Tis the season of Sample Sales, or so it seems when the mailers start
arriving announcing this 40% off (but it's in downtown LA) or that 80%
off, but not until two weeks from now when I’ve completely forgotten
about it and f*#k it anyway, where’s the instant grat? I subscribe to
Daily Candy and Top Button, the latter being exclusively an online
sample sale site. There is also a mother at my younger daughter’s
school whose clothing line I happen to love that has her sample sale
around this time too.
It’s taken me a long time to become a savvy shopper when it came to
these 'deals’. I was the sucker that clipped the coupon for something
at the market I would normally never eat. I would be under the illusion
my family might try the yogurt covered zucchini chips for 50% off.
Invariably it would linger past its expiration date and get thrown out.
This always jettisoned me into the ‘I’m gonna be homeless someday, why
oh why did I waste my money like that??” fear fantasy. I would vow
never to make that mistake again and I finally learned that the only
coupons worth clipping for me are batteries and toothbrushes. Do I
really need that 35¢ off the second four pack of Charmin? Hell no!
High Tech, Low Tech, and On-line Afflictions
Technology
Espionage as Sustenance
My junior year of college I worked as a spy. At the age of 21, I liked to refer to myself as The Youngest Spy in the World. There was no real way of knowing if this was true or not.
There was no Facebook.
This was 1989. Before the Internet. Before hostesses stopped asking “Smoking or non?” and before toothbrushes started looking like sneakers.
Today, kids probably have more opportunities to become spies at an earlier age because kids now do everything at an earlier age. They go through puberty earlier, they experiment with sex at an earlier age and they probably get hired as secret agents earlier, too. Which means I probably no longer hold the unique distinction as being the guy who was once The Youngest Spy in the World.
What's Apple Up to?
For geeks everywhere today is the day we finally see the device we
have all been talking about for the last year. For the last week I’ve
seen prediction pools where you get 1 point for each correct answer.
Seven or ten inches? Verizon or ATT? Stylus or finger?
All these questions and many more will be answered today at 10am when Steve Jobs strolls on stage in SF and announces to the world the product many of us didn’t think we needed in our daily life.
I’m the tech guy for all my friends so in recent weeks they have turned to me and asked what I think will be announced. “No idea what it will do or how it will work,” I reply, “but I’m saving my money because I’ll order it on the first day.” No computer company has made a tablet anyone wants, but then again no one got a phone right until Steve Jobs pulled that iPhone out of his pocket.
My Filofax, My Friend
Four
people asked me what I wanted for my birthday last week and I gave each
of them the same answer, “A new Filofax.” All four of them said the
same thing. “No, you don’t. Nobody wants a Filofax any more. It’s so
old-fashioned. Don’t be ridiculous. iPhone.” My daughter Maia was the
harshest. She simply said, “Oh, Mom! iPhone.” It made me feel
old-fashioned. It made me feel old.
For the record, I have an iPhone but despite the fact that four assistants over the last three years have religiously promised to transfer all my names and phone numbers into my computer and my iPhone, it hasn’t quite happened yet. And I never seem to have the time.
But I like my Filofax (even though it does sort of look like a truck ran over it.) It feels like a friend. I like it that it has names and addresses and phone numbers hand-printed into it. (Arguably, a few of them are dead, but I’ve learned not to notice. And I can’t quite bring myself to cross the names out. That would seem too final.) I use it in meetings to take notes. Sometimes, I’ll have a thought in the car or a random sentence for something I’m working on and I’ll pull over and jot it down into my Filofax. There are a few haikus that will probably never be printed anywhere else. I can gauge from them how sad I was on a given day. (Haikus are usually sad. The more comedic ones have found their way into my computer.)
You're Never Too Old To Rock
As much as I hate to admit it, my husband Dave was right. It hasn’t happened often in our over ten years together – married seven with nary an itch – but it has been occurring more frequently, much to my dismay.
However, I guess even he has to be right some of the time and in the instance of his “insane” (my words) purchase of the video game ROCK BAND last November (2007) I would actually say he was a genius. If you haven’t heard of it you must not have teenagers or been living under a rock. We, like all of our friends’ kids, are completely addicted. In
fact, the upcoming release of ROCK BAND 2
has us almost as excited as we were about the iPhone.
What’s crazy about our behavior is we are not video game people. Actually, we both were in the arcade heyday of the 80s, but now most of the games have too many buttons to push and too much violence to lure me into wasting my time. Though Dave’s the King of Technology, except for the Wii, he’s rarely tempted into the gaming world. That fateful day in November changed everything. He suckered me into going to the Best Buy on a Saturday by promising to let me purchase a new game for our Wii console. I don’t know if he was already planning on buying Rock Band, but once he saw they had a few kits in stock, he just had to have one. It was rumored to be the “must have game” of the holiday season and Dave is never one to be behind the technology curve.
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