Author: Steven Garrity

Trivial Tragedy #4: Hands Hands Fingers Thumb

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

As a toddler, I had access to loads of great books. We had Golden Books, Dr. Seuss, Berenstein [sic] Bears. While I enjoyed most of these, there was one that I remembered dreading.

Hands Hands Fingers Thumb by Al Perkins was a simple rhyming book about monkeys and their drums. Eric Gurney’s illustrations of those monkeys, though, terrified me. The growing refrain and rhythm of the book would build the terror:

“One thumb, one thumb, drumming on a drum…”
“One by one more monkeys come…”

Until eventually, there were:

Millions of monkeys
Millions of drums
MILLIONS OF MONKEYS, DRUM DRUMMING ON DRUMS.

It was just too many monkeys.

As an adult, I was looking through the “baby book” that my parents had lovingly kept for me. It contained the snip of hair from my first haircut, among other mementos and milestones.

I came across the “Steven’s favourite book:” page in the baby book. The horrifying answer: Hands Hands Fingers Thumb.

 

Trivial Tragedy #3: The Great One’s Autograph

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

I don’t recall how old I was at the time, but let’s be generous and assume I was only about 8 years old. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was on Prince Edward Island as part of a celebrity charity golf tournament.

I wasn’t a big sports fan, but I understood that Wayne Gretzky was a big deal. My parents took me and a few of my siblings to see if we could spy his greatness from the fringes of the golf course. We skated to where the puck was going and intercepted Gretzky from the side of the road by the Belvedere Golf Course.

We not only saw him — he was graciously and kindly signing autographs. My siblings and I each got a scrap of paper signed by The Great One, Wayne Gretzky.

On the drive home, I noticed that his pen hadn’t been working well. You could read his signature, but it was pretty light on the page. So, I fixed it. I traced over it and darkened it up.

As I was doing this, my family noticed, and it was only from their reaction that I understood that tracing over an autograph effectively destroyed it.

I’m not sure I really cared that I had a Wayne Gretzky autograph. However, knowing that I had casually destroyed something of value was enough to break my tiny heart.

 

Trivial Tragedy #2: Minimum System Requirements

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

Our first family computer was a Packard Bell 20Mhz 486sx, with 2MB of RAM and a 100MB hard drive. It was amazing. It came with Windows 3.1, which I soon discovered was quite limited.

Family friends had Macs, which were remarkably advanced from a user-interface standpoint compared to our simple Windows 3.1 Program Manager UI. I had seen a piece of software called Central Point Desktop advertised that promised to bring the power of the Mac GUI (and more) to the humble Windows 3.1 user.

It was $99. As with my telescope in the 4th grade, I somehow acquired the funds to make the purchase.

When it finally arrived, I was so excited. My desktops (yeah, that’s right, multiple desktops) would be so organized.

When I tried to install it, I was devastated. It turned out that it needed 4MB of RAM. I only had 2MB.

I recall a local computer shop selling us 4MB of additional RAM for $400. One hundred dollars per megabyte of memory.. I can’t imagine how I justified this expense to my parents at the time. I must have been really disappointed about that first $99.

In the end, I did get Central Point Desktop installed. It was okay. I was okay.

 

Trivial Tragedy #1: The Telescope

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

The first such tale is about desire, hope, and value.

I was in the fourth-grade and had spied an object of desire in the Consumer’s Distributing catalogue (source of several such tragic desires). It was a telescope that cost $39.

As I recall, I saved up my money for months, but given the limited income streams of a ten-year-old, I can only assume the money came in one form or another from my parents. That they let me think I was saving up my own money is a prime example of how good things were for me.

In the time it took to “save my money”, my expectations of the performance of the telescope grew. By the time I actually got the telescope, I had Hubble-like expectations. I would be able to see the U.S. flag on the moon and rings of Saturn. I would be discovering habitable extra-solar planets and putting Einstein’s theories to the test.

The time finally came to buy the telescope. I can still picture it. About two inches in diameter, about a foot-and-a-half long, it stood on a small plastic tripod stand.

We set it up on the window-sill in our family room and pointed it towards an enormous, bright, full moon.

It sucked.

It was easier to see the moon with the naked eye than through this piece of junk. We thought maybe it was broken, but the more we used it, the more it became clear that what had seemed like a NASA-sized budget to a fourth-grader just wasn’t enough to buy a worthwhile stargazing device.

I had squandered my limited childhood financial resources on a worthless device. The lesson I can see in retrospect was one of dangerous expectations. The longer and more deeply you want something, the less likely it will be able to meet your ballooning expectations. As you’ll see later in this tragic series, this was not a lesson I learned at the time.

 

Trivial Tragedies — sad stories from privileged childhood

by Steven Garrity

When you’re blessed, as I was, with a healthy, pleasant, and generally good childhood, you really have to look hard to find heartbreak. When all you’ve known is stability and pleasantness, though, little problems can seem like big disasters. Such is the delight and tragedy of childhood that you can be in a divine delight over a toy or a hug in one minute, and in the depths of despair over a lost marble in the next.

When you’re a child, your heart is easily delighted and just as easily broken.

I find something strangely compelling about the little things that seem like great wrongs as a child. So, I give you a series of such tales: Trivial Tragedies, a series of insignificant heartbreaks. I’ll keep a running list of the stories here as I publish them:

 

Helmet hyper-empathy

by Steven Garrity

I’ve been reading and appreciating the two Parable books from Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents. They are powerful books. I can’t quite say I’m enjoying them, because the characters endure such horrible events (including sexual violence against children — it’s dark). It reminds me of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in that it is well-written, compelling, and a powerful story, but depicts a world so awful that it’s difficult to engage.

[Spoilers for the Parable books below]

In the world of Butler’s Parable books, some people are gifted/afflicted with a hyper-empathy condition, as a side-effect of drug use during their mothers’ pregnancy. They feel the pain (and less often, the pleasure) of others they see. If they see you break your leg, they feel like they’ve broken their own leg.

All of that said, I’ve concluded that I have a particular type of hyper-empathy. It only applies to people I see wearing bicycle helmets backwards. Even though they may not know of their shame yet, I feel it deeply.

 

Vaccination as generational public service

by Steven Garrity

In the introduction to episode 425 of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco Arment made the following statement encouraging people who are eligible to get vaccinated (note that my transcription here isn’t word-for-word, as I’ve trimmed it a bit for clarify):

“We don’t get a lot of chances as a society to really step up and serve the world in some big way. Most of us my age […] have not been alive during a military draft, certainly not the big world wars. This is something that we as a society are really given a huge opportunity and duty here to help the world out – help us get out of this pandemic – help literally save peoples’ lives by stopping this virus, and the way we do that is widespread vaccination. […]

Those of us who can get vaccinated I think have a duty to everyone else who can’t […]“

Marco Arment, on the Accidental Tech Podcast episode 425 (transcribed here generously and not word-for-word is it was spoken extemporaneously)

I like the way Marco framed this. Though I’ve long been looking forward to getting vaccinated and will do so as soon as possible (my turn will be coming in the next two months), I hadn’t quite thought of it as part of a once-in-a-generation (hopefully) movement of collective-service. I don’t mean to (nor do I think Marco meant to) compare getting a vaccine to fighting in an actual military conflict, but that’s kind of the point — the service we have to perform here is pretty easy.

While I like to avoid metaphors and language of war and violence, I think it could be effective to communicate an effort like mass vaccination or combating (there’s that war language) climate change as a ‘wartime effort’.