Gweneth's curiosity about men, a desire to be among them as another man. I have
a friend who once dressed-up as a man, strapped down her breasts and stuffed cloth in her
crotch. Tried to pass for a day. She was typed as a gay man, considered it a success.
Maybe if we were to switch bodies for say, a month, yes, a month would be perfect, then
we'd know so much more about ourselves and others.
Computers are ubiquitous and accepted, part of the life of this person,
important, but secondary to the story, no social commentary, no fear of technology. One
interesting scene, a marriage proposal, the couple is face to face, yet they use a
computer to propose and accept marriage, an intimate moment, yet mediated by a machine, it
could have been on a piece of paper, or by word, a need for a protected distant between
two people, a distance that never closes.
Old hardware still doing new things. I laugh when I see software and hardware
touted as "The Next New Thing" and it's just a rehash of something done on an
older operating system, a slower machine or a mainframe. One scene, in a barn full of old
computers and parts, really struck me. Some 25 years ago I found the end of an old harpoon
in an abandoned barn in Maine. Still have it. Behind my house is a shed housing what I
call "My Computer Museum" housing an Apple II (#276), Vic 20, Commodore 64, four
or five Amigas, and boxes and boxes of boards and disks and books and zines. Food for the
mice. Maybe someday it will be discovered as some treasure trove of history, an old way of
doing things, like that harpoon.
