I bough a computer today. A small one, that can sit on my lap and fit in a small backpack. It is actually smaller than most of my textbooks for school, which is kind of funny. Considering it can fit so much more than a book.
The computer is mainly for my summer activities. The plan is that I should go to Scotland with dad in the middle of June, then hop on the train and travel around Europe for a month, after which I will return to Stockholm and hopefully spend a couple of weeks at dad’s cottage. Then, it’s off again, this time up north, to the highest mountain in Sweden and the research station that my department runs there. A summer course in glaciology and quaternary geology. For these things, I need a laptop. My lovely desktop, with its beautiful big screen, does not fit in a backpack that I’m strong enough to carry.
But I feel kind of bad about it, too, mixed up with all the excitement of a new toy. I shouldn’t buy stuff. People in general shouldn’t buy so much stuff. It is bad for the environment and isn’t it kind of hypocritical of me to be all “save the planet” one day and then go buy a new laptop the next? It makes me feel kind of stressed. But, you see, the way I’ve rationalized it for myself is that one of the things I really enjoy about living is experiencing new things, especially while traveling. And I’m going traveling all summer. And what I like to do when I go traveling, is to take photos and write about it. That’s how I experience things, through pictures and words. And one of the few things I regret from my North America trip last spring is not having my own computer. That, and allowing the 21-year-old Germans partly spoil my experience at the horse farm in BC and letting Eric give me his cold on my last day in San Francisco. I always had to borrow someone else’s computer in order to move my photos from the camera onto my external harddrive and my tablet. And many times, that made me feel really uncomfortable. I don’t like losing my independence.
So, you see, it’s not the thing in itself. It’s what it enables me to do. – – – Gaah, who am I kidding? It’s a new toy and I’m just as bad as anybody else. I can’t deny that. Hopefully me traveling by train, instead of airplane, all summer will make up for my shopping spree in Mother Earth’s book of good green deeds.
The laptop is so cute. It’s got such a pretty greenish blue color, they call it Pacific Blue on the package and I guess, in a sense it fits – even though the Pacific of British Columbia was mostly gray, and in California a kind of pale blue. In my opinion, my computer is the color of the Baltic Sea. And I’m going call it Portia. (My desktop is called Ofelia. For some reasons, my favorite horses have a tendency to share names with Shakespeare’s heroines. And I like to name my computers after horses that I’ve loved. What that says about me, I don’t really want to get any deeper into.)
Katja Malmborg 