#64 - A case for fun tech: one year later

A year ago I published A Case For Fun Tech. I don’t know how I landed on that topic, but I knew I needed to put an essay out that week because I had to prove to myself that I could. I had been broken up with that Monday, but I felt like if I published it meant I would be okay. It meant that I would still write, that this substack wasn’t just an escape hatch that I invented while trying to sort through my feelings during the relationship’s slow demise.

It meant…something. Anything. I wanted to latch onto the fact that my life was now my own, and my choices were real, and I was a person with interesting thoughts who presented them in interesting ways.

So I wrote about my keyboard. And clamshell iBooks. I lamented the lack of color options from major tech overlords and emphasized how little I care about sleekness because none of my accessories ever fit in my pockets anyway.

It’s funny to me that the newsletter came to mean so much to me that week. I had only published ten sporadic ones so far, I certainly hadn’t committed myself to writing one every week, but that became the thing that I had to prove to myself. I would be okay if I could get out the substack. It wouldn’t be weird to publish one ever again if I could just hit send on that Friday.

Of course, it would be almost a full two months before the follow-up essay in which I ranked the fuckability of the last ten presidents. (Because this is a serious newsletter where I talk about only serious things.)

And hey, it turns out that giving myself little pieces of driftwood to cling to during that week really WAS helpful. I felt adrift in a way I never had before. I had been pulled out by the tide, and despite knowing where the beach was, I knew I didn’t want to go back there. But I couldn’t tread water forever, so we were going to have to survive long enough to figure out the new plan.

I had never defined myself before. Like really taken a look at who I was without the projected voyeuristic lens of what people would think about who I was influencing my choices. I also didn’t know who I was as a healed person. Like, strip away all the bad shit that happened to me, and what was left? If I removed the defensiveness from my comedy, was I still funny? And apparently, my avenue in was to complain about the lack of cute options I had re: television shapes. And you know what? I was right!

In the last year I have purchased two more mechanical keyboards, and four sets of keycaps. I know far too much about mods and how to increase thockyness. And I still think they’re one of the best and most joy-inducing things I use every day. The amount of typing I do has only increased in the last year, and when I started to think of my keyboards as a digital pen, it started making a lot more sense to me why I was so picky about them.

I think I was crying out for more color in my life because I had unknowingly created a drab atmosphere in my apartment. Grey towels, neutral tablemats, things that were boring enough for two people to agree on them. It took a bit but I’ve finally fully adjusted to only buying things for my taste. I wanted color, so I filled my world with it.

I bought desk mats and changed them out with the seasons. I attached LED strip lights to the back of my monitor and under my desk so that I can now create a fun glow and change the vibe depending on what color I’m going for. Pulling keycaps is a Sunday tradition because I love to refresh the setup at the beginning of the week and asking what I want to be looking at on my desk is now part of that. My mini desk fan is turquoise, I got colorful little crates, and I use an adorable catch-all tray that my best friend makes.

(My bedding is still mostly all-white. I just like to wake up and feel like I could be in a Nancy Meyers movie.) (Plus if Goob has a hairball…there’s bleach! My life can never be that romantic when BooBoo remains my roommate. She makes sure of that!)

But I bought cloud blankets, and cute cups, and I determinedly got art, and pink frames to put it in. My ergonomic chair is powder blue.

Color is disappearing from the world. People are afraid to renovate their homes in ways they want to because of “resale” value, which really just means they’re treating the home they own as if they rent it, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of owning one. Personality is only frightening to those who lack it. I want to see authentic expressions of self through sconce choices and wallpaper!

As tech becomes a larger part of our lives, it’s a real bummer that it is so devoid of true joy. There are cute phone cases, but why not cute phones? What are Apple and Microsoft so afraid of? At least the Sony Vaio series had pink keyboard options!

Our allegiance to those companies can say something about us apparently, but we lack the ability to say much about ourselves outside of our consumeristic buying patterns, so it would be cool if they gave us just a few more options to express ourselves through since every other paradigm in which we used to do it is practically non-existent! It’s great that they put out MacBooks in color, but the colors are honestly not that fun and there is still a heady lack of whimsy available. No one’s even coming close to the clamshell iBook levels of cool and WHY NOT. They could literally just re-release those at this point, we’re in the dregs of the Y2K revival anyway!

(I got to tell a tech company that their product lacked the whimsy that was promised to me by their ads, so in future meetings, the CEO would make sure to point out to me all of the places where he had added whimsy, color, and brightness. It was honestly super adorable and I’m sad their product will probably run out of funds before debut, but I very much appreciated that he took me seriously, and then took whimsy seriously. We look at boring interfaces all day long, gimme something fun every once in a while!)

(Also this whole Y2K revival era is unfathomably boring, fashion is a mess. It’s just references, and it’s not even to the coolest things we did/had, and everyone’s severe lack of imagination is more apparent than ever. We are missing tastemakers!! It used to be difficult to cultivate coolness, which is why it was a limited resource. Now everyone is just copying head-to-toe outfits. Where’s the originality?! Where are the risks! I see no ugly skirts over pants, I see no fun being had, everything is just as small and tight as possible and like…wake me up when [Kate Moss throwback diet culture era] ends.)

Anyway, I am not a visitor in my life, I’m a permanent resident. My home, my space, my…tech, it’s an extension of myself. And I had the very daunting task in front of me last year to get to know myself, without. Without the trauma, without the other person through whom I felt I could define myself, without fear and trepidation that others may not like me. And I feel like I’m supposed to write “and it wasn’t easy” but you know what…it kinda was. Like, yeah, I’ve committed a lot to it, but I’ve done harder things before. Getting to know myself more was not hard. It took a while, like in a physical sense it was often exhausting, as relevatory experiences tend to be, but WOW am I glad I did it now and not five years from now. I never want to punish myself for the length of time things take me—they take as long as they’re going to take. I wasn’t mentally ready at 22 to heal, but I was at 29, and I am so grateful that I got to. I had a job that I got to work from home for, which meant my morning was no longer consumed by a commute, which made it super possible to write 6 pages on self-reflective questions every single morning. (Or just whatever shit is coming to mind that day, I’m not always trying to do Big Healing at 6:30 in the morning, though I have found that it’s often easier to access some of that squishy soft interior stuff before my brain has built up the walls necessary for me to traverse the world.)

I bought a purple iPad and a fun case and cute grip thingys for the iPencil (it’s not called that but WHY isn’t it called that?? Get it together, branding) (also sidenote: trying to track down that pencil in the Williamsburg store was excruciating—it’s nearly impossible to find anything you’re looking for on a wall full of all-white boxes and all-white accessories, let alone the one last pencil they have available but anytime you look around to find help it’s just the dude who “checked you in” glaring in your direction because he knows you’re just missing it and it’s definitely right in front of you but who is making 0 moves to come and actually help. Apple’s customer service being “cool” is my literal nightmare, I hate not having a clear counter where checkout happens, this is no longer a “chill tech innovative checkout” situation I am now just irritated while making the single largest purchase I will all year and having to type my email into an iPhone with a clunky case while I try not to drop my items) and I change out my phone cases with my outfits and I got new keycaps for my keyboard because it was autumn and the matcha themed set looked ~peaceful.

I kept the apartment in the breakup, which means that I’ve been living in this apartment for two full years, and soon I will have lived alone in it longer by myself than with anyone else. I’m painting all the doorframes pink. The bathroom towels are now yellow. I moved all the furniture around and created a giant closet for myself.

This is my life and it’s happening right now.

I’m really grateful to my past self who wrote that random tech essay and was weirdly determined to make sure that I reclaimed the spaces that were mine just for me within days. I spent a lot of time worrying that I was reacting to the breakup “wrong” as if there’s a rulebook for what we “should” do during one. But there isn’t. We just have to let ourselves feel and the important things will become apparent. This newsletter, turns out, was one of mine, but I don’t know if I could have told you that days before shit went down. It was only when I was searching through the rubble of my life that the recovery list was written.

Having cute shit around me, in fun colors, that made me happy and that reflected my personality was important. So I made it happen.

I’m still waiting for the tech world to catch up a bit, but me and the other keycap-obsessed girlies have certainly figured out how to hack it a bit in the meantime.