One christmas, many moons ago, when I was but a wee geek, I had spotted an arcade, put-the-quarters-in game for sale for a few hundred dollars. I thought this was the coolest thing ever, and I told mom how desperately I wanted it. I’d pretty much lay money that she told me it wasn’t going to happen. I’m also pretty sure this was in my devoutly catholic days, when I believed quietly, yet fervently in a benevolent, all-seeing god who wasn’t clearly differentiated from Santa Claus. <\/p>\n
The day after christmas, with no arcade game in sight, we went to disney world, or disney land, whichever one is in florida. World, I think. I had the usual, that-was-mildly-entertaining, reaction. And the whole time, I was fantasizing about coming home and finding that arcade game waiting for me. I was dreaming about it so much (the fantasy kept me [relatively] well behaved on the plane home, probably at disney world and on the plane there, too), that I was disappointed when I came home, and found that there was no neato arcade game waiting for me. I was thinking, precociously enough, that I would so much rather have had the game than the trip, after all, I could use the game repeatedly, but the trip was over, and that it might very well have been cheaper, too. (I think I was born at least as much economist as geek. This would have been not too far from the time in my life where I started doing simple graphics-and-sound programs in TI-Basic). Fortunately, I was mature enough (or meek enough) at that point not to rant at the “injustice” in the world (I think), and I recognized that I was the one who had set me up for the fall. I still moped for several days.<\/p>\n
It’s humbling to realize that I still set myself up for a fall sometimes, in ways not-so-very different, when I take the long view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One christmas, many moons ago, when I was but a wee geek,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}