years ago that I am ruled by my unconscious, which I have taken to mean I am never really sure that what I think I think is what I think.  OK, I know this is basically the definition of how the unconscious works.  Still, in spite of my knowledge of the universal applicability of this understanding of the unconscious (assuming there is indeed some validity to the idea of the unconscious),  I have taken my astrological chart personally and to heart as the foundational, explanatory motif of much of my life.  What else could I conclude as early ignorance and stunned late discovery of what apparently had been on my mind all along has marked my life?  (For instance, my first breakup took me totally by surprise when I initiated it by having what was called, in the old days, a nervous breakdown.   Who knew I was so unhappy?  I didn't.)  As I result of this psychological situation, I am easily swayed by the generally well-intentioned and very possibly good advice of almost anyone who may have an insight into the world of consciousness that I lack.  In other words, I cave in in my uncertainty and insecurity, undermining what I thought I had in mind since I am rarely sure of the genuineness of what I think I have in my mind.  (I know that this insecurity and suggestibility is rooted not really in the stars but in my relationship with my mother, whose voice in my head has proved immortal, but I am not going to go into that now.) This is sometimes good but often leaves me further in the lurch of uncertainty, insecurity, and frustration.

But then I take a breath, try to sort the wheat from the chaff as they say, revise, and come back to submit another day.  This is what I call modern maturity.