Given my training and temperment, I have always thought of power in terms of political power, or cultural power.  I was educated in the notion of more mechanical or electrical power by Tim Allen.  The video was called "Men Are Pigs".  And I was watching it in a situation where I was inclined to agree with the title, and disinclined to view the video.

We (my life partner and I) were in Texas, visiting his old friends, who I'd been hearing about for years.  They were all living in Austin now, although they had all worked together once upon a time in San Antonio.  I'd never been to Texas.  And I'd never met these people before that very day.  To that point, I'd concluded their politics were very different than mine, and that they seemed to me to be racist, but I was prepared to accept that such racism was a collective characteristic of all Texans, rather than peculiar to these individual Texans.

After a dinner, during which I concentrated on biting my tongue and not burning my tongue on the jalapenos and habaneros peppers, we returned to one of the monster ranch houses in the suburbs.  This tape got pulled out, and David seemed eager to see it; he too had only heard of Tim Allen (courtesy of his sister, who is not Texan).  I was hardly about to put up a fuss.  And so, I became familiar with such watchphrases as "More power", and "So, I rewired it".  And, I even saw the humour in it.

I thought the video could have been subtitled "Interpreting guys for women and other aliens"; but then, the guys might not have bought it, I suppose.  I started to understand that being married to a man, who also happened to be an engineer, meant that life was about power: not political power.  Electrical power.  Mechanical power.  Nuclear power, even.  But not personal power.  

Somewhere along the intervening years, I found myself "catching" some of the power thing.  This is particularly true of computers.  Much as I've resisted wanting the newest, hottest, most powerful processor, video card, sound card, and so on, it's been catching.  In fact, I had found using my 486 laptop painful.  It still worked; it even ran Windows '98.   But it was horribly slow.  Or so it seemed to me.  Then I found out that it wasn't Y2K compliant.  (What? IBM didn't know about Y2K problems four years ago? Huh?)  Then came the killer blow to my budget and my self-discipline: today was the last day that I could buy a Y2K-compliant computer and write off the entire cost in this calendar year. 

I succumbed.  More power.   And now it's mine.   It's faster than my desktop computer, for heaven's sake!  Does this mean it's only a matter of time before I find the desktop painfully slow? I like to think not.   After all, the desktop is a Pentium 200; not the fastest, not the latest, not the most powerful.  But unless I'm pushing all the multi-tasking limits of even the human mind (never mind the computer world!), then it's not slow.  I don't wait for it.   It's working as fast as I do.  So, I like to think I'm at the "enough power" stage, at least in terms of computing power and speed.  For now.   Enough.

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