Friday, September 25, 2009

Reflection: Netbook Attachment/ Beautiful in my Eyes

I was thinking about a previous post regarding the distinction between dependency and attachment -- and I was also thinking about this bitty netbook here. An acquaintance said a person can only be termed 'attached' if they're unwilling to trade their special something for something else of equal or greater value... Well, I surely agree, and I guess I'm a little attached to my netbook; I can't envision trading it for a laptop of twice the price. Partly, the attachment has grown from personifying the bitty computery-wutery in my posts, a bit like I once personified the great city of Seattle (though not to quite the extent). It's not a person, it's not a kitty-cat; ultimately, there's a limit to how much I would pay to get it repaired -- yet there's this pang in my stomach when I say those words. Ah, attachment! There's a limited number of objects I'm attached to -- and a limited number of people. Attachment often traces back to some initial recognition of positive qualities in the 'other', but it wouldn't be attachment if that's as far as it went. Dr. Laura titled a chapter of one of her books "Stupid Devotion" -- and then wrote about women who tried to change people because they really weren't happy with them at all! That's not devotion. Again, I think it's dependency. If you're devoted to something, then that something becomes, in the words of Joshua Kadison, "beautiful in (your) eyes."