A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

So if you follow me on Facebook you’ll know I’ve been lusting after the 27″ iMacs lately. You know… for development.

It started last week when I was checking prices on macs for a friend of mine. I went back and forth with a couple people about whether they were REALLY that good, etc. I checked prices and bank accounts, bopping my head in acknowledgment.

Today I walked in to J&R and let the salesdrone accost me so I could bug him about cpus, lust after the thing, and such suchness.

I almost pulled the trigger right then and there, bringing the thing back to the office, lugging it back here. But I bowed out, realizing that the smart thing would be to wait for the monster paycheck I’m getting on Friday to cover last week’s madness.

I got out of the subway in Brooklyn at about 5:20 (suck it, plebes) and remembered I had to pick up my laundry. As I walked in to the atm thingie I thought “ouch. There’s $35 down the drain.”

and I stopped.

physically stopped.

right there.

And I thought to myself, I thought… “Self? What the…”

So apparently I have almost NO trouble dropping a quick $2500 on a dev box, but $40 on laundry makes me flinch?

“But it’s for development!”

What development?

I’m not DOING any development.

I haven’t written a line of code in months.

I don’t particularly WANT to write a line of code. Sure, there a couple quick hit perl scripts I want to write. Maybe even a couple dozen. And yeah, I’d like to go teach myself some ruby/haskell/erlang/clojure/go or something.

But on the whole, development just doesn’t get my knickers all in a wad very much any more.

So whiskey tango then?

I’ve just crested the first rise of being back on my feet financially. My balance is going steadily up.

The last two years has been plagued with this feeling of being financially hamstrung. Always in focus were the things I couldn’t do while maintaining any sense of temperance.

I’ve been lusting after furniture, new computers, music, instruments, trips. All kinds of things kept out of reach by a basic sense of self preservation. (That might be the beginnings of adulthood peeking through. No no, the other … oh neverind.)

I know how positively sensual that feeling is, making a big purchase. Taking the hours I’ve kibbitzed with managers and slaved over shitty code and turned it in to something shiny and wonderful that’s MINE.

And it’s good. That feeling.

But of all things, a computer? Computers are the razor sharp double-edged swords of my life. If I knew what else I would do I’d walk away from them entirely. But now, after all these decades? Well… I’ll keep looking at least.

No. It would be a dark thing for me to buy another shiny brand new computer. A different platform no less! One that I’d stay home, experiment with and ADD over for months and months.

Pushing off my actual goals that much farther.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.