What I Want

So it's been a bit of time since my last post here and I think it's about time that I sat down and figured out what is to come: The first attempt here got stopped due to work on plays and frankly that's not something that is ever going to end in the near future so if every play I get behind on will end this project then there is no point in going on. *gasp* However, having recently moved and seen the objects in my life drastically scaled down, I would really like to move this project forward into a second stage, if you will.

What I Own was supposed to look at the weird things that I had amassed over time and see what they said about me: In general, they say that I own too much crap. Apparently I need more. At the moment I am lacking the following:

• A digital camera
• A video camera
• An X-Box 360 (with BioShock and Mass Effect, please)
• A winterized bicycle
• More crap that I'm forgetting.

What does the things that we want say about us? Who knows? Why am I even writing this?

I suppose the point of this post is to say that I want to continue and time willing I will do so soon. Also, not having a digital camera makes things a little hard. :P So, hang tight people and you may soon be subjected to yet more of my self masturbatory rantings about things I bought in flea markets.

Yeah, I Lied Again

Hey guys. Sadly, I've greatly overestimated my free time/creative output and as such I'm going to have to extend the little break here on the project indefinitely. Well, with any luck I'll be able to get this thing back on its feet in a couple of weeks when more of my writing chores on other projects is wrapped up but for the moment I'm going to have to concentrate elsewhere. I will promise however that I will be back and as soon as possible. In fact, I will keep this project alive until I've gone through 100 entries, at which point I'll assess if I'm done with it or not. Fair enough? Good, because you have no say either way.

In the meanwhile, you can feel free to read on my various exploits on my main blog which will still be updated from time to time, if only because when I fail to do so people complain. What a bunch of whiners!

Whoops, I Lied

It's Thursday and there has yet to be an update: The reason for this being that I'm INCREDIBLY BUSY with the various other projects on my plate. While I have a couple of posts good to go, I'm going to hold off until next week to start posting again so that I've got a shot at building up a buffer again. Sorry guys. This project doesn't really take that much time to deal with, but sadly I'm just swamped with auditions and the like all week. Hopefully things will look up in a bit. Later.

Adjusting Our Practices To Serve You Better

Well, we managed to burn through the backlog pretty nicely, taking us all the way up to 40 with few glitches. Sadly, I wasn't quite able to set up another backlog, which gives us this unfortunate gap. Hopefully I'll be able to shoot some more items soon and put them up, which will get everything rolling again.

In short- No entry for this Thursday or Friday, but everything should be moving along again come Monday. Fingers crossed.

Item Number 40: Glasses, Black

Time in possession: 2 years now maybe? I honestly couldn't say for sure without doing some serious Internet sleuthing.

Description: Black plastic glasses with white "marble" inside detailing. No idea what brand. Very strong prescription. Kind of beat up (left arm is pretty wobbly) but are the height of nerdy/artist fashion. Or so I'm trying to convince people.

Cost: With lenses, these babies set me back something in the ballpark of $260. They do have all sorts of fancy scratch resistant, glare resistant, x-ray vision enabling, etc. coatings on them though. ...I wish they really did give me x-ray vision. That would be awesome.

Story: One of the projects that inspired this one was a project where this guy sold everything he owned on eBay. I can't find the project with a quick Internet search sadly, but it was published as a book and was a fun read. Several of his items were bought by friends of his but never picked up, his glasses being one of them, presumably because his friend didn't want the project's creator to walk around blind. If I did the same thing, I don't know if I could have made that gamble. I'm not saying my friends are jerks (well, some of them are jerks) but without my glasses I am blind.

When I buy glasses I always do two things: I buy two pairs, because of my uncanny ability to lose things, and I buy pairs that look like they could take a bit of a beating. While this pair haven't seen the worst of my glasses transgressions (at the moment the best on was probably when I fell off a snow bank and didn't' find my glasses until 6 months later) but they have had more than enough abuse in the years they have resided on my face. They have been dropped, hit off of me, taken off too quickly for their own good and fallen into the garbage can by my bed on several occasions. Frankly, the fact that they still hold themselves on my head and do their job is a small miracle.

When I was originally told that I needed glasses, I was told that my vision would continue to deteriorate until I was 21. I'm 24 now and while on my last eye exam my prescription had changed slightly these glasses still work well enough and I'm happy for it. Replacing your glasses every year is a huge pain in the ass and even with vision coverage from my library job and from acting, it's pretty damn expensive too.

Item Number 39: Mini Filing Cabinet (and contents!)

Time in possession: 2 or 3 years

Description: Grey plastic "filing cabinet", designed to hold business cards. Top cabinet contains a small digital clock. Current contents are several dozen Nintendo Game Boy e-reader cards, several pieces of expired or seldom used ID, misc client cards, a padlock, some extra keys and other useful crap to have nearby and at hand.

Cost: The Cabinet itself reminds me of the kind of thing you'd buy for Regal for $7, so let's put it there. We'll also add in the e-reader cards (the complete set of all the NES classics plus a few extras from magazines and the like), $.99 a pop x13 sets (yay for failed media!) and the cost of the lock and other various crap that lives in there ($2.99! No real reason!) and we've got ourselves a grand total of $22.86

Story: This little guy sits on my actual filing cabinet (which doubles as an end-table) right beside the head of my bed and next to my ancient alarm clock (a future entry for later). Having a fake filing cabinet on top of a real one fulfills some sort of divine aesthetic in my mind. Yeah, I'm probably a little crazy.

I got this filing cabinet for Christmas one year, probably as a stocking stuffer the year I asked for a real filing cabinet and actually got it. My parents like playing jokes like that. In my extended family once you're 18 you join a pool and buy one gift for one family member. One year I asked my uncle for something off a list of games. When I opened his gift I found a ratty red sweater. After my folks got a good chuckle out of it, they revealed his actual gift. I guess my parents can be jerks some times.

There's something nice about having this cabinet. It holds all the cards that would otherwise get tossed into random drawers and mason jars and plastic tubs. It is the perfect balance of order along with the ability to just toss something in there and forget about it. You know, this post will one day be used to disassemble my fractured psyche and determine the exact point I went off the deep end. On that not, I think I'll leave you all. Have a good one.

Item Number 38: Portable Game System, Sega Game Gear (x3)

Time in possession: Between 6 and 4 years, depending on the individual unit.

Description: 3 Sega Game Gear systems, all suffering from various degrees of abandon. Only one of the systems actually works for any length of time, although I haven't checked in a while so that may no longer be true.

Cost: One of these systems belonged to an ex-girlfriend who was done with it, but I honestly can't remember where I came across another two. If I had to guess one of them would have been bought at a flea market (I'd often buy boxes filled with old video game stuff from people who weren't aware of what they were selling or just didn't care) and another off an eBay case lot. Really though, I couldn't tell you for sure. Lets just say $40 for the lot. That's actually pretty generous considering.

Story: I didn't know a lot about video games when I was a kid. I mean, I did read all the game magazines I could get my hands on and played as many as my parents would allow me, but in hindsight there wasn't a lot of thought going into my video game selections. The early games I nearly broke myself trying to beat on my NES? Mission Impossible, Werewolf, Iron Sword? They really, really sucked. If not for my childhood ignorance and stubborn drive I wouldn't have played any of those games for any length of time. I certainly wouldn't now. All that being said, I always, even back then, knew that the Game Gear was a shitty system.

The Sega Game Gear was Sega's answer to the Game Boy, a phenomenally more successful machine. (according to the ever reliable wikipedia the Game Boy sold 69 million units while the Game Gear only managed 8.9) Now before I go off sounding like a Nintendo fan boy (which, to be honest, I am) there were some nice features on the Game Gear: It had a colour screen which was back lit, a feature that would take Nintendo over a decade to implement in their own handhelds. It was easier for many people to hold, being wider. It eventually got a TV tuner, turning the system into a portable TV which was a pretty neat use of the technology. See, already I'm grasping at straws. The system's flaws more then make up the difference here: The colour screen was prone to becoming a blurred mess and worse than that was prone to burning out (the problem with two of my systems). The machine was a battery monster, chewing through 6AAs typically in 5 hours. Those batteries made the thing a heavy brick (just what you want in a portable electronic device!) and the worst sin of all: It didn't have any good games.

It is telling that when the original Game Boy was being given the intense shot in the arm that was Pokemon ('98) the Game Gear had already petered off into nothingness, dropped from support and forgotten. Owning one, I find myself seldom drawn to do anything with the system, although should a bugler ever break in I would not be opposed to hucking it at their head. These things have got to be good for something, right?

(Edit: Actually, they are good for something! They allowed this post to use both the "broken" and the "broken?" tags. Nobody cares except me...)