Dec 2004, 25 entries

There are some things you buy and you feel a little guilty about. They are cool in theory but in reality you can't exactly say with confidence that your brain is supplying more happiness neurotransmitters to your emotional core than it had been before. And if you're really unlucky you may find that the happiness is sucked out. I am very aware of the way expensive electronics impact my happiness... probably because I have purchased so many and have been disappointed by them at times when I thought I should've been happier. I also found that almost immediately I can tell whether it's a happiness-inducing gadget or a soul-sucking gadget. My first few digital cameras, PDAs, mp3 players and computers were of the soul-sucking variety.

Then I found a trick with myself that I can be happy by avoiding certain qualities in a thing such as price, feature-packed-ness, and popularity. I don't need to buy the cheapest or the most expensive thing... in fact, I should ignore that factor because the cheapest thing is not worth it if it sucks... and same with popularity... the most popular thing isn't worth it if it sucks. Etc. Common sense to most, I imagine, but one has to find a way to put it into practice and that's the tricky part. I bought a cool mp3 player once that also had a digital camera module and immediately regretted it. I also bought one that had a lot of memory but was too big. PDAs just suck so I don't buy those anymore. Then, when it came to buying a phone, I found that the camera thing did matter this time, more than size. It's odd and counterintuitive unless I specifically try to address each instance as its own puzzle.

Anyway, about this projector... this projector's job that I was hiring it for was to make me enjoy sitting in my living room by myself more. If it could play movies on my wall too, that was a bonus (though I predicted a correlation). That is quite the job considering how tenuous my understanding of my own happiness is, and also because I'm very picky about sitting in my living room and get upset pretty quickly.

However, after watching 3 movies on my new projector (Jules and Jim, Some Kind of Wonderful, Before Sunset, in that order), I can already tell that my morale is significantly lifted. I'm one step closer to living in the future... or something. I like also that it's not the perfect set-up... wires for my powerbook and from the stereo and out of the projector criss-cross around the room and it's always possible that I might trip on the way to getting a refill on my Whiskey sour and take down the whole arrangement... but assuming I can avoid that, I think this is going to work nicely, very nicely.