I love my Mac: a Valentine's post

I no longer have a life, I have an iLife. Yesiree, I've bought into the marketing hype that is Apple and installed the whole iSuite: iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband (I guess they didn't want to do something like iBand or iMusic to get it confused with iTunes). People say the "i" is for internet, I think it's for "indulgence" as in "self-indulgence." Now with the technology you can be the center and star of your own little world, it takes home movies to a whole new extreme. Now, you can package hours and hours of boring home videos with snazzy DVD themes and music, so at least you can skim through the videos faster.

I read an article in the New York Observer about how we are a generation of me obsessed folks and that the popularity of shows like American Idol and the Apprentice are due to the fact that we just want someone to slap someone silly with reality and tell them, no Timmy, you are not the best (just like everyone else).

I suppose this whole iLife suite simply encourages that trend. But in another sense there's a freedom of creation. A way to indulge a dream of being the next great movie maker, or the next great composer (look what happened with grundge music built on 3 chord songs).

And now if you really wanted, you could literally create a movie to have your life flash before your eyes, complete with soundtrack.

The programs can be a bit tedious and don't quite have all the fine control you'd like to have, but they do their job. I recently made a DVD of the Small Press Traffic performance of Eileen Tabios' play, "When I was Jaspar John's Filipino Lover" which was a hoot and a half to do. My first DVD ever! I don't have a digital video camera, so this will be my only dvd for a while.

Get a bit of hip music, get some flashy transitions, voila! Now we are immortalized for the next several hundred years in way less space than a VHS tape. Will this make me watch my home videos more, probably not. I have shelves of them sitting, collecting dust, some marked, others not. It'll just mean I can fit more on a shelf than I could before.

In any case, I'm having fun. I sit there for hours, tweaking little things, changing color, text, font. And that part of me that's been feeling creatively stifled, feels a bit better.

I finally got to load all my photos into iPhoto. The previous version would always get messed up. The new one can handle at least 15,000 photos (I have one friend who actually loaded that many). I have 5000, many are duplicates, triplicates, of photos. Now they're all mashed together in one place. And now I have to remember, how long ago events were and where I was and when I was there. The pictures go back to 1998. I have to recategorize the past 7 years of my life. Alot changes in 7 years, yet much stays the same, all of which scroll by in 1 inch thumbnails on my screen. Things I thought were just a few months ago were really 3 years ago.

I supposed this is why when people have kids they measure by how old the kid(s) were. I still distinctly remember eating Ramen noodles after kindergarten watching Sanford & Son on a black and white tv. It amazes me how that was over 2 decades ago. I hope that when it stretches to 4, 5, 6 decades, I'll still have a few of those memories.

One of my clients at work is the Wellness Center. They put out a newsletter on health and nutrition that's widely circulated. An 86 year old woman called them up and asked about a story from a 1996 newsletter that discussed how coal burning electrical plants were particularly bad for St.Louis, MO. She recalled it was on the front page and she wanted a copy so she could bring it to the City Council who were considering putting up another coal burning electrical plant. Well, the 86 year old woman was wrong, the article was on page 4. When I'm 86, I want to be as wrong as she was.

I was watching an episode of Nova that discussed Alzheimer's and how losing one's memory has been a fear of mankind for well as long as we can remember. How memories are so much a part of who we are, and how even the shortest memories are a part of our identity. With Alzheimer's, patients eventually even forget how to live.

That's the interesting thing about iLife, it taps into this innate desire to remember and record who we are and what we do and to see and relive that expanse of time.