Building Puzzles

Note: This was actually written a couple of weeks ago, however, the stress of packing and moving (as referred to in the post) zapped my energy to finish and publish this until just before the Internet went down for four days. As I write this note, I am actually at the college and have just began classes. Therefore the timeline in this post is a little bit out of whack (when I say 'right now,' it now actually means like two weeks ago), but the general informational idea (such as it is) is still the same.

So after that post talking about that little detour (or, more accurately, hairpin-sharp left turn) into the college thing, you faithful readers may or may not have wondered, 'Will she still do choreography?' (Okay, I know you probably didn't care, but humour me.)

As of right now, yes. Actually, I'm kind of choreographing like a mad woman. Having never been in a public school setting I have no clue what to expect from college. I hear people griping about the workload -- assignments and essays and homework and things -- but I don't know how much truth there is to that, or if they're all just being public-school whiners (crap. I said that out loud, didn't I?). As a result, I'm not sure how much spare time -- if any -- I'm going to have for personal pursuits such as choreography, so I'm trying to cram in as much as I can now, just in case. On paper, my course load this semester seems not bad (three classes Mondays and Wednesdays and two on Tuesdays and Thursdays), but who knows how much outside studying there'll be...

I've talked before about my experience with emotion being good for creativity (whether it's quality creativity remains to be seen). So having to leave my beloved dance school and now psyching myself up to saying goodbye to my friends and family here in two weeks and then moving -- something I've never done before in my life -- out of province is sparking a lot of creativity. Since the beginning of June I've choreographed (fully notated) Changeless, Sanctuary, and Daniel Amos' lovely Beautiful One (that last one only took 28 hours from initial idea to full notation), plus I've also sketched out a lot of other stuff and it's all quite good (in comparison to everything else I've done so far).

Following that I was working on a White Heart song (hey, DA and White Heart make good nuanced music, okay?) called Heaven Of My Heart. It's off to a slow start, though... I know sort of the feel I want for it, but the specific steps to accomplish said vision are so far eluding me, so I've been flipping back and forth between a few other songs... notably White Heart's Silhouette, John Michael Talbot's The Birth Of Jesus, and Terry Scott Taylor's Dancing On Light (words cannot explain how much I love this song). I have a lot of good ideas for all of them, but for some reason I don't want to commit to one... probably because I had committed to Heaven Of My Heart and it's not going anywhere. I hate leaving choreography half-finished (Montana Sky still haunts me).

However...

The other day while listening to the ShufflePod, David Meece's heavenly symphony God's Promises/Rainbows In The Night came through (followed immediately by the Swirling Eddies. I love my iPod). This is a gorgeous song, and it has ballet written all over it. I always knew I would do it someday, but 'someday' would come when I had really refined my ability to choreograph a smooth, flowing dance and aesthetically pleasing formations. This is a phenomenal majestic song and as a choreographer I cannot give it anything less than the best that ballet has to offer. I knew if I were to do it at that point, I couldn't even do the song justice, and even mere 'justice' is not good enough for something so sweeping and marvelous. I wasn't yet ready for a project of this caliber -- it would be six and a half minutes of grand, majestic, and very precise classical ballet for twelve people.

Last time I even thought of this song was probably in the spring sometime. I hadn't heard it in a long while (it's a crime to forget this song, and yet I keep doing it). Since then, things have changed -- I've had the opportunity to take a couple of ballet classes in the next level up than I was in, and it's one of those 'big jump' levels... you go from floating and gentle ballet to quick, precise and expressive ballet. I've noticed choreography coming far easier and far more quickly than before I took that class, plus my dancing is way more interesting now. I have a lot more technique to draw on thanks to that class.

Also, in the past week and a half or so I've been watching pretty much every classical ballet video that exists on YouTube. All the classic ballets (Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, I even saw some Alice In Wonderland...), and quite a few rehearsals, plus a bunch of Balanchine's stuff (despite having spent most of my life in the ballet community and having heard he was such a great choreographer, I've never actually seen his work).

You know how it works -- the more you watch something or listen to something, the more it sinks into the fabric of your being. Watching literally hours and hours and hours of rehearsing and excerpts of great ballets has packed my head so full of ballet stuff: intricate footwork, quick and complex movements, strings of impressive extensions, turns, and jumps without a break. (If you only watch one ballet excerpt in your entire life, watch this one... you will never fully understand how amazing this is if you've never been on pointe, but even to the untrained eye this is no doubt impressive.)

As a result of all the learning, the other day when that David Meece song came through, I began to wonder if maybe now I was ready.

So I'm seriously sketching it out now -- not officially notating, but coming up with pieces and fitting them together. It really is like building a puzzle, only you also have to create the pieces first. I did this with Sanctuary, with fantastic results -- Sanctuary is freaking gorgeous. The ending alone could stand as my best work (so far). Of course, by the time I finished I was ready to shred my sketch pages (my cross-references had cross-references which cross-referenced back for two lines of information before another cross-reference sent me off on another quest for a different page. The ending may have turned out spectacular, but sketching that first and then filling everything else in later on the following pages was insanity), but at least the final product was worth it. Because it worked so well with Sanctuary, I used the same approach with Beautiful One -- essentially choreographing the entire thing in my head and outlining it in English notes, then just transcribing it into BMN. I can pretty much guarantee that was how I managed to create the dance for Beautiful One from scratch so quickly.

Sorry, kind of a ramble... but as I'm writing I'm realising I think I found my creative rhythm!

Anyway, I haven't totally committed to God's Promises/Rainbows In The Night yet, but it's much closer to what I envisioned than it was a month ago... I seriously thought it would be years and years, and it's kind of surreal to think that maybe it's not that far off. I'm excited, anyway.

Music Day

It's my birthday today and you know what that means... it's White Heart Month here at the Edge Of The Dream! (Provided, of course, that the iTunes Store actually has five White Heart songs that I haven't already featured.)

The other day I was listening to White Heart's Freedom album on my iPod. It's a totally different experience on the iPod -- headphones always make the mix sound better anyway, but this specific album is heaven on earth through headphones. Plus, this album just means so, so much to me -- track two, Sing Your Freedom, has gone down in this blog's history as the first piece of choreography I ever completed, Eighth Wonder holds the distinction of being the first piece of my choreography to be publicly performed, and the phenomenal opener Bye Bye Babylon was the song that catapulted White Heart firmly into the slot of 'My Favourite Band Ever Of All Time.' I listen to my CD copy of the album that I ripped from my mother's well-loved cassette at least twice a week, probably more.

I rarely listen to it on my iPod though. Usually I listen to my iPod when choreographing a specific song, and I tend to listen to full albums on CD as I'm driving places in the rattletrap.

However, Freedom is different on the iPod not because of sound quality, but because of the tracklist. As I mentioned, my Freedom CD was originally a tape. Then, several months after I created it, I found out that the original CD release of the album had an extra track sandwiched in between The River Will Flow and Let It Go, a track which I assume was excluded from the cassette and vinyl releases due to time constraints (though don't quote me on that). iTunes had the track (for once -- pause while we give sarcastic applause), but I'd already burned the CD and didn't want a perfectly good CD to go to waste. So I still listen to the cassette version but because I'm a purist, I have the official CD tracklist on the iPod.

So the other day as I was listening to the album on my iPod, I suddenly went 'holy crap I forgot about this song!'

Title: Set The Bridge On Fire
Artist: White Heart
Album: Freedom
Year: 1989
Label: Sparrow
iTunes here; YouTube here.

This is a freaking good song. Guitar, bass, keys, drums... everyone is in top form here. The interlude is one of the best I've ever heard. It's not just a standard 'insert guitar solo here' deal, every instrument gets to play. The synth, real soft and gentle (yet it manages to be stately) and then the guitar rips through and the bass and a different guitar comes in and then...

There's even a great little acoustic guitar riff at the end of each verse. The rest of the song is hardcore rock, but somehow they make that little acoustic bit work.

Even the rhythm is great -- driving, and not quite centered.

Fans often cite this as one of Rick's best vocal performances to date (along with Desert Rose, How Many Times, Dr Jekyll And Mr Christian, Sing Your Freedom, Unchain, et cetera et cetera...), and the title is well deserved. He simply soars here. It sounds so effortless.

Lyrically, the song makes some good points. It doesn't beat the visual to death, but it explores it just enough to make you really think about it. Do you really want to live forever in that headspace of regretting the things you've done, the times you've messed up?


Great message. Phenomenal performance. If you only own one White Heart song, this should be a contender.

Explosion Of Creativity

This past weekend has been a roller coaster. Possibilities, excitement, doubt, a sense of being utterly stupefied. My future is at a huge, huge crossroads right now, and I'm still kind of on the fence about which path I'm taking... I've almost decided, but not quite...

Given this huge rush of excitement and the swirl of thoughts racing in my mind since Friday, I was pretty much rendered useless (just ask my mom). Until yesterday...

Since National Choreography Month, I've been slowly working on choreographing a ballet for White Heart's Montana Sky (very slowly), but I hadn't worked on it in a good week, or maybe more. Yesterday I decided I really should put in some effort on that thing already so I can move on to something else.

So I got my clipboard with my work-in-progress and notes and my pencil and eraser and sat down with my iPod. I didn't really want to do choreography yet, so I thought I'd relax and listen to a couple of other songs first.

So I listened to some Undercover, and then I started on my Daniel Amos collection, all three songs of it (don't freak out, I haven't converted to country -- these are Alarma Chronicles tracks. Good, decent rock). The first song on the list was The Double, from Doppelganger.

As I listened, my mind, as it almost always does when I hear music, started to picture a stage with dancers on it, trying out concepts and moods and disciplines and movement/formation ideas. As the song went on, I began to notice that some of the stuff in my head was really quite good and began to pay more attention to what my brain was coming up with so I could write it down later.

But as the song drew to a close, I realised I had to go back and write it down now, or else I would forget everything -- and it was too good to risk forgetting over the course of the upcoming song. I paused the iPod, grabbed a fistful of blank paper off my desk, sat down, restarted the song and began to write.

One idea led to another led to another led to another as I connected the dots of the pieces I'd come up with on the first listen, and three hours later I had completed the dance. Start-to-finish. Four minutes' worth. For either three or six people (it would work either way; I haven't committed to either one yet).

And get this -- in tap.

Until yesterday, I could barely choreograph more than sixteen consecutive tap counts for a song before stalling out. And here I just sort of poured out an entire four-minute piece in three hours. It was surreal watching my own writing devour the blank pages so quickly -- one... four... six... seven...

I'm thinking the co-existing heights and depths of excitement and terror surrounding and consuming me since Friday had something to do with this explosion of creativity... No matter, I'll take it. And here's to many more tap dances.

National Choreography Month - Day 21

1.49 am -- Just spent two hours reading stuff on contemporary dance, jazz technique and the Shim Sham on the Internet. My eyes are tired now. Thinking maybe I can throw some jazz walks into Apathy Alert somewhere. Also, now I have a really annoying song in my head but I don't know what it's called -- just some song on one of the videos of some girl in a really skimpy dress that was actually more like a shirt. How can anyone walk on a stage before hundreds in that getup without either dying of embarrassment or freezing to death?
Sort of dreading choreographing The Gift. Yesterday morning I realised I've only heard that song like five times in my entire life -- I only picked it because it was short and I was feeling like an underachiever for only planning two dances.
Apathy Alert has picked up a little (as of early yesterday morning, before I went to bed), but it's fast becoming a Sing Your Freedom-like show of potentially-impossible-to-execute technical prowess. And speed. Because technique and complex sequences are nothing without speed to make it look even more amazing.
Also, getting sick of the song Apathy Alert. I've been solving the problem by listening to Sheila Walsh and reading random dance articles online. Unfortunately, that's not very choreographically productive.
Sort of intimidated by all the stuff I read on choreography though. Most of it was modern/contemporary-based, but still. I can't expect any of my output so far to get noticed. It's horrible stuff. But I only have till September to get some solid performance-worthy choreography in place if we want a shot at getting our first decent-sized gig. Thank goodness I'm not the only choreographer on the team...

3.10 am -- Just killed spider the size of a dinner plate. Off to bed now... though whether I'll actually sleep now is another matter.

12.39 pm -- My mother is yelling at me again because I'm apparently not productive enough.

7.39 pm -- Finally starting work (of the choreographic persuasion). Apparently today was spring cleaning and as such I was unable to report for duty till now. Am starting work at about the 2.04 mark of Apathy Alert.

7.59 pm -- Got a phrase divisible into threes? Eschappés are your friend. I doubt the poor saps -- I mean, highly skilled and amazing dancers -- who actually have to perform the sequence will agree, though.

8.30ish pm -- Am now at the 2.34 mark. (I'd like to know how I managed that kind of speed because I'll definitely need to replicate this feat in the future...)

11.45 pm -- iPod just randomly crashed and made me lose my place. Continuing on... Almost done notating the eschappé/relevé sequence.

Music Day -- And An Urgent Request

(I had a different Music Day post all ready -- complete with pictures and everything. I spent more than five hours on the stupid thing. Oh wait, heaven forbid Blogger can just put one line of text right underneath the picture, not ten tab-returns below it or beside it. So now I guess you can just read part of the text because I refuse to blow the rest of my sleeping night swearing at Blogger. I might post the pictures part later when Blogger decides it has a brain behind its operation.)

Anyway.

(*painstakingly pieced together photo montage with scary-appropriate captions that won't work goes here*)







 

The government of Alberta is taking measures to censor Christianity and erase all moral and ethical code.

In fact, it's not just Alberta. Ontario has already passed similar legislation and I think at least two other provinces have done the same. This is going to sweep Canada unless the body of Christ suits up and comes to fight. This is clearly the work of Satan, trying to make sure the future generations of Canada will not ever get the chance to hear of the just, merciful, loving, holy, majestic God who created them.

Please pray this will not come to pass. That the church of Alberta will rise up and protest -- with love and respect, but also firmly.

And we need your help now. Yes, yours.

Whether or not you homeschool your children, whether or not you even have any children, whether or not you live in Canada, whether or not you're a Christian, today is your day to speak up.

I post this at approximately 2.00 am Mountain Standard Time on the ninth of March. Two of the legal representatives of homeschooling in Canada have declared the ninth of March as a day when the pressure on the Canadian government is turned up -- substantially.

They -- we -- are asking that everyone who is concerned about this, no matter for what reason or where they live, to contact the Premier of Alberta or the Minister of Education today and respectfully make their opinions known. There has already been a phoning and letter-writing blitz going on this week, but it's only been amongst Albertans. Since the Premier and the Minister of Education continue to push for this legislation with alarming determination, we are inviting Canada, North America, the world, to join us.

I'll be posting some links below that outline the specific situation. Suffice to say, if this legislation gets passed, all I can see is Nazi Germany all over again. One of the governmental higher-ups was even quoted as saying, "(Whatever the nature of schooling -- homeschooling, private school, Catholic school -- ) we do not tolerate disrespect for differences." (Emphasis mine.)

Of course the statement was later 'retracted,' but if that doesn't sound like Hitler, I don't know what does.

Please pray. The freedom of Alberta, indeed of Canada as a whole, hangs in the balance. Not just for Christians, but for everyone who doesn't fit the 'Aryan' mould our government clearly intends to impose on us.

Now for the song (I had a nice segway here but it wouldn't have made sense without the pictures).

The other day on the commute from dance, while listening to the ShufflePod (as I call it now -- the iPod nano I listen to on shuffle), this track came on. And immediately I thought of music day.

So here it is.

Title: WAR

'Artist': John Piper

Year: 2007

Listen to and download the free MP3 here. YouTube here.

I'll let the track speak for itself... all I can say is it's powerful.

Again, please help us put pressure on the Alberta government to retract the changes to Bill 2. Whether you pray for the softening of hearts or you actually make a phone call or send an email, I as a homeschool graduate, a Canadian, and a Christian, on behalf of my Christian homeschooling parents, my Christian homeschooled siblings, and all my Christian homeschooled friends, thank you in advance.

Contact information:

Honourable Thomas Lukaszuk, Education Minister

423 Legislature Building
10800 - 97 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB
Canada T5K 2B6
Phone: (780) 427-5010
Fax: (780) 427-5018
edmonton.castledowns(at)assembly.ab.ca

Premier Alison Redford

Office of the Premier
Room 307, Legislature Building
10800-97 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5K 2B7
Phone: 780-427-2711 (ask to be connected with the Premier’s Office)
E-mail: Use this form.

Links explaining the details of the situation:

http://www.hslda.ca/blog

http://www.aheaonline.com/

Both pages also contain links to other very informative articles.

Today's Commute (As Chronicled By The iPod)

Today's two-hour commute to and from dance went as follows:

(Backstory: A friend from church ended up with a second iPod car adapter he didn't need and gave it to me. I decided to put my 2 GB nano back to work (it had been kind of forgotten since my library outgrew it). I loaded it with a bunch of random songs and took it for a spin today.)

I started it off myself with The Devil Is Bad by the W's. It was the first song that caught my attention as I was scrolling through the song list and I thought, 'Hey, why not?' (It was also peppy enough to get me through the first few minutes of the drive when I'm still tired and not really alert.)

Then I set it to shuffle.

I didn't recognise the second song at first... but when I did I started laughing. The only Christmas song on the iPod (and, I had noticed after syncing, the *gasp!* only White Heart song). It seemed quite fitting as the clouds hung thick and white in the sky, heavy with glorious snow so rare.

We were off to a very good start.

Next up, the analogue recording of PFR's Name (even though the dragging is awful, I couldn't part with the analogue tracks even after getting the CD).

After that, Petra's More Power To Ya, followed immediately by Adonai.

That right there, my friends, is a good commute song. Actually it's good for pretty much anything. (Have I ever mentioned that I love this song?)

It was kind of a downer when the best rock praise song ever recorded (says me) was followed by Switchfoot's More Than Fine. Not a lot of tracks can easily follow Adonai, and that wasn't one of them.

Then came Frontlynaz's Addicted (a random hip hop song I heard once and kind of liked so I downloaded it. You know, back when I had money for that kind of frivolous stuff).

Then the iPod abruptly changed gears and put out two early Amy Grant tracks in a row -- Love Can Do and Angels (eerily appropriate for driving that highway at times).

Then it apparently tired of the '80s and moved on to R&B/Soul-type stuff (Nicole C Mullen's Witness and Mary Mary's Shackles (Praise You)).

Midway through that last track we arrived at the studio and the iPod was put on hold for several hours in favour of piano music.

Upon returning to the rattletrap and finishing the Mary Mary song, it pulled out Owl City's Fireflies, much to my sister's delight, then, as we came off the overpass onto the main highway, one of my favourite Newsboys tracks, Praises.

Following that, Fisherman Song by Boxtree -- a sweet little flashback to my childhood. Such a cute cheerful song. Stylistically it's like PFR's Great Lengths, only nobody's ever heard of it.

Then came the ultimate in modern pop (as modern pop as one gets on my iPod, anyway), the remixed version of ZOEgirl's Even If. This is definitely a song you blast from the speakers as you rock down the highway. (At least that's what I did.)

And the ultimate in BeeGee-esque late '70s rock (as far as that goes on my iPod -- see previous paragraph) Petra's Angel Of Light. It was a bit of a jump, but hey, Petra is always fitting. Always.

We pulled into Tim Horton's just as Angel Of Light finished and paused it while I went in and ordered our weekly pair of small iced capps. (Yes, non-Canadian readers, that's 'capps' with two p's. It takes less time for the weather to change around here than it does for us to say 'iced cappuccino' and we just don't have that kind of time to mess with because the hockey game starts in ten minutes and we have to hurry up and get back to home sweet igloo before the face-off.)

Anyway, the trip from Tim Horton's to the next lights followed the soundtrack to Phil Joel's Strangely Normal, and the trip from those lights to the next were underscored by PFR's Goldie's Last Day. (Is it just me or did I drive really really slowly through town? Wow. Two songs seems a bit excessive. Apologies to the people stuck behind me.)

The Newsboys' Joy carried us out of town and back onto the highway, followed by Steven Curtis Chapman's This Day and Jasmin Gibb's Come To Jesus.

As I made the left onto the gravel road to our house, the final leg of the journey, and the last note ofCome To Jesus faded into a mere echo in the short-term memory, I began to seriously hope the next song wouldn't be a dud. Years of living in the same house, taking the same road over and over and over again has taught me that from the turn onto the gravel to our house is four and a half minutes -- just enough for one more song.

What would it be? Which should I hope for?

Come on, don't pick a lame one, don't pick a lame one...

Drum beat. Drum beat. Three more, successive.

Yes. (*insert mental fist pump here* I couldn't do a real one because if I took my hand off the wheel the wind would have swept us neatly into the ditch.)


People In A Box.

Just a little bit of eighties to stick in my head for the rest of the afternoon. (Okay okay, maybe a lot of eighties to stick in my head for the rest of the afternoon.)

And then once I got in the house it was too quiet so I put on some DeGarmo & Key. So much for that other plan.



(Yes, I know I need a life.)

A Mini-Rant

You know, when you have found one program -- one single, solitary program -- that actually works on a PC (as long as the PC is in a semi-cooperative mood), you expect the Mac version of the same program to work just as well, right?

Fat chance.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but if you want to use the sound recording/editing program Audacity, find a PC. The Mac version is not only a major pain in the neck to install, it crashes every five minutes and heaven forbid that you might want to save your project.

And while you're using the program on one of those lowlife PCs, take the time (perhaps while it's spending two minutes to export a two and a half minute song as an MP3) to find a way to contact Audacity's people and demand that they fix their Mac version.

Because maybe your PC is like mine and it takes forever to do anything, never mind coordinating sound and graphic rendering, and it also has like ten gigabytes of remaining space and that's after you clean off all the junk.

And maybe you have a super fast Mac with several hundred gigabytes of storage for the sound files and it also happens to be the computer you sync your iPod with.

And maybe, like me, you would really like to do your importing into the Mac for the aforementioned reasons.

And if the Mac version of the program sucks, there goes an increasing number of your downloads (on Audacity's part) as the number of people buying Macs increases. Macs may still be in the minority for now, but they're gaining steam fast. If you as a software producer don't keep up, you might as well go take a job as a burger flipper. Sure, Audacity is open source and free and therefore nobody's making a profit from it, but if you can make it work almost flawlessly on a system as deeply flawed and persnickety as Windows, you can most likely make it work almost as well on a system as smooth and well-thought-out as Mac OS X.

But even though this is all immensely frustrating, I have to give Apple credit for one thing: if Mac OS X (or a program it's running) is going to crash, at least it does it quickly and gets it over with. You don't sit there looking at the 'busy' cursor for an hour while the hard drive churns and rumbles and strains before finally coming to the conclusion that the program is not responding.

Welcome, Successor To The Zombie's Throne

Yesterday I welcomed a new addition into the family of technological devices that are quickly taking over my house (not to mention my life).

Yes, I am now the proud owner of a 13" MacBook Pro.

Four gigabytes of RAM, a 2.3 GHz processor, and three hundred and twenty sweet gigabytes of space for my music, photos, and writing. Portability so I can work on my writing whenever I want, not whenever I manage to wrestle the desktop PC from my sister. And (obviously) it has a battery so if the stupid power decides to go out for sixteen straight hours I can still get things done.

And... I can now sync the iPod touch! (Well, I can as soon as I email myself all the notes I've written on it to back them up.)

Only one more thing remains to be done... to get a wireless Internet connection of some kind in the house so I can officially blog from it. Blogging on a PC just doesn't have that same... allure. (That's why this post seems so scattered.)

It's still rather surreal. When I woke up yesterday morning, I had no idea that it would be the day. I'd thought about the possibility of buying it the night before, but I thought 'Yeah, right. Not for a while yet.' I knew I had nearly enough money, but I didn't think I had enough.

Regardless, Saturday morning I counted my money (there was slightly more than I thought) and went to the Apple Store and asked the staff a few fairly minor questions I still had. (Shout-out to Jenna at the South Common Future Shop if you ever happen to stumble across this -- you were a great help! Thank you so much!)

I was still fairly certain I wouldn't be getting a MacBook that day, but then she mentioned that the Macs were actually on sale until the 17th of June.

It wasn't much, just a hundred dollars or so (not much when you're talking about a $1300 computer), but as she pointed out, it's a big deal when anything with an Apple logo is on sale. She also offered me a twenty dollar discount on iWork, which I was also planning to buy whenever I bought the MacBook.

Then she gave me a few minutes to think about it.

I had no idea what to think. Suddenly I wasn't sure exactly how much money I had on me, I couldn't remember, but I would almost certainly be able to make it work.

So I could actually get my dream computer today?

The thought was so radically different after months, nearly a year, of telling myself 'Eventually, eventually, sometime you will get this MacBook. But first you have to wait.' I couldn't process the idea of the eventuality actually becoming true -- today.

She returned and asked if I'd come to a decision yet. The truth was, my brain had frozen. I hadn't expected to actually be considering the idea of purchasing one that very day and therefore my brain had refused to entertain the idea even though it was now within my reach.

I took a breath. I still had no idea what to say.

I heard my voice say, "I think... I'll take it."

She smiled.

"That's great! I'm so excited for you!"

She got me a MacBook and a copy of iWork. I paid for it and brought it home.

I spent most of this afternoon adding music and photos to it and it still doesn't quite seem real -- that this MacBook is mine, all mine. That I can customise and play to my heart's content because I'm not just drooling over someone else's MacBook -- it's actually mine.

The Birth Of A Computer Nerd -- Part Two

My parents acquired our first computer when I was eleven. We were visiting relatives and they had recently gotten a new computer. Therefore they had a slightly used Windows ME computer they were getting rid of. My parents, who had been sort of considering getting a computer, agreed to take it.

Again, I have no idea what the thing's technical specifications were (and unfortunately the tower is no longer in our possession), but it worked for what we needed. I was rather disappointed that I couldn't start e-mailing my friends -- my parents were dead-set against the Internet -- but I managed to survive by drawing things in Paint, occasionally doing some typing, and playing with display settings (my sister and I would preview the haunted house screensaver and spend hours pretending to sneak up to the house on the screen from the other end of the room. Whenever a ghost would appear or a noise was heard, we would freak out and skitter back to the opposite wall where we would catch our breath in the most dramatic fashion and then slowly gather the courage to make our way to the house again).

For several years nobody really used the computer for much -- the varying versions of Solitaire were the most often-used programs.

Then I got an iPod.

I knew next to nothing about iPods at the time. All I knew was that somehow you used a computer to put music on it and then you could listen to music all the time without the bother of toting along half a dozen scratched CDs only to find that two of the cases are empty -- twenty minutes into a three-day road trip.
For me, a music junkie, that was all I needed to know. We had a computer, I had enough money. No problem.

Alas, I was young, sheltered, and as such completely unaware that there were different kinds of operating systems. Neither was I aware of the term 'incompatible' in the computing world.

Long story short, I bought the iPod, brought it home, and after several hours came to the conclusion that the computer simply would not communicate with the iPod. Since I didn't have very much computer knowledge I initially chalked it up to my own inexperience. However, after I'd talked to a friend who also had an iPod, I read the iPod's packaging, on her recommendation. It was only then that I found that I needed something called 'Windows XP.' I also needed 'iTunes' which required... an Internet connection.

At the time a computer nerd relative of ours had just moved to our area. We telephoned him and asked what we could do. He said he would download iTunes onto a portable drive and install it onto our computer from there.

Several days later, he came out to do that... but the computer refused to read the drive. Nothing he tried worked.

Finally we had to admit defeat. The computer was simply too old. However, this relative -- who built and repaired computers for extra cash -- said that the next time he got his hands on an XP computer to sell, we could have it.

Seven months passed and I began to despair of ever being able to use my iPod for more than the Apple version of Breakout that came bundled with it (it was a pretty decent version, but even so...).

Finally though, the day came when he told us he had a computer for us. Since we still didn't have the Internet, he took the liberty of installing the latest version of iTunes on it before giving it to us. He showed me how to import my music and sync my iPod, and in doing so was the midwife at the birth of a more manic computer geek than anyone would ever have dreamed I'd become.
Not wanting to repeat the frustration of spending several hundred dollars before discovering an incompatibility and having to wait seven months to be able to use the device I'd paid good money for, I decided I would learn more about computers so I could avoid similar mistakes (but anyone who's read the story of The Zombie (as I've decided to call The Computer) knows that I still make that mistake. Occasionally. Once. And it did work out that time... for a month and a half anyway).
I went to the library and borrowed a few computer books that had 'Windows' or 'iPod' in the title, figuring that was as good a place as any to start.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), those beginner computer books led to more complex and in-depth computer books. It wasn't long before I was bringing home books and magazines with titles like 'Teach Yourself C++,' 'The Hacker Quarterly,' and 'Dreaming In Code' (excellent book, by the way, utterly fascinating. The author is Scott Rosenberg if you'd like to look it up).
My knowledge quickly expanded. Eventually I'd read all the computer books the library had and moved on to tinkering with our computer without any specific goal in mind. How it survived some of the things I (mostly accidentally) inflicted on it I have no idea.
Two years after we got that XP computer, my parents finally gave in to their offspring's pleas and got high-speed Internet installed. Around the same time our computer geek relative was given a newer, better Windows XP computer to sell and passed it along to us. I got the old computer (I was rather disappointed since I'd outgrown the hard drive before it even passed into my hands and had hoped to get the newer one since my parents and sister were perfectly fine with the old computer anyway. I still have that computer though... it's the 20 GB one mentioned in the story of The Zombie).
Despite all the reading though, I've done most of my learning through trial and error. To this day I have never owned a brand new computer, either my own or my parents'. Since used computers tend to come with, ahem, 'quirks' (some more severe than others), I've had to do a lot of experimenting and stabs in the dark, hoping for something to work. As much as I hate having to coax unresponsive computers back into existence, I've accidentally taught myself a lot of things (like never put the iTunes folder in another user's Documents).
The nine-year-old who spent a half hour in a dialog box trying to figure out how to shut down Windows ME seems so far away now. Especially considering I've hatched a rather elaborate, multifaceted, and probably-going-to-be-mostly-ad-libbed plan to get The Zombie operational again. (I suppose if it works I'll have to come up with a different name for it though... although really, computers are zombies to begin with...)

Subdued

Part Two of a three part series.

For the remainder of July (for it was July by the time I set the computer up), I added programs and photos with rather reckless abandon, and spent nearly every waking moment either working on my Spider Solitaire winning streak (it ended at 19 games, if I recall correctly), customising preferences, or writing.

Two rather good short stories were born out of this writing, as was the nebulous of a poem of sorts.

In late July, I got an iPod touch (an early birthday gift). After it was purchased, I read the packaging and found that as far as Windows XP goes, it was only compatible with Service Pack 3 or higher.

The computer I had been planning to use it with (the only computer in the house that had both iTunes and a working USB port) had SP2.

For a split second I was horrified... my (very generous) grandmother and I had just spent a collective total of nearly three hundred dollars on this and I couldn't even use it?

Then my mind flashed back to the System Properties dialog box on my new computer. If my memory was accurate, it might just have said 'Service Pack 3.' However, I wasn't sure.

So when I got home, I rushed to the computer and called up The Official Windows Box Of Nerd Stats.

Sure enough, it read 'Windows XP Home Service Pack 3.'

I was elated. All I needed to do was install iTunes, add my music, and hook up the iPod.

Six hours later I had finally installed iTunes and added (I hoped) every song I could think of that I might possibly wish to listen to (it would have taken far longer if I hadn't had a partial backup of the other computer's music files). Exhausted but excited, I plugged in the iPod. And got an error message from iTunes.

It needed to connect to the Internet in order for me to register the iPod and thus, sync it.

Due to lack of finances (or more accurately, laziness preventing us from researching the actual cost), there is no networking in the house. If you want to get onto the Internet, you have to get onto the one computer that's connected to it.

The SP2 computer.

Upon researching the potential pitfalls involved in upgrading that computer to SP3 I (wisely, as I would realise later) dropped the notion. However, it looked as if I would never get to use the iPod for anything more than note-taking.

That night, however, an idea came to me and the next morning I put it in action.

It took me a good half hour to rewire the Internet connection, moving it temporarily from the 'primary' computer to mine. With my computer on the Internet, I registered the iPod, bought a few songs, and synced it before moving the Internet connection back to its designated place.

I had been quite grateful for the computer before, and this only heightened my thankfulness. Without it, my iPod would have been the next thing to useless.

Then dawned 1 August (actually, it didn't even have a chance to dawn; I opened Word and started writing as soon as the clock read 12.00 AM), and I started my novel -- the one about the murder.

I quickly discovered that I do my best writing between the hours of 11.30 PM and 4.00 AM (something I'd suspected, but hadn't yet confirmed).

So, every night, as the rest of the family was falling asleep, I woke up the computer, plugged in my trusty flash drive, and wrote until I could no longer see the monitor for the black spots before my eyes.

The story took shape at a blinding pace, and the computer was quite patient about the whole thing.

For twenty-three days (rather, nights) we worked together, racking up over 45,000 words out of the goal of 50,000.

And then in the proverbial home stretch it choked.