"What's New?"

This is a 1938 song that has nothing to do with 'What's New, Pussycat?', which must have come much much later. Another song that I didn't know at all before sight reading it today, and this one I do like. The text setting has an opera recitative quality about it, and the ending has a bit of a surprise to it, even though in retrospect I should have seen it coming. But it still works. Another one that I'll go back to later.

Tonight it's snowing here, which feels appropriate, since I just came home with a new (to me) computer, a gift from some very generous friends, and it feels like my birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. This new computer is about seven years old, and a replacement for the recent five year old computer that I purchased on eBay. My friends have put a huge hard drive in, and some extra memory, and I can't wait to get it set up. For most of the last five years I've been working on my husband's computer, the first iMac ever created, since my computer was even older, and had no ability to be hooked up to our DSL line. But this past summer my father bought me a little digital camera, and that meant that I needed OS X, and that meant that I needed a new computer altogther. (I didn't complain too much. Or at all.) So I searched on lovely eBay, and got another, slightly newer, iMac for a song. Unfortunately, that computer, the newest in the house, had a fatal motherboard crash. I wept, literally. Having that computer set up, with all my stuff organized the way I wanted it, the prospect of becoming even more personalized, figuring out a new operating system inside and out, doing wacky insanely anal projects. . . when it crashed I realized how much fun I had been having, and how much I had missed having my own machine.

I really love computers. Really really, as I love calculus, and assembling IKEA furniture. I wanted a computer of my own all my growing up, from way before the time when real personal computers were available. I asked for one every Christmas. I remember my best friend's parents getting a machine that loaded its programs from tape cassettes (!!), and then my father's first computer, with its yellow letters on a black screen. I learned to type on that machine, playing a little game that had something to do with lobsters eating the letters, I think. I worked on a Mac for the first time in college, at the recommendation of my friend, Chris Jester, and I fell utterly in love with the simplicity and hack-ability of them. When I came to Pittsburgh, and my dearest bought me a computer with one of his grad school paychecks, my happiness was complete. (No surprise that I married him later.)

So hopefully this will be the last evening that I will be writing on this little iMac, the last to write in my husband's studio rather than my own. I will resume my anal organization of my hard drive, filling its vast space with the software of my dreams, and zillions of files that no one else will ever care about. I am in the midst of geeky Kathryn computer bliss. (Thank you so much, Alison and Aaron!)