Somebody stop me
After a hearty breakfast (thanks to Scotty Chan, the man with the plan) a crew of my friends and I descended upon Perth’s CBD for a short constitutional. All seemed to be going along well until we approached the gaudy yellow-and-black doors of JB Hi-Fi. As a future note to anybody, anywhere: If you see me going into JB Hi-Fi, stop me.
Every time I walk through those doors I end up buying a hundred dollars worth of CDs or more. Last time, it was Veruca Salt’s Eight Arms to Hold You, A Perfect Circle’s Mer de Noms, K’s Choice’s Paradise in Me, and perhaps Gob’s Too Late… No Friends (as far as my memory serves me). Of course, I don’t regret those purchases (with the exception of K’s Choice. It turns out they suck more than “Not an Addict” would indicate), but the thought of spending a hundred bucks every time I walk through the doors of a record store is just a little unsettling.
Today, I proved to myself that I just never learn. Fifty blank CDs, AFI’s Sing the Sorrow, Strung Out’s An American Paradox, Massive Attack’s 100th Window, and Veruca Salt’s Resolver. I could strike this one down as “catching up” with some of my favourite artists’ latest work; since all of these albums are, really, their latest albums… but that would be a cop-out. I am terrible with my money. Abusive, even.
A little more shopping took us to the camera store: Scotty wants to trade up on his digital camera. This got me thinking… I have 2 cameras: my really old (and sucky) point-and-click consumer-model shitbox and my newer, cooler SLR. I used to love photography, hence the purchase of an $800 SLR, but that was in high school when I actually had access to darkroom facilities. Nowadays, buying film and paying for processing seems like a real drag — a digital camera could only be a step in the right direction. Of course, trust Scotty Chan to get my brain racing. Talk moved to laptop computers. “If I get this job in Melbourne, I’ll probably sell my car and my PC and get a laptop”, he says.
Me? Selling my PC, my eMac, and my cameras could undoubtedly afford me a shiny-ass new iBook, or even a 12-inch PowerBook (given that Curtin’s campus computer store gives some seriously generous student discounts). But where does that place me? Aside from the portability, and being the kind of geek item that I’ve craved for years; how well could a laptop really serve me? It wouldn’t be any more powerful than my desktop, it’d have a (painfully) smaller screen, and portability and… really… cool… dammit I want one!
I hate myself. My credit card will never recover.