Jeremiah Hankins
May 2, 2002
Mr. Post, per. 4
My Room
I am simple person who loves the complex. I hate large unneeded things that get in my way, yet I love little gadgets. My room is like me. It is bare of furnishings, but littered with fascinating junk.
A bed and two desks are the only three pieces of furniture that reside in my room. I rest on a straight simple blue against the white of the walls. The bed sits so close to one of my desks that it shelves my choices of nightly entertainment: Popular Science and Astronomy magazines and assorted sci-fi books. That is my work desk. School work and a solitary lamp complete its adornments. My second desk is large and holds my computer and stereo.
That desk is a mess! It is covered with drawings, ideas, and notes jotted down on all forms of paper. It is stacked over five inches high! The deeper you dig, the older the papers. They are as my diary. I use these tattered papers to help me organize my ideas. Strewn among these shredded pieces of me are floppy disks, CDs, and sometimes old food. The desk itself was poorly designed; it restricts access to my computer and minimizes storage and working area, but I make do.
It’s amazing how much I manage to fit on it. A gargoyle watches over the happenings in my room from its lofty perch atop the printer. Next to him, a lava lamp pumps ever-changing globs of red. My favorite accessory has to be my Dilbert Electronic Candy Dispenser. He sits at his computer and stares silently at me as I pound away at my keyboard. You must remember that all my computer accessories also rest on this desk: speakers, microphones, a joystick, two mice, a web cam, multiple headphones, and my stereo.
I am very proud of my sound system. Holding five CDs with two tape decks, my stereo stands mighty. Two large speakers hang in the upper left and right corners of my room, while three support speakers lay hidden. Connecting the many speakers to my stereo takes a lot of wiring. Once, when trying to untangle the knot of wires linking all of my electronic components, I measured a total of over 312 feet of cable. There is enough current flowing through the wires to generate a magnetic field causing the disruption of radio signals. Much to my amusement and to my parent’s annoyance, radio signals are hard to receive in my room. I have had to extend my stereo’s antenna out the window to the roof where it is nailed in place.
I spend most of my time on my computer. Although the realm of cyber space is a lonely place, I persist. I am content with being left alone so that I may immerse myself into my thoughts. In this way I am like my dad. He also enjoys doing things by himself. His favorite pastimes — surfing in the wee hours of the morning, puttering in the garden, and reading a good book — require no one else. My dad is also very smart. He is much like me in the way that he doesn’t forget much of what he learns. His knowledge is very widely spread. In fact, much of what I have learned has come from news clippings about science that he brings home for me.
I have met people on the Internet who have slowly become friends, and I enjoy talking to them. I haven’t actually met most of these people in real life but encounter them in games we play. Usually a rivalry in the game will develop into friendship.
Having spent most my life with computers, I am very comfortable with them. It seems to me that most people who haven’t grown up with computers treat it as some sort of alien technology. A computer can only supply two senses: visual and auditory. Users must supply the other three via their imagination. I am fully able to immerse myself so that I feel as though I’m really there.
Most of my time is devoted to my games. But I find myself spending more time upgrading and customizing the games than I do actually playing them. I like to replace files with those I think are more interesting. In one of the games I play, for example, I altered the textures of the environment. It started with a boring, plain-blue box for a sky which I changed into a raging thunderstorm just to stir things up. Entire 3-D worlds are waiting for me to invent and share with others. My creativity is often brought out in the things I do on my computer.
I inherited this creativity from my mom. She is not afraid to take chances and do things she has never done before. This year she took her fifth grade GATE class to the Universal Music Recording Studio. They sang songs that they wrote themselves and recorded them onto CDs. She too likes to express her creativity through computers. She can always be found sitting on the couch updating her websites on her laptop. When she is having trouble with her computer, she comes to me for advice even though she is the one who is originally responsible for teaching me my basic understanding of computers.
I often like to be alone to think and create, just like my parents, and in what better place than my room —a room of simplistic chaos.