Twenty years ago this month I graduated from high school, and twenty years ago next month I bought my first laptop. I did not expect to find the exact make and model when I googled “silver and blue laptop 2003” just now, but there it was: the Dell Inspiron 1100. Not just silver, but midnight silver; not just blue, Venice blue. Was there ever anything more beautiful? Well, yes: the rainbow array of those Y2K-era Apple iBooks, ads for which I’d torn out of Time and taped up in my bedroom, but I was working with the budget of my graduation gift money, which wouldn’t have been enough for Apple even if I’d been able to convert the unusual number of Cracker Barrel gift cards I received into cash. But chicken fried chicken and a PC isn’t a bad way to equip oneself for the future, I see that now. Abundance is abundance.
How did I buy this thing? How did I even know it existed to be bought? Did a catalog arrive at my house? Did I go browsing at Circuit City? Oh, wait — it was probably a TV commercial that sold me. This was 2003, peak Dell Dude time, and we were at the peak of the peak: the Dell Dude had grown up in Chattanooga, so not infrequently there was a local news story about him followed by an ad break and there he was again, at least until that summer when he got busted for pot and lost the gig, but by then his work was done, on me at least.
I seem to recall that my parents wanted me to buy a desktop. A desktop was less stealable, less drop-and-breakable, less leave-behindable — totally reasonable concerns that my eighteen-year-old self took as deliberate affronts to my personhood. A desktop was a ball and chain. A desktop was stagnant, stifling, antithetical to everything college symbolized for me. How could I become the carefree liberal arts undergrad of my dreams, somehow both studious and social, intellectual and affable, writing a paper while also playing frisbee on the quad with my many many new friends, if I had a desktop? Didn’t they see that? Didn’t they want me to be free?
Well, of course they did. Computer aside, they were footing at least half the bill for all this impending freedom. They just wanted me to buy the messenger bag with the padded carrier compartment, too. Fine. Fine! The bag was at least as heavy as the laptop, and the laptop itself was seven and a half pounds — the average weight of a newborn baby. It has been years since I held an Inspiron 1100 and only weeks since I held a newborn so it’s hard to compare, but truly, how could you? One is a pantyhose full of warm potatoes, the other a flattened slab of neutron star.
My family had dial-up internet, a secondary phone line connected to the Compaq Presario in the dining room so we didn’t miss calls on the main line, over which my sister and I were in a perpetual standoff, especially in the summer. But once I had my laptop she was free to tippity-type with her friends about Newsies or listen to my songs that I downloaded on Audiogalaxy or whatever she did on there all night long. After my parents were asleep and probably nobody would be calling the house until morning, I could unplug the cord from the telephone in my bedroom, plug it into my laptop, and fire up my AOL Free Trial — three months, just enough to tide me over until I left for school. Every night I felt like I was pulling off a heist. I was in my bedroom on my computer on the internet? It somehow felt more real than the internet I could access on the family computer, more real but more fragile somehow, or smaller, like one wrong click would reveal it to be an incomplete facsimile of the real thing. I mostly used my great new privilege to write LiveJournal entries about the passage of time.
In August I moved into my freshman dorm room, a double connected to another double by a common room with a four-hole ethernet port. A 20-foot cable wasn’t long enough to reach so I bought the next size up at the campus bookstore: 100 feet. The excess cordage lived in a big tumbleweed under my desk and, like everything else that summer, it felt symbolic: I had so much internet, so much freedom, it was kind of a burden. I was obsessed with staying logged into Instant Messenger. I missed my boyfriend and my friends from home and my BuddyList was a portal to them that I couldn’t bear to see close, even in the middle of the night. So I refused to log out, refused to close my laptop, would not even let it go into sleep mode, would not take it anywhere my ethernet cord couldn’t stretch. After a while of this my roommate made a sideways comment about the perpetual glow of my screen saver, but it was the laptop’s own complaint — a strained, peevish tone to the fan that sometimes woke me up at night — that made me think, hmm, maybe I don’t have to do this? So I made peace with the door-slam sound and the click of the lid at night, but the fan never quite recovered and my habits had been set: I never took the laptop to class, rarely took it home for the weekend, never wrote papers on the quad while playing frisbee with my many many friends. I once thought I could become that person, but maybe I wanted the potential for it more than the freedom itself.
On my laptop, at my desk, I wrote papers and essays for class and articles for the campus newspaper; I wrote IMs and emails home; I wrote LiveJournal posts I hoped nobody at school would find, until I found everyone at school’s LiveJournals too. Sophomore year I joined MySpace, junior year I joined Facebook. At some point the school installed campus-wide WiFi, but it never quite worked; year after year, the laptop stayed tethered to its Linksys umbilicus. Fall semester, junior year, my main hobby was ripping my entire CD collection to iTunes just in case I got an iPod for Christmas; spring semester, my main hobby was re-ripping my entire CD collection to iTunes after receiving an iPod for Christmas and promptly overwriting the work of fall semester while trying to import a Johnny Cash album. By then, the laptop fan had two modes — howl and scream — and it ran so hot it felt alive.
That spring on the laptop I emailed away my internship application to the music magazine, and that fall I reported to the office for my first day with the blue and silver slab in my arms. It didn’t seem strange to me that I had to bring my own computer; it seemed perfect. This was it! This was why I had to have a laptop all along. Three days a week, August to May, I schlepped it back and forth across town between my apartment and the magazine office. At home, I wrote my papers and my newspaper articles and my senior thesis. At the office, I wrote news articles for the website and reviews of albums nobody else wanted to write for the magazine. Occasionally I tried the pose favored by some of the editors — butt in chair, feet up on desk, laptop on lap — but by this point it ran hot enough to scorch my thighs through my jeans and every so often would overheat and shut down, screen black, fan dead, no warning, even when it was flat on my desk. The thing was to keep it elevated so air could circulate underneath. A pack of Post-It notes under each corner did the trick.
The magazine hired me full-time after I graduated but they still didn’t have the budget to buy me a computer, let alone pay me enough that I could afford a new one of my own, but I was so in love with the job I forgave this and quite a lot else. I moved into an apartment near the office, near enough that I could easily walk to work, less easily if I was carrying the laptop. I left it at the office most nights and over most weekends. Nobody needed me after hours, and anyway I didn’t have internet at my apartment. This was another kind of freedom, soon to be rarer than the kind I’d yearned for at eighteen, though of course I didn’t know this at the time and wouldn’t have fully appreciated it if I did.
The next summer, our marketing director left to get her MBA and I inherited her Apple MacBook, purchased during a hard-to-imagine financially flush moment in the magazine’s semi-recent past. It was old and heavy, but not as old or heavy as my hot blue brick. It was silver and cool to the touch, fan running smooth. I would write my first feature story on it, and my first cover story, and some reviews that would get me nominated for a big award, and I would watch my first streaming Netflix movies on it after I caved and got internet at my apartment — WiFi, even. I toted it to coffee shops, airports, my parents’ house, my boyfriend’s apartment. I sometimes fell asleep with it in my bed and woke to the sun glinting off its aluminum shell. I felt again like I’d pulled off some kind of heist. It wasn’t one of the candy-colored iBooks I’d pined for in my youth, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful, but it was never really mine.
Thanks for reading Vanitas, a newsletter about life, death, and other dumb stuff. If you’d like, follow me on Instagram: @by_rachaelmaddux.
The image is Trees, from Joseph Schiller’s The Mathematical Basis of the Arts.
Love seeing a reference to the Dell Dude! He ended up living in my family's house for a few months, along with his father, the summer my parents and I lived in Berkeley while my dad did something important. The Dell Dude's dad had left the church where he was a pastor and their family was going through a transition and they needed a place to land and we had an empty house to offer. I don't know why I've remembered that weird tidbit all this time, except that I was seven and it felt like the first year I was really aware, and have a consistent body of memories. It was a year everything felt in motion. The oddity of living somewhere else and exploring San Francisco with my mom, of losing my first tooth, of knowing another family was in our house while we were gone. The year my parents got really into Cobb Salad. Funny how time goes by, the artifacts we mark the passage by.