Typing

I’m writing this piece using an old desktop, recently resurrected by the more technologically-minded among us. The computer has been lying around beside the call room’s front door. It’s immediately on my own desk’s posterior.

I like the staccato sound of the BenQ keyboard, still dusty after many months—probably years—of storage. The computer reminds me of my first desktop, the first one I’d ever owned, which I bought in 2005, cheaply at 25 thousand pesos at a store in Gilmore Street. My friend Luther, who would eventually graduate summa cum laude in electronics and electrical engineering, accompanied me that morning. I didn’t care what the specs were—processors and RAMs were his thing, and choosing the best one for me, at a price range I could afford, thrilled him. What I was really after was how the entire ensemble would look like. I wanted my keyboards to have a clean font.

At the time, all dorm rooms had actual desktops, with heavy monitors that had to be detached from the CPU box. Residents would assemble them at the beginning of the semester. They’d be dismantled during semestral or Christmas breaks, when the dorm would be closed. Only very few people owned laptops then.

I miss that desktop. I would eventually ship it back to Mindanao, where my brother Sean would use it as his own, mostly for gaming and playing music—things I didn’t have much interest in that the time.

These days I own a very slim laptop—an 11-inch Macbook Air—which is lighter than my Internal Medicine textbook. How technology has grown indeed. I place it inside my satchel and sometimes forget it’s there.