There I was this afternoon, typing away on my laptop, when suddenly everything froze. I tried all the usual things — nothing worked. So I drove up to the Apple Store in Cambridge where, to make a long story short, the techs determined that my laptop had to be sent off the be repaired. Fortunately, I have back-ups of my most important data here on my office computer, as well as hidden away on my unlimited stoage space on AOL’s server.<\/p>\n
The Apple store is in the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall, not someplace I’d ordinarily go. So as long as I was there, I firgured I’d look around and see what it was like. I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the stores or restaurants, but the people were fascinating: families with children, a few pre-adolescents on their own, teenagers in small groups, young adults, and even a few middle-aged people like me. I seemed to notice that everyone was surprisingly well dressed. Then I figured out that many of the young people were playing the mating game when I heard some young men behind me talking about pretty girls they had an eye on — the crowds were so thick I couldn’t tell which pack of young women they were looking at, but that helped me realize why so many of the young people looked like they took such care in dressing. I did not fit in — not that I was badly dressed, but I was sensibly dressed for the cold weather and slushy sidewalks, as opposed to being fashionably dressed.<\/p>\n
After I left the mall, I walked over to the MIT Press Bookstore. I fit in better there. Some geeky-looking young women browsed the cognitive science books; had I been twenty years younger, I would have been fascinated by them (I mean, cognitive science, wow). One man was sitting in the corner with the computer science books and I don’t think he moved the entire half hour I was in the store. I browsed their selection of books on ecology and the environment, but wound up buying a book called On Physics and Philosophy<\/em>. I’ve lost my interest in malls, but bookstores still do it for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There I was this afternoon, typing away on my laptop, when suddenly everything froze. I tried all the usual things — nothing worked. So I drove up to the Apple Store in Cambridge where, to make a long story short, the techs determined that my laptop had to be sent off the be repaired. Fortunately, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}