Home at Last

just a virtual girl

Don’t let the digital revolution fool you. Even computers reflect a creative vision of style that springs forth from an inspired mind.

By Christine Mather
Photograph by Thais Mather

This article first appeared in Summer 2008 Su Casa

The time is rapidly approaching when a new computer may be needed. At three years of age, my current one isn’t anything anyone’s grandma would consider old. But if I don’t move up to the new model soon, all of the things I must struggle to learn as technology blazes forward will be lost on me, perhaps forever. Already the newfangled phones and other gadgets—handheld devices, digital cameras, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and any number of other fairy-tale terms—have left me feeling, nay, knowing, that I am a woefully inadequate human being. Here sits a nitwit too dim to even dissemble that I may not have the firmest grasp on how the electric light bulb works, to say nothing of the combustion engine. This new learning experience will put me directly in contact with people half my age who seem to have, if not the wisdom of the ages, at least a vocabulary that might come in darn handy during a Scrabble game. Around the time the Spaceport is up and running, I should have a handle on my computer’s address book.

I admit that I have always chosen my technology based upon—hang on now—how it looks. Yes, that’s right, I am a total shallow sucker for looks. If it is thin or gaudy or stylin,’ well, let me at it. I will, of course, pretend to have an interest in things like “memory” or speed, but give me a flashy plastic casing, and suddenly gigabytes have all the charm of the theory of relativity. Like everything else in my visually obsessive world, my computer has to first have the ability to look good, a sort of designer’s extension of my very, very good sense of taste. As a result, I own at least one designer-ish laptop that sits pulsing on a small desk, able to do very little other than look good. When I took it to the giant-box store to “download” its feeble brain onto my new handsome but not-so-suave laptop, a young man came steaming across the store and admiringly asked, “where did you get that?” as if I had just stepped off the QE2 with a complete set of Vuitton. Here was my one little moment of one-upmanship in the technology world as we both gazed with wolfish love at the curvy casing that gave my laptop the look of a very sleek and lovely orange toilet-seat cover. This selfsame computer that I had so cleverly managed to acquire was even featured prominently in the movie Legally Blonde—need I say more?

Besides the opportunity to occasionally buy in to some very nice designs, my various computers have been a source of great comfort and joy. I wrote my first large book entirely on a very small self-correcting typewriter. Being of the generation that learned to type under the tutelage of folks like Mr. Steinecker and Mrs. McCleary—an experience that involved counting up your errors, as well as fixing them on carbon copies with the aid of an X-Acto knife—I found a self-correcting typewriter to be a fabulous instrument. Nevertheless, I did type each photo caption on a separate page so corrections for the publisher could be made without retyping or repairing the entire manuscript. Now, with the help of my computer, I whiz around the page with abandon in a cut-and-paste ballet that would have put Mr. Steinecker right out of business. I can burn, file, copy, and reformat on a dime, but bitter experience has left me with the habit of printing everything out at the end of the day. All of this seems like a spectacular divide from the plodding writing of my past, where the difference between an A or an F hung upon the slippery slope of three misspelled words. Who then could have imagined the miracle called spell check?

So much in my present world would have been unimaginable in the fresh new world of my youth, when careers were compartmentalized so tightly by gender and training. Most of the tasks I perform in the workplace are things that finally temperament and passion led me to, hardly the stuff of the quaint training offered in Home Economics, French II, or Typing. Perhaps this very great divide between what I once imagined my world would be like as a very grown-up person and the reality of my daily world today keeps me grounded in the visual world of style, design, and art. This is a world that can only spring forth from the mind of the individual. Like writing, the visual world can be greatly aided by the smart technologies that march forward in a relentless series of innovation. But finally, it all hangs upon a solitary soul with a vision, with artistic skills, and with the drive to convince an entire corporation that a laptop made to look like a futuristic orange toilet-seat cover is the coolest thing since paper clips.

Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.