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The on-off "affair " with the iPad

Mondoweiss, a blog well worth reading and subscribing to, has a somewhat whimsical piece by Phil Weiss "My wife forswears the groovy Ipad forever".

"I came down to breakfast at my parents' house yesterday and my wife said, "Have you seen my Ipad?" "Have you looked in the car?" "All through it." "What about your bag?" She rolled her eyes.

I went out to the car and searched it top to bottom, under the seats, etc. I was a little frantic. Not again. Four months ago my wife fell asleep on the train and someone snatched her Ipad out of her bag. We bought her another one.

On Saturday there was a funeral in my wife's family in Philadelphia and we'd driven around from one event to another with the Ipad in the front seat. I'd locked up, at the church, and at the club for the reception, then later at the mourning family's house-- but the windows were down a little because the dogs were in the back. Then my wife had opened the doors to get the dogs out...

My Toshiba laptop had been in the car the whole time, too, but of course no one had snagged that.

I found my wife in the living room. I said, "Find out where the Apple store is, let's go out and buy you a new one right now." She shook her head solemnly. "No. I'm not doing that. I'm not getting another one. I don't want to have the groovy trendy object that everybody wants any more." "But you love it and use it." "I don't want to have to worry about it all the time. It interferes with my human relationships. It's like when I used to go to parties in New York and a woman would be running back to the bedroom every hour to make sure no one had run off with her Prada coat. That's really stupid. You don't live life the way you want to."

I searched the car again and when I came back in my wife was in the kitchen with my mother, and my mother was pressing money on her. "Get back on the horse," she said. "Here's $60 to your new Ipad." "No," my wife said. "I mean I'll take the money, but I'm not buying another one of those stupid things."

I reheated some coffee. The Ipad was sitting by the microwave. I'd either brought it into the house the night before, boozily, and forgotten about it; or my dad, who's dottier than I am, had borrowed it and then brought it back downstairs. I brought it into my wife. She pressed the money back on my mother, and she's been using her Ipad ever since."







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