Day 14: Microphone

Readers, meet my childhood doll, Mary. Mary, readers. No, I know what some of you may be thinking, but you've read the title of this post. You know it's not her. No, this is not Mary's final hurrah. Simply by virtue of having made it through my brother's toy-decapitation phase early in life (poor Barbie), she has earned total immunity from all future purgings. Instead, Mary is playing Vanna today. Sure, the dress is not so glamorous, perhaps, but you must admit her face has a certain Elizabeth Taylor quality to it (as does her slow aging).

Too soon for Elizabeth Taylor jokes? Probably.

In my last semester of graduate school (there were only two, but it makes me sound smarter when I say it that way), I bought a laptop. It was my second computer and a huge relief to have something portable to work on my thesis with. Before the laptop was the iMac. It was my first computer, and I loved it. To this day, it chugs away at snail's pace in my parent's entrance room, its once spacious 40 gig memory now burdened with my younger brother's countless video games and music. While quite the new thing in its day, one of the features it nonetheless lacked (in addition to a floppy disk drive) was a strong internal microphone. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but one of the projects in a college class I took was to create a digital story. Think, slide-show with voice over. So I decided to invest in something that could capture my voice at a higher quality. Unfortunately, this microphone did not do the trick. There were compatibility issues, or maybe just cheapness issues. Either way, I ended up recording the voice-over for "A Weekend Alone in Paris" on my iMac's wimpy microphone. The sound quality isn't great, but I often wonder if maybe my voice just sounds like that. To avoid any definite answer (I'm pretty sure I don't want to know), that digital story will just have to stay hidden in the folds of my overly-complex computer filing system for now. Perhaps for a later viewing. Perhaps for a later purging.
Since that project, the microphone has sat in a drawer, its existence justified by the thought that I'll be ready, should I ever need an external microphone. It didn't work the first time, though, so I'm not sure how I've managed to convince myself of its necessity for this many years. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I think this microphone might be proof that this label suits me a little too well.